Patrick and the Ship That Was Ready

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A boy is standing in a field in the rain, with a flock of sheep, and he is saying his prayers.

He is not saying them for the first time, and he is not saying them because anyone told him to. He has been at it since before it was light. He will say them again at noon, and again at dusk, and probably, if the sheep let him, once or twice in the night, because he has found out something rather surprising. When there is nothing else in the world to hold on to, a prayer is something to hold on to.

It is snowing, a little, now, as well as raining. The boy does not seem to mind. He has noticed that he does not mind, and that is the thing that puzzles him most.

He is a long way from home. He is a very long way from home, and no one at home knows where he is.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves, and the sheep, I think, would like me to begin at the beginning.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story comes from the saint himself, who wrote a short account of his life in rough and honest Latin about fifteen hundred years ago. A few of the small moments, the weather, the sheep, and the conversations on the road, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will tell you at the end which is which. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let me tell you first what this story does not have in it.

There are no snakes. There is no three-leafed clover. There is no great fire lit on a hill to defy a king, and no contest with wizards, and no green. If you were hoping for any of these, I am sorry, and I promise you that there is something better. You see, Patrick, the real Patrick, wrote a small book about himself. It is only a few pages long. It is called the Confession, and it is one of the very first things written in Ireland that we still have. And in it he never once mentions a snake.

What he does mention is a farm, a ship, a pig, a dream, and the fact that his Latin was terrible.

That is the man we are going to meet tonight.

Start with the farm.

It was somewhere in Britain, in the four hundreds. We are not exactly sure when, and we are not exactly sure where. Patrick tells us the name of the village, but it is the sort of name that no one has ever been able to find on a map, and scholars have been arguing about it for a very long time. It was somewhere on the western side of the island, probably, and near the sea.

Britain at that time had been part of the Roman Empire for nearly four hundred years. The legions were leaving, or had left. The roads were still there, and the villas, and the Latin, and the Church. And Patrick's family was very much the sort of family that went with all of that. His father, Calpornius, was a deacon. His grandfather, Potitus, was a priest. And his father also held a position in the town, a sort of local councillor, which in those days came with some paperwork and a lot of responsibility.

I find that one rather funny, because it means that Patrick's father was both a church official and a town official, and I imagine that his dinners were mostly spent being asked to do things.

They had a small country farm, nothing grand. They had servants, and slaves, which was normal then and is a thing we will have to be honest about in a minute. And they had a son, whom they called Patricius, and who was, by his own account, not a particularly good boy.

I want to be careful here, because the saint is very hard on himself in his writing, and I think he would not want me to make him sound like a villain. He was a perfectly ordinary boy. He did what boys do. Later, as a bishop, he looked back at those years and thought of them with a sort of sorrow, and he writes that at that time he did not know the true God. He had grown up in a believing family, in a believing town, and had somehow not taken it in. He says it plainly. It was there in the house, like the furniture, and he did not much notice it.

Most of us know that feeling. The most important thing in the room is the one we walk past every day.

And then, when he was nearly sixteen years old, the raiders came.

Now I am going to tell this part very quickly, because it is not the part of the story that matters most, and because it is bedtime.

There were sea raiders in those days, who came across from Ireland in swift boats and took what they could carry. Sometimes that meant cattle. Sometimes it meant people. One day they came to the coast near Patrick's father's farm, and they took Patrick, and many thousands of other people besides, he says, and they put them on the boats. And away they went, across the grey water, into the west.

That's all. There is no more to say about the boats. Patrick does not say anything about the voyage, and I think, out of respect, we shall not either.

He ended up in Ireland, as a slave, and his work was to look after sheep.

I want you to picture Ireland as Patrick found it, because it was not the Ireland of postcards.

It was green, yes. It was always green. But it was also wet in a way that most of us would find hard to believe. There were forests and bogs, and small farms made of timber and wattle, and little kings, many of them, each one the king of a few valleys and some hundreds of cows. There were no towns to speak of. There were no roads like Roman roads. And there was no Latin, and no Church, and no one who spoke Patrick's language.

