the Voice of Irish: How God Made an Apostle Out a Frightened Boy: 1

He Was a Frightened Boy Taken in Chains - God Made Him the Voice of a NationMost people think they know Patrick. They know the shamrock, the feast day, the legend. But beneath the legend is a Roman-British boy seized by Irish raiders, carried far from everything familiar, and set alone on a foreign hillside - where something unexpected began.The Voice of the Irish follows Patrick from that hillside to the threshold of his mission: the long captivity, the hundred daily prayers, the night God spoke, the walk toward home, the welcome he could not quite accept, the schooling he had not anticipated, and the call that sent him back to the island that had taken his youth.The boy before the bishop - who Patrick was before Ireland claimed him, and the comfortable distance from God he kept until chains and a hillside closed that distance foreverPrayer born in captivity - six years of solitude transforming a lukewarm faith into an unquenchable hunger, one hundred prayers rising daily from a frightened shepherdThe voice in the night - the dreams, the call, the agonizing decision to return to the very land of his enslavementThe long road back - the walk home, the welcome shadowed by wounds that could not stop him, and the schooling and preparation no one expects from a man already formed by sufferingThe open door - how Palladius and providence converged to place Patrick at the threshold of everythingThis is the real Patrick - fully human, perpetually astonished at a mercy he never felt he deserved, and unmistakably marked by the hand of God. Written with reverence for the man the sources reveal, The Voice of the Irish is for the Irish diaspora who carry his name, for Catholic faithful who want their saints unvarnished, and for every reader who has wrestled with a calling that seemed too large for so small a life.Book One of The Apostle of Ireland: A Life of Saint Patrick