This magical world, though full of adventure and surprise, is no longer full of dread. Rather, Christ has trodden all pathways before us, and at every crossroads and by every tree the Word of God speaks out. We have only to be quiet and listen, as Patrick learned to do during the silence of his “novitiate” as a shepherd on the slopes of Sliabh Mis.
This sense of the world as holy, as the Book of God – as a healing mystery, fraught with divine messages – could never have risen out of Greco-Roman civilization, threaded with the profound pessimism of the ancients and their Platonic suspicion of the body as unholy and the world as devoid of meaning.
Cahill, How The Irish Saved Civilization, p. 133
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Entrusted to the Dirt 