The people of Ireland at that time were not Christians. They had their own gods and their own customs, and their own very elaborate system of poets and judges and priests. I want to say, since people sometimes make a fuss about this, that they were not savages. They were a proud and clever people, with a sense of honour, and a gift for stories that has never gone away. It is simply that they had not yet heard the good news, and Patrick, for a long time, was in no state to tell them.

He was a teenage boy, hungry and cold, with no shoes worth the name, and a flock of sheep to mind on a hillside. The sheep did not speak Latin either.

Now, I would like to tell you that he had a wonderful time. But I do not think he did. He tells us, in a few plain sentences, that it was hard. He was often hungry. He was often cold and often wet. He did not complain, much, in the book. It is only that he says, again and again, in the quietest way, that it was in this place that something happened to him.

I will give you what he says, as close as I can. "The Lord opened my unbelief," he says, "and I turned to the Lord my God with my whole heart."

That is all it is. A boy on a hill, with nothing, turning around.

And it started with prayer. It started the way a small fire starts, with a little bit of dry stuff and a little bit of patience. At first he prayed a few times a day. Then more. Then he found that he was praying a hundred times a day, and nearly as many in the night. He says so himself, and he is not a man who exaggerates. A hundred prayers a day is a lot. That is a prayer every few minutes, all day, and he had a great deal of day to fill.

And I think, if you've ever sat with a flock of sheep, you will see how this could happen. Sheep do not need a great deal of supervision, as long as they do not, you know, wander off a cliff. So a shepherd has a great deal of time to think. And a boy, with time to think, and no one to talk to, and nothing to lose, and a long way to go from being sure of anything, will find out a great many things about what is in his own heart.

The sheep, as far as we know, did not mind. I like to think that they came to expect it. A damp young man mumbling to himself in Latin on a hillside, every day, in every weather. They would have had a name for him, I'm sure. It would not have been Patrick. I think it would have been something like "Him".

He stayed there six years.

Six years. Think of it. He was almost sixteen when he arrived, and he was twenty-one when it ended. And the whole of that time he did the same thing. He looked after the same sheep. He lived in the same cold, and he learned the language of the people who owned him, which he came to speak very well. And he prayed. He says that the love of God, and the fear of God, grew in him more and more, and his faith grew, and his spirit was stirred up, so that in a single day he might say a hundred prayers, and he did not mind the snow, or the frost, or the rain.

That last part is the bit that I find almost impossible to imagine, and I think Patrick found it hard to explain. He does not claim to have been tough. He says that he felt no harm from it. That was not because he was strong. It was because, he says, the Spirit was burning in him.

I'll be honest with you. That's a very hard thing to put in a bedtime story, because bedtime is for warm blankets and soft pillows. But the old books say it again and again, that there are people who find God in the very places we would least like to go. And that the finding is not a reward for being brave. It is simply what happens when you stop looking anywhere else.

Then, one night, he had a dream.

I should say, before we go on, that Patrick describes several dreams, and he takes them very seriously, so we shall too. They are not the kind of dreams that you or I have after cheese. They are the kind that change the shape of a life. He says that he heard a voice, in his sleep, and the voice said to him, "You do well to fast. Soon you will go to your own country."

He was already fasting, as it happens, because he was often short of food, so the voice was perhaps encouraging in a rather practical way.

And then, after a little while, he heard the voice again. It said, "Look. Your ship is ready."

Now, here is a thing that I love about this story. The ship was not near. Patrick says so. It was not just along the road. It was, he says, about two hundred miles away. He had never been to that place. He did not know anyone there. And he had absolutely no idea how to get there, and no money, and no permission, and no food. And he was a slave. If he were found, and he was caught, he might not live to be sorry.

So he did the only thing that a person can do with a message like that. He got up, and he left.

He left the master he had served for six years. He left the sheep. I am sure that the sheep did not come to the door to wave. He left the hill, and the rain, and the little patch of the world that he had come to know better than any other. And he walked.

Two hundred miles. Through forest, and across bogs, and over rivers, and through the land of people who might have been kind or might have been dangerous. He doesn't tell us a single detail of the journey. He says only that he went in the strength of God, and that God directed his way, and that he feared nothing until he came to the ship.

