In Front, Behind, Within, Without

A Celtic Curriculum, Week Seven

Welcome to week seven of our Celtic Curriculum for supporting subscribers. Thanks for your patience this week—our church is doing camp and I’m co-leading the “pastor’s corner,” so our Monday curriculum is dropping on Tuesday. Learn more about subscription levels here. Members and friends of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Herndon are eligible for complimentary gift subscriptions; just ask. 

This week, we have as our inspiration the famous poem-prayer by Saint Patrick, known as Saint Patrick’s Breastplate (shared below). The breastplate has been put to music countless times and includes words familiar to many of us, “Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me,” but also calls upon elements of nature for sustenance and strength. 

As I consider this centuries-old work of devotion, it speaks to me of two twin practices: WELCOMING IN and LETTING GO.

About the Practice

In her book The Soul’s Slow Ripening, Christine Valters Paintner writes about Saint Patrick’s prayer in a chapter called “the practice of encircling.” The prayer is called a lorica, which means “shield,” and is a prayer of protection. And Patrick would have needed it: as a young man living near Wales, he was captured by pirates and taken to Ireland, where he was enslaved for several years. After receiving guidance in a dream and other visions, he made a daring escape and fled for Gaul, where he studied for the ministry. After many years, he had a dream calling him back to Ireland, where he’d been enslaved, where he was vocal against slavery and for the liberating way of Christ. 

Imagine what it was like for him to return to that traumatic place. “Here was a man enslaved,” Paintner writes, “who escaped by divine intervention, and then heard the call to return to the land of his slavery–and he went willingly. He must have experienced more than his share of discomfort at the thought.” Hence the writing of the lorica prayer, in which Patrick “binds unto himself” the forces of nature and of nature’s Creator. To put it in the language of this week’s practice, he welcomes in everything he needs for the grueling work of ministry, including the spirit of Christ himself. But in the full version of the prayer, he also asks to be saved from the “snares” of temptation and vice, and from anyone who would wish him ill. There is an attempt to let go of all that would attack and discourage him. (You will see this in the full Breastplate below–check out the powerful “against” section.)¹