Patricius endured six years of this woeful isolation, and by the end of it he had grown from a careless boy to something he would surely never otherwise have become – a holy man, indeed a visionary for whom there was no longer any rigid separation between this world and the next. On his last night as Miliucc’s slave, he received in sleep his first otherworldly experience. A mysterious voice said to him: “Your hungers are rewarded: you are going home.”
Patricius sat up, startled. The voice continued: “Look, your ship is ready.”
Miliucc’s farm was inland, nowhere near the sea, but Patricius set out, whither he knew not. He walked some two hundred miles, through territory he had never covered before, without being stopped or followed, and reached a southeastern inlet, probably near Wexford, where he saw his ship. As he tramped toward his destiny, his faith that he was under God’s protection must have grown and grown, for it was virtually impossible that a fugitive slave could go so far without being intercepted. “I came in God’s strength… and had nothing to fear” is Patricius’s simple summation.
Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization, pp. 102-103
Photo by Bruce Warrington on Unsplash
Entrusted to the Dirt 
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