I have always wished he had told us more. Did he sleep in barns? Did anyone give him bread? Did he get lost? Did he, at any point, turn round and look back at that one lonely hill, and think, I have been here six years, and I have no idea what is on the other side? We don't know. All we have is the walking.

He came, at last, to the coast, and there was a harbour, and a ship ready to leave. Exactly as the voice had said.

He walked up to the sailors, and he asked, quite politely, I imagine, if he might come with them.

The captain said no.

Not in a rude way, I should think. Just in the way that a captain says no to a thin and dirty stranger with no money and no luggage and a story that no one is going to believe. Patrick says that the man spoke to him harshly, and sent him away.

Now, I want you to think about that for a moment. This is the point where the ship is there. The voice was right. The journey has been made. Every single thing has gone exactly as promised, and the very last step is a closed door.

And Patrick, as I think we should expect by now, did what he'd been doing for six years. He turned and went away, and he started to pray.

He says that before he had even finished his prayer, he heard one of the sailors shouting behind him. "Come quickly," the man was calling. "These men are asking for you."

That is the whole of it. I have always thought this must be one of the shortest answers to prayer on record. Before he'd finished the sentence. And the captain, who had a moment ago sent him off with a flea in his ear, had changed his mind. "Come on," he said, or something very like it, "we'll take you on trust."

And so they pushed off, and the harbour grew small behind them, and the boy who had been taken from the sea went back to it.

Three days they sailed. And then they came to land.

It is here that the story gets a little odd, and I will tell it as Patrick does, which is plainly. They landed, and they set out across the country. It was, he says, a wilderness. A desert, he calls it, though no one is sure if he means that literally or in the way that people say "it's a desert out there" about a town with no shops. Whatever it was, there was nothing to eat in it, and nobody living in it, and they walked through it for twenty-eight days.

Twenty-eight days. Four weeks. And by the end, they were out of food.

I think we can imagine the mood. A group of sailors, some of them quite big, miles from anywhere, and hungry, and getting hungrier, and one of them a young stranger who had said that his God was a good and powerful God. And the captain, who is a practical man, turned to him and said, in what I imagine was not a gentle voice, "Well, Christian? You say your God is great and almighty. Why can't you pray for us? We are starving. We might never see a human being again."

Now, I want you to hear what Patrick said, because I think it is the best line in the whole book.

He didn't say, "Well, I'll try." He didn't say, "I'm not sure, I'm only a beginner." He didn't make any excuses, and he didn't promise anything on his own behalf.

He said, "Turn in faith, with all your hearts, to the Lord my God, to whom nothing is impossible, so that today he may put food in your path until you are full. For he has abundance everywhere."

And, he says, with God's help, it happened.

Out of the trees came a herd of pigs.

Yes. Pigs. I'm sorry. I did say there'd be a pig. Not a dragon, not a miracle of light. A herd of pigs, trotting down the road, just when they were needed. The sailors killed a good many of them. They ate. They stayed there two days, resting and eating, and their strength came back. And the dogs, Patrick adds, who had been starving as well, were fed too. I like that detail very much. It's very much not the sort of thing you'd put in if you were making it up. It's the sort of thing you'd remember if you'd been there.

Some of the sailors, he adds, had been pagans, and after that they gave thanks to God. And he, Patrick, was held in honour by them. They even gave him a bit of honeycomb, which was a very expensive present. But one of them said that it had been offered to an idol, and Patrick would not eat it. That is the kind of man he was. Hungry as he was. A famous saint's miracle has just been done, and he's turning down a piece of honeycomb on a point of principle.

I find that rather lovable. You might too.

So, what next? Well, I'm sorry to say that it didn't go smoothly for a while. In the book he mentions, very briefly, that he was captured again, and held for sixty days. But he does not say by whom, or how it ended, only that God freed him. And then, at last, after some years, he found himself standing on the shore of his own country, in the Britain he had been taken from, and walking up a road that he knew.

I think this is the point in the story where it ought to get easy. He is home. His parents are alive. They take him in. They are overjoyed. They tell him, he says, that he is their son, and after all these hardships he must never leave them again.

That is the happy ending. That is where most stories stop.

But Patrick's did not.

He had been home for some time, a year, or two, or perhaps more. We don't know. And then, one night, he had another dream.

