The Shepherd, The Lawyer and the Confession
If I were to tell you that Pat Robertson’s son, Gordon, produced a movie about St. Patrick you might accept it without question. Others at another time would have been shocked that the son of the founder of CBN who had no desire to enter the family business would end up producing a movie about an Irish saint.
“I obviously grew up in the Church,” he explains, “and by the time I was fourteen years old, I was confirmed. I saw the cost of ministry and I did not want to pay the cost. I was all about let’s go out and make money. I actually swore I would never host the 700 Club. But God has a sense of humor and that is why he made me.”
A lawyer in one of Virginia’s most successful law firms, Gordon Robertson explained that a pastor friend tricked him into joining him on a mission trip which changed his life forever.
“I was practicing law with a partner in one of Virginia’s oldest law firms. A pastor friend of mine, John Jimenez, called me up one day and said: ‘I had a dream about you’ and that got my attention and ‘I had a dream that you went with me on a mission trip to India.’ ”
The plan was for him to leave the following Monday. The lawyer he was at the time understood that it was impossible to get a visa to India that quickly, so he agreed.
“I said ‘OK, John if you can get the visa I will go.’ I did not know that the fix was in and apparently that was part of the dream he had. You could have a visa expediting service and so he said well where’s your passport.”
This was twenty six years ago. The next night, John called Gordon and told him that he had the visa to India.
“I honor my word and I had given my word ‘I’ll go if you get the visa.’ And so, on Monday morning I find myself on an airplane ride to India.
“This became a living reality for me, I found people just as the Apostle Paul found the people in Athens on Mars hill: ‘I see that you are a very religious people’ and India is a very religious people but they’re searching for God without knowing him.”
Within a year he left his law practice behind and entered into the mission field.
“I moved my family to Asia and used Manila as the base. I started the Asian center for missions and was regularly going to India, Indonesia, China and Thailand and a friend of mine sent me a copy of the [St. Patrick’s] Confessions. Here was the St. Patrick I never knew.”
I [RJC] spoke with Gordon[GR] about the movie I Am Patrick that comes from words of St. Patrick himself.
RJC: Where did this idea come from to do a project on St. Patrick?
GR: I knew some of the legends about him. I really did not know the man until I read his Confession. I just found myself in a deep bond with him years after he wrote it and thought it would be wonderful for the entire world to get to know him.
RJC: I knew little about St. Patrick and I read the Confession after I saw the movie. A real powerful story that shows this person who has a tremendous experience and trust and love in God in a difficult time.
GR: It is a very difficult time. I don’t know why God loves shepherds so much but it seems like the time Patrick was a shepherd, he was a slave. So, he is carried away from Britain, spent six years as a slave and he is forced to be a shepherd. In those times on the hills of Ireland, he begins to pray. God begins to answer and show him things.
My goal with this film is to show people who are living today that you can still have that experience with God, but you need to have time. You need to have time where you the read the bible and then you start to pray the bible. You begin to listen and have quiet time where God can speak to you.
RJC: The beginning of the movie shows he is brought up in a Christian family where people are more culturally Christian instead of actually living a relationship with God