The and Now ~ What Endures

Patrick Marches On

My story begins on the coast of Britain, at what felt like the edge of the world. Behind us was home, fields, family, the things you assume will always be there. In front of us was the sea. I didn’t know then, but sometimes the sea is a door.

They came in daylight. Raiders—sudden, fast, practiced. Many of us were taken so quickly it hardly seemed real. One moment, I was where I belonged; the next, I was a prisoner, and the world had changed its rules.

We were forced onto a ship and carried away from everything familiar. Days later, land appeared—green, strange, and beautiful in a way that didn’t comfort me, because it wasn’t mine. I was brought inland and sold into slavery.

The rest becomes simple to describe and hard to live: a master, a hut, and work that never stopped. I was made a herdsman – tending animals, moving with them, sleeping rough, waking before light, living by weather and orders.

Fear followed you everywhere. You learned what could get you beaten and what could get you killed. You learned how a man can lose hope.

And yet something else began in me, something I would never have chosen. I began to pray. At first, it was desperation. Then it became a habit. Then it became my life.

Out on the hills, with nothing between me and the wind and the sea, I came to know the living God. I was still a captive, still a young man far from home, but in the midst of that hard life, something awakened within me.

I labored there for six years, and to my surprise, I began to love the people who held me captive. They were quick to laugh and quick to fear the unseen, bound to signs and seasons, to old stories, old spirits, old gods.

They were deeply superstitious, yes, but not empty. Even in the darkness, there was a small light: kindness at a doorway, loyalty to kin, reverence for what they could not name. I was their captive, yet I could not stop seeing them as human, a people made for more than the world had revealed to them.

Then, in a dream, I heard the voice of God: “Your ship is ready.”  That night I slipped away and ran back across the land in the direction I had come six years earlier, running, hiding, hungry, exhausted, listening for footsteps.

I kept moving until the air tasted like salt again and the land fell away into the sea. At last, I reached the coast. There was a ship, and I asked to go with them. The captain turned me away sharply.

So I went to a nearby hut and prayed a prayer of desperation. A man came running, calling me back. They’d changed their minds.

We sailed for three days and made land. Then we walked for twenty-eight days through the wilderness until the food was gone and everyone’s mood turned dark. The captain looked at me and said, “Now pray.”

So I did. Not long after, we came upon a herd of pigs. We ate, we recovered, and we kept moving. And at last, I reached home again, back with my parents, a son returned from the dead, and a son who had changed.

Three years later, I sailed to France to study to become a priest fit to serve God’s people. But one night, another call came. It was not God’s people calling to me. It was a people still in darkness, the land of my slavery, calling my name as if the wind itself had learned it.

I heard them as plainly as I had once heard the message of the ship: Come back, Patrick. Come walk among us again. Come to the western sea.

I left at once and sailed around Britain, back to the land of my captivity. I arrived with apostolic fire in my bones and went among them. The scripture “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light,” became my strength. The very people I once feared received the Gospel, and before long, I knew I would forever call them my own.

So, I did the work set before me. I baptized. I confirmed. I ordained priests. I set up small chapels and brought the Mass to places that had never known it.

I gathered others to walk with me, and we went on to the next town, and then the next, and in each place, we spent time, weeks, and did it again. Water poured, hands laid, prayers spoken, an altar raised, a small community formed.

And the people of Ireland rose up and claimed their allegiance to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Something within them answered more than I could have imagined, and it gave them a strength they did not know they had, a strength that would one day reach far beyond the shores of their island, a strength that would change the world.

I grew old, and in time, my days in this world came to an end. I left them, trusting that what had been lit would not go out, and that they would march onward.

And they marched on, far beyond the shores of Ireland, carrying the light of Christ and the Catholic faith into lands I never saw, planting it in homes, in parishes, in schools, in the steady habits of family life.

They carried what keeps a people strong: devotion to God, love of kin, hard work, and the belief that education is not a luxury, but a duty. They marched in labor and in unions, in public safety forces, in management and in business, in religious life, in courtrooms, and in the halls of civic leadership. Families marched into parishes and schools where ordinary people learned how to belong, how to serve, and how to pass the faith on to the next generation.

And yes, they marched in the parade, not as a boast, and not as a costume, but as a declaration: we are here; we have roots; we have duties; we have gratitude. Pipes and drums, dance schools, banners, faith units, police and fire, veterans, civic groups, each one a chapter in the same story.

St. Patrick’s Day in America is not only a remembrance, but it is also a transmission. It is how people teach the next generation what they are, and what they owe, to God, to family, to community, and to the country that became home.

I marched across Ireland, but the march did not end with me. It continues still down Main Streets because the faith endured, the culture endured, and the people endured.

.

.