In this dream, he saw a man coming to him, as if from Ireland. The man's name was Victoricus. And he was carrying a great many letters, more letters than Patrick could count. He gave one to Patrick, and Patrick opened it, and read the first line. And the first line said: "The voice of the Irish."

And as he read, he heard, in his dream, a sound. A great many voices, calling out together. They were the voices of the people who lived near a wood in the far west of Ireland, by the sea. He calls it the Wood of Voclut. They were crying out, as if with one voice: "We beg you, holy boy, come and walk among us again."

And he woke up with his heart breaking.

I have thought a good deal about this part. Because look at who is calling. They are the people who owned him. The country that took him. The people who made him cold and hungry for six years, and whose language he had learned in his loneliness. And in the dream they are not threatening him, or ordering him. They are asking.

Now, I do not want to say too much, because I do not know the whole of what he felt. But I think that this is the moment he knew what he was for. Not for a quiet life in a good house in Britain. Not for being safe. He was meant to go back. Back to the hill, and the rain, and the people who had hurt him, to be the one who finally spoke their language, and told them what he had found.

I don't know if I could have done it. I really don't.

It did not happen quickly. He had to study, to learn. He had to be made a priest, and eventually a bishop, and this was no easy matter for a man who had missed his schooling. There was a great deal of that in the book. He admits, with real humour, that his Latin was not good. He says he is rusticissimus, which means "very countrified," a bumpkin, the most unlearned of men. He had been a slave in his teenage years, when other boys were learning grammar, and he had never caught up. And there were learned men back home who looked down on him for it, and told him so.

And what does he say? He says, in effect, "You are right. I am not clever. But God does not need a clever man. He picks the foolish things of the world, to put the wise to shame."

I rather like that. I think Saint Paul would have liked it too, because he said it first.

And then he went. He sailed back to Ireland, as a bishop, a man in his middle years, and he started his work.

We know less about the work than we might like.

What we do know is this. He travelled all over the island. He baptised a great many people, thousands, he says, and he is probably not exaggerating, since he had a lot of years. He ordained clergy. He set up churches. He encouraged young men and women, many of them from the families of chiefs, to give their lives to God, as monks and nuns. He says that some of the noblewomen did this against the wishes of their families, and suffered for it, and that he found this very moving.

He travelled among the kings, and he gave gifts to them, so that they would let him travel through their lands in peace, and he refused any gifts in return. He says he paid out the price of fifteen men's lives, over the years, to keep the roads open. That is a very large number, and I think he was not rich. He simply spent what he had.

It was not easy. Twelve times, he tells us, his life was in danger. He was once held in chains for a fortnight. He was robbed, and mocked, and misunderstood. Some of the older bishops back in Britain thought he was too ambitious, and even raised something he had done as a boy, many years before, a mistake which he had confessed to a friend and which the friend, it seems, had told. It hurt him greatly. But he writes about it with such gentleness, without a trace of bitterness, that you can tell the matter was long since settled between him and God.

And the people, those who had been shepherds' neighbours and rivals and slaveholders, listened. The Irish heard him. And they became, in a few generations, so thoroughly Christian that the whole country was soon known across Europe as an island of saints and scholars. Monks from Ireland went out with the gospel to Scotland, and England, and France, and Germany, and all the way down to Italy. One of them, Columba, has an episode of his own in this very podcast.

All of that came, in some way, from one boy with a flock of sheep, saying his prayers in the rain.

Now, we should say a word about the legends, because I did promise you that I would.

The shamrock is the best known. According to the story, Patrick used the three small leaves of the clover to explain the Holy Trinity, one God in three persons. It's a charming story, and it may well be that somebody, at some time, did something like that. But the story is not found anywhere in Patrick's own writing, nor in the old lives of him, and it first appears in print more than a thousand years after he died. So, I'll leave it where it belongs, as a story, and a pleasant one.

The snakes are even more of a puzzle. The story says that he drove all the snakes out of Ireland. But Ireland never had any, you see. There were no snakes there in his day, or for thousands of years before. The island was cut off by the sea before they could arrive. So if he did, in fact, drive them out, he did a very easy job.

