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 a.d.
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.
Have
you ever wondered why more people aren't making an effort to improve
their moods and attitudes? Has it ever bothered you? Maybe even
frustrated you? There are four common reasons why more people don't try
to feel better:
