The Truth about St. Patrick

     I don’t mean to make you Irish cry in your green beer, but here’s the shocking truth about your patron saint: Patrick wasn’t Irish. He was English. And in Patrick’s story, the Irish aren’t the good guys.
     In the fifth century, Patrick was captured by the Irish from his English home and hauled off to become a slave, working as a swineherd.
     Patrick, a lackluster follower of God, prayed for his freedom and escaped. He fled and made it back to England to be reunited with his family. Gratitude!
     He would have happily stayed there, but a dream rocked him: babies in Ireland pleaded for him to return to tell them about Christ. He couldn’t shake off the dream, so he received monastic training and traveled back into the country that had once enslaved him, according to historian Bruce L. Shelley (“Church History in Plain Language”).
     A touching story, yes, but what’s it got to do with us?
     What if Patrick’s story is our story? What if something has taken us captive so we’re in a pigsty of trouble? Things like bitterness, or compulsions, or pleasures?
     That’s happened to me. Like Patrick, I cried out for divine help. Escape came, and I threw off chains of hurts, habits, and hangups (as Celebrate Recovery puts it). Gratitude!
     I’m not Irish, but I happily claim Patrick as the patron saint representing deliverance from whatever enslaves us.
     Because who wants to stay in bondage?
​
     (Photo by Nheyob, own work, [CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0], via Wikimedia Commons, at Saint Patrick Catholic Church, Junction City, Ohio)