And the fire on the hill, and the contests of power with the druids, come from a life of Patrick written about two hundred years after his death. That is long enough that, in those years, a legend can grow around a saint like ivy around an old wall. People loved him, and they wanted him to be as large in their stories as he was in their hearts. That's understandable. But I think that the real man is greater than the ivy. I think that a man who walks two hundred miles to a ship, and walks back to the people who held him captive, does not need a single snake.

Now it is quiet, and the candle is low, and I'd like to slow down and tell you how it ends.

We do not know exactly when Patrick died. It was probably in the second half of the four hundreds. The old tradition says it was on the seventeenth of March, and that is the day we keep his feast. Tradition says it may have been at a place called Saul, in the north of Ireland. The old stories say he was buried at Downpatrick, and a plain slab of granite was laid there, in the cathedral grounds, in the last century, with a single word on it. Patric.

He left behind the Confession, that small and rough and wonderful book. And at the end of it he says something that I find myself coming back to. He says: "I hope that I have done what I ought. But I am not trusting in myself. I know that the Lord is with me, and that whatever I have done, whatever I have been, it is a gift. Let anyone who wants to laugh at me, or sneer, do so. I will not be silent. I will not hide the signs and wonders that the Lord has shown me."

And then, a little further on, he says: "I give thanks without ceasing to my God, who kept me faithful in the day of my trial."

The day of his trial. He doesn't mean the hill. He doesn't mean the slavery, or the hunger, or the cold. He means everything. The whole of it. The boy who walked away, and the man who walked back.

I think the sheep, if they could, would say that they were glad to have been a part of it.

Here is what I take from it, and then I will leave you to sleep.

Patrick's story says: you may be taken from everything you know, and put in a cold place, with no end in sight. And you may find that it is in precisely that place that you meet the one who made you. It is not a punishment. It is not a mistake. It is simply the place where, for you, it happens.

And it says: when the voice says "Your ship is ready," it does not tell you how far away the ship is. It only tells you to get up.

And it says one thing more, which is, I think, the loveliest. The people who hurt you may be the very people you are sent back to love. That is not an easy thing to hear. It certainly was not easy for him. But he went, and because he went, a whole country found the faith, and kept it through the worst of times, and gave it back to the rest of Europe when Europe had very nearly lost it.

So, tonight, if you are lying awake, and you feel very far from home, and you have been waiting a long time for a ship, I hope you will do as Patrick did. Say a small prayer. And then another. You don't need a hundred. One will do for tonight.

And leave the rest to the one who sends ships.

Notes for the curious.

Saint Patrick is a real person, and unusually well documented for his age, because he wrote about himself. Two short Latin works of his survive: the Confession, a defence and account of his life, and a letter to the soldiers of a British chieftain called Coroticus, who had raided Ireland and carried off newly baptised Christians. Almost everything in tonight's story that is about his capture, his six years as a herdsman, the voice and the ship, the twenty-eight days, the pigs, and the dream of Victoricus is in the Confession, and where we could we have kept his own words. The dates are uncertain. He lived in the fifth century, and scholars still argue about whether he died closer to the year four hundred and sixty or four hundred and ninety.

He was a Christian before the division between East and West, and he is honoured as a saint by both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. His feast is the seventeenth of March.

The story of the shamrock, the story of the snakes, the fire on the hill, and the contest with the druids are legends. Several are from Muirchu's Life of Patrick, written some two hundred years after his death, and the shamrock does not appear in connection with him until a good deal later. The hill in Antrim where he is said to have kept sheep is a later tradition; the Confession does not name the place of his slavery, and we have not named it either.

What we invented: the weather, the sheep and their opinion of him, the dog, the conversations on the road and aboard the ship, the sailors and their moods, and most of the jokes. The sentence about the pigs and the dogs is from Patrick, as are the words he spoke to the captain, which we have given in our own modern English. We invented the picture of the hungry sailors' mood, and Patrick's honeycomb is as he tells it. The details of his work as a bishop are gathered from the Confession, and from what we know of the age.

That's the story of Saint Patrick for tonight. The Catholic and Orthodox Churches both keep his feast on the seventeenth of March. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day. And may the prayer that is said to be Patrick's own go with you, the one that begins, Christ be with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me. Goodnight, and God bless.

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