A
Slave to His Destiny
One morning a sixteen-year-old boy was kidnapped from his house
by a band of knife-wielding thugs and taken to another country, there
to
be sold as a slave. The year was 401 AD.
He was made a shepherd. Slaves were not allowed to wear
clothes, so he was often dangerously cold and frequently on the verge
of
starvation. He spent months at a time without seeing another human
being -- a severe
psychological torture.
But this greatest of difficulties was transformed into the
greatest of blessings because it gave him an opportunity not many get
in a
lifetime. Long lengths of solitude have been used by people all through
history to meditate, to learn to control the mind and to explore the
depths of feeling and thought to a degree impossible in the hubbub
of
normal life.
He wasn't looking for such an "opportunity," but he got it
anyway. He had never been a religious person, but to hold himself together
and
take his mind off the pain, he began to pray, so much that "...in one
day," he wrote later, "I would say as many as a hundred prayers and
after dark nearly as many again...I would wake and pray before daybreak
--
through snow, frost, and rain...."
This young man, at the onset of his manhood, got a 'raw deal.'
But therein lies the lesson. Nobody gets a perfect life. The question
is
not "What could I have done if I'd gotten a better life?" but rather
"What can I do with the life I've got?"
How can you take your personality, your circumstances, your
upbringing, the time and place you live in, and make something
extraordinary out of it? What can you do with what you've got?
The young slave prayed. He didn't have much else available to
do, so he did what he could with all his might. And after six years
of
praying, he heard a voice in his sleep say that his prayers would be
answered: He was going home. He sat bolt upright and the voice said,
"Look, your
ship is ready."
He was a long way from the ocean, but he started walking. After
two hundred miles, he came to the ocean and there was a ship,
preparing to leave for Britain, his homeland. Somehow he got aboard
the ship
and went home to reunite with his family.
But he had changed. The sixteen-year-old boy had become a holy
man. He had visions. He heard the voices of the people from the island
he
had left -- Ireland -- calling him back. The voices were persistent,
and he
eventually left his family to become ordained as a priest and a bishop
with the intention of returning to Ireland and converting the Irish
to
Christianity.
At the time, the Irish were fierce, illiterate, Iron-Age
people. For over eleven hundred years, the Roman Empire had been spreading
its
civilizing influence from Africa to Britain, but Rome never conquered
Ireland.
The people of Ireland warred constantly. They made human
sacrifices of prisoners of war and sacrificed newborns to the gods
of the
harvest. They hung the skulls of their enemies on their belts as ornaments.
Our slave-boy-turned-bishop decided to make these people
literate and peaceful. Braving dangers and obstacles of tremendous
magnitude, he actually succeeded! By the end of his life, Ireland was
Christian. Slavery had ceased entirely. Wars were much less frequent,
and literacy
was spreading.
How did he do it? He began by teaching people to read --
starting with the Bible. Students eventually became teachers and went
to other
parts of the island to create new places of learning, and wherever
they
went, they brought the know-how to turn sheepskin into paper and paper
into books.
Copying books became the major religious activity of that
country. The Irish had a long-standing love of words, and it expressed
itself to the full when they became literate. Monks spent their lives
copying
books: the Bible, the lives of saints, and the works accumulated by
the
Roman culture -- Latin, Greek, and Hebrew books, grammars, the works
of
Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Homer, Greek philosophy, math, geometry,
astronomy.
In fact, because so many books were being copied, they were
saved, because as Ireland was being civilized, the Roman Empire was
falling
apart. Libraries disappeared in Europe. Books were no longer copied
(except in the city of Rome itself), and children were no longer taught
to
read. The civilization that had been built up over eleven centuries
disintegrated. This was the beginning of the Dark Ages.
Because our slave-boy-turned-bishop transformed his suffering
into a mission, civilization itself, in the form of literature and
the
accumulated knowledge contained in that literature, was saved
and not lost during that time of darkness. He was named a saint, the
famous
Saint Patrick. You can read the full and fascinating story if you
like in the excellent book How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas
Cahill.
"Very interesting," you might say, "but what does that have to
do with me?"
Well...you are also in some circumstances or other, and it's
not all peaches and cream, is it? There's some stuff you don't like
--
maybe something about your circumstances, perhaps, or maybe some
events that occurred in your childhood.
But here you are, with that past, with these circumstances,
with the things you consider less than ideal. What are you going to
do
with them? If those circumstances have made you uniquely qualified
for
some contribution, what would it be?
You may not know the answer to that question right now, but
keep in mind that the circumstances you think only spell misery may
contain
the seeds of something profoundly Good. Assume that's true, and the
assumption will begin to gather evidence until your misery is transformed,
as
Saint Patrick's suffering was, from a raw deal to the perfect
preparation for something better.
Ask yourself and keep asking, "Given my upbringing and
circumstances, what Good am I especially qualified to do?"