Towards the end of his life, Saint Patrick wrote his ‘Confessions‘ which, like his near-contemporaneous Saint Augustine’s autobiography of the same title, is meant in the original sense of that word: As a song of praise to God for His goodness and mercy, as manifested in their respective life journeys. Both saints began as sinners mired in ignorance – by their own ‘confession’ – but the grace of God brought them to Him and His salvific truth. By cooperating with that grace, both bishops changed the entire course of history.
As Saint Patrick admits at the very beginning, his Confessions are from the pen of a ‘rustic’. They don’t have the polished, dense paragraph-long sentences in Latin prose like Augustine. Nor do they have all the personal details of Augustine’s. But they have their own honest, Celtic beauty, which have echoed through the ages.
Friends of mine sent the following musical rendition of part of the Confessions, around the memorial of Saint Patrick, but I only saw the note today. I was so taken with this song, that I had to post it here for others, as an extra for our Sunday musical offering on this Monday morning. We’re still in the ‘octave’ of Patrick, at least for all you Irish out there, or would-be Irish, so I suppose it still counts.