visions

The passage from Acts (16:9-15) for the sixth Sunday in Easter, year C, begins:

During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, "Come over to Macedonia and help us." When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.

The call echoes in the experience of a later messenger, as he tells of his life and the grace of God ...

After many years I finally returned home to my family in Britain. They took me in — their long-lost son — and begged me earnestly that after all I had been through that I would never leave them again. But one night while I was at home I saw a vision while sleeping — it was a man named Victoricus, among to me as if he were arriving from Ireland. With him he brought a huge number of letters. He gave me one of them, and I saw that the first words were “The Voice of the Irish.” When I began to read this letter, all of a sudden I heard the voices of those Irish who live near the woods of Foclut near the Western Sea They called out to me with a single voice: “We beg you, holy boy, come here and walk among us!” I felt my heart breaking and was not able to read any more — and so I woke up. But thanks be to God, because after many years the Lord made their prayer come true.

("Confession," Philip Freeman, Saint Patrick of Ireland, Simon & Schuster, 2004, 182-183.)

Yes, that was Patrick of Ireland, in the fourth century of our era. He like Paul followed the call - the leading of the Spirit - in a way we might, maybe, find strange: through the figure of a dream. When the saint awoke, like the apostle, he gathered the images of the dream and heard in them a direction.


2019 May 26
Sixth Sunday of Easter
Year C
Acts 16:9-15
Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5
John 14:23-29
Psalm 67