The Prayer of Patrick
Three Takes on the Lorica
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day Weekend, everyone!
If you need a quick-yet-meaningful1 activity to celebrate the great Irish Saint, I’ve got you covered! In the earliest Celtic Christian traditions, a “lorica” was a prayer of protection. The literal meaning of the Latin word is “breastplate” or shield.” One of these loricas has been preserved through the centuries as “Saint Patrick’s Hymn” or “Saint Patrick’s Breastplate.” Around here, we just call it “The Lorica,” and we pray it every year on his feast: “Christ to shield me today/ Against poison, against burning,/ Against drowning, against wounding…”—it’s a great family read aloud!
There are several iterations of The Lorica choose from, and all of them are wonderful. I took the liberty of copying the translation we use into Word, switching the font to Garamond, and making it landscape so you don’t have to! Here it is! (Please, someone, email me if the link is not working.) The rest of the content in this pdf will make more sense if you read on, but, if you have a Saint Paddy’s celebration to get to, feel free to take it and run.
Also, the texts of and research related to The Lorica were gleaned from this (incredible!) website: Patrick's Hymn — Hymnology Archive. So if you’re looking for a more academic approach, there you are.
The Lorica has been attributed to Saint Patrick time out of mind—that is, since 690, which is basically the same thing, since the dear Saint of Ireland died only 200 (ish) years before.2 Yes, his authorship is sometimes questioned. But in the words Whitley Stokes translated and included in his Goidelica, a glossary of many ancient Celtic verses: “Patrick made this hymn. In the time of Loegare son of Niall it was made. The cause of making it, however, was to protect himself with his monks against the deadly enemies who were in ambush against the clerics.”
Allow me to finish the legend. Saint Patrick and his followers were braving a trip through the Irish countryside to evangelize the people of Tara. The chieftains and druids pursued them, casting spells and curses and incantations all the while. In these straights (and it wouldn’t have been the first time it happened to Patrick), the Christians countered words with their own words— their loricas, the prayers of protection. Patrick sang out his hymn, and in answer, God disguised the Christians as deer. They passed through the countryside unharmed. Patrick’s Lorica is also called “Faeth Fiada,” which means “The Deer’s Cry.”3
The words of The Lorica have been remembered and retooled in the centuries since. There are many versions, but I will limit myself to three of them.
Take One
I first encountered The Lorica eight years ago in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the third novel in the Time Quintet. I found the paperback copy on the bookshelf of the basement apartment we lived in as newlyweds. It was one of those books that I practically ate (that is, began one day and finished the next).4 We could have inherited it from either of our families, but my guess is that the book—a first edition paperback, copyright date 1978, “Printed in the U.S.A.”—belonged to my dad (Dad, you can have it back whenever you’d like).
Each of L’Engle’s chapters is titled with successive lines of this poem:
In this fateful hour, I call on all heaven with its power, The sun with its brightness The snow with its whiteness The fire with all the strength it hath The lightning with its rapid wrath The winds with its swiftness along its path The sea with its deepness The rocks with their steepness The earth with its starkness All these I place Between myself and the powers of darkness.
The characters (still Murrays, but quite a bit older than they were in A Wind in the Door5) refer to these lines as “Patrick’s Rune.” The book explores the power of intercession, particularly the idea that intercession is unbounded by time. I typed the words of “Patrick’s Rune” into Google, and the result returned was “Saint Patrick’s Breastplate.” And, eight years ago, that was as far as I got. I closed A Swiftly Tilting Planet and put it back on the shelf. But the words of the “Rune” stayed with me and grew in significance as time passed.
Take Two
Celtic scholar Kuno Meyer’s 1911 translation of “Faeth Fiada” is recognized as the most accurate to the original language. This is the one we pray together on Saint Patrick’s Day, and I included the full version in that pdf. Here’s how it begins:
I arise today Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, Through belief in the threeness, Through confession of the oneness Of the Creator of Creation
Here’s the fourth stanza:
I arise today Through the strength of heaven: Light of sun, Radiance of moon, Splendour of fire, Speed of lightning, Swiftness of wind, Depth of sea, Stability of Earth, Firmness of rock.
It’s sharper and more staccato, but certainly recognizable as the part most closely linked to L’Engle’s poem.
Take Three
Twenty years before Meyer wrote his translation, Cecil Frances Alexander set Saint Patrick’s Hymn in a metrical version. Now, Alexander herself deserves a deep dive,6 but I’m not going to attempt that today. She’s an Anglican hymnist, and the most famous of her hymns is “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” Her setting of Saint Patrick’s Hymn, known as “I Bind Unto Myself Today,” is mind-boggling. She preserves the power of the original prayer while altering it into sing-able, rhyming English. Here’s that fourth stanza again:
The virtues of the starlit heaven, The glorious sun’s life-giving ray, The whiteness of the moon at even, The flashing of the lighting free, The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks, The stable earth, the deep salt sea, Around the old eternal rocks.
When I saw the word “whiteness,” the link between the Meyer version and L’Engle’s poem shifted in my mind. Was L’Engle’s play on “brightness” and “whiteness” sourced from Alexander’s hymn? L’Engle herself was Anglican, and a great lover of music at that. She must have known this hymn. And I must confess, even though the Meyer version is usually what we read to celebrate Saint Patrick, and the Alexander version is sweeping and beautiful, I still like the L’Engle version of Saint Patrick’s Lorica the most, despite its brevity. It’s the one that caught me first.
Three Takes Together:
But any version we can read, sing, or pray is a powerful meditation on intercessory boldness. Saint Patrick invokes the Creator of all creation—from strength of Heaven to stability of earth—in his hour of need. His thorough confidence reminds me of the child at the dinner table who thanks God for, “The rocks, and the trees, and the sheeps, and the cars, and the people, and the dog, and the squirrels, and the clouds, and everyone, everything, everywhere.”
When we pray like Saint Patrick, we step into the mystery of God’s omnipotence. I’ll let Alexander close us out with her final stanza, which is probably the best-known part of Saint Patrick’s Lorica:
Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!
A good litmus test for many Church-calendar related activities, at least the at-home-with-small-kids variant.
His date of death is contested by scholars.
This translation is also contested by scholars, because apparently that’s what scholars do.
“eating a book” is reading it within two days, “inhaling a book” would be more like reading it within a twenty-four-hour period.
So, one of the fascinating things about L’Engle novels, particularly the Time Quintet, is that different people gravitate toward different ones, attaching an almost peculiar level of significance to one of the books in the series (I have a sister-in-law who is attached to A Wind in the Door in the same way I’m attached to A Swiftly Tilting Planet). There are many, many, many people who don’t like this third book in the series (just look at Goodreads). She is approaching some pretty mature themes (nuclear Armageddon, the backstory of Branwen O’Keefe [Calvin’s mom], to name a few)—I think this is why the characters are so much older. For better or worse, I’m stuck to it.
Here’s a good place to start, though! Hymnology Archive, ya’ll.
A Swiftly Tilting Planet has always been my favourite of the Time books (I was a tween/early teen when I read it) and for a long while I had a printed copy of the poem taped to my bedroom wall. It was my introduction to the Lorica as well, and you're the first person I've seen mention the former in discussion of the latter.
As an aside, I've also noticed how different people latch onto different books in the Time Quintet - A Wind in the Door is my least favourite of the first four, but the echthroi and the idea of X-ing keep popping into my head lately, including last night while watching a live performance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
That hymn setting was my bridal processional. I look back on that selection often as this mark of grace that has become more layered with just how appropriate it was over time. It is one of my favorite prayers and I loved learning more about the stories!