On Saint Patrick

Christ be with me,

Christ within me,

Christ behind me,

Christ before me,

Christ beside me,

Christ to win me,

Christ to comfort and restore me.

Christ beneath me,

Christ above me,

Christ in quiet,

Christ in danger,

Christ in hearts of all that love me,

Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
--St. Patrick's Breastplate

Patricius Magonus Sucatus had left an incredible story, though obscured by dressed up legends and traditions now held on today, the date of his death, the celebration of his life. He had come from an upper middle-class family, and then a nominal Christian, was taken captive by Irish raiders in the late 4th century. In Ireland Patrick was sold into slavery and put to work as a shepherd tending to flocks of sheep; interestingly, it was there on the popular location of Foclut, in eastern Ireland, that he became close to the Lord, building on the relationship with fervant prayer from morning to night. One can research Patrick's life on the Web in various sites, and in library's across the globe, but by the Lord's will I think it was meant to be that we should not know anymore about this Christian who ministered to the Irish after having fled to his homeland and returning by the directions God had sent him in dreams.

In two letters, one called Confessio, a letter to certain church leader in Rome who though Patrick to be some bumpkin who was not capable to be a minister of the Gospel, and the other one was a letter to a British officer called Coroticus. Even Patrick himself acknowledges that his Latin and his education is limited and says of himself in the first sentance in that letter that he is "a most simple countryman, the least of all the faithful and most contemptible to many" and "therefore for some time I have thought of writing, but I have hesitated until now, for truly, I feared to expose myself to the criticism of men, because I have not studied like others, who have assimilated both Law and the Holy Scriptures equally and have never changed their idiom since their infancy, but instead were always learning it increasingly, to perfection, while my idiom and language have been translated into a foreign tongue." But he was quite confidant in the Lord, knowing that the servant is not greater than his master, writing to the the bishops and deacons, reminding them that it is the Lord who he looked to not at his own works (the Italics are mine):

But had it been given to me as to others, in gratitude I should
not have kept silent, and if it should appear that I put myself before others,
with my ignorance and my slower speech, in truth, it is written: 'The tongue of
the stammerers shall speak rapidly and distinctly.' How much harder must we try
to attain it, we of whom it is said: 'You are an epistle of Christ in greeting
to the ends of the earth ... written on your hearts, not with ink but with the
Spirit of the living God.' And again, the Spirit witnessed that the rustic life
was created by the Most High.

I am, then, first of all, countryfied, an exile, evidently unlearned, one who is not able to see into the future, but I know for certain, that before I was humbled I was like a stone lying in deep mire, and he that is mighty came and in his mercy raised me up and, indeed, lifted me high up and placed me on top of the wall. And from there I ought to shout out in gratitude to the Lord for his great favours in this world and for
ever, that the mind of man cannot measure (The "Confessio" of Saint Patrick, www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/patrick.html#forty1).