Faith & Spirit Quote by Saint Patrick

A hard-edged kind of humility is doing the heavy lifting here: Patrick frames his life as conditional ("If I be worthy") and then immediately commits it to a single purpose ("to teach the heathen"), with zero promise of comfort, gratitude, or even safety. The line reads like spiritual accounting. Worthiness is not a feeling; it is proved in action, especially when the audience "may despise me". That last clause is the real engine of the sentence. It pre-empts the obvious objection to missionary work - rejection, mockery, violence - and turns it into evidence that the mission is authentic.

Context matters. Patrick is writing out of the late Roman Christian world, shaped by captivity, frontier insecurity, and the Church's growing sense of itself as a universal institution. "Heathen" signals not just unbelief but a boundary: the edge of the Christian moral map, where evangelizing doubles as cultural translation and, unavoidably, cultural contest. The subtext is political as much as devotional. Teaching is a claim to authority, and "my God" is a declaration of allegiance that outranks local kings, clans, and customs.

Yet Patrick doesn't swagger. He anticipates contempt and accepts it as the price of spiritual labor. The rhetoric is calibrated to make vulnerability look like strength: if you're despised and still persist, your motives appear purified. In one sentence, he sanctifies unpopularity, converts opposition into proof, and recasts missionary ambition as self-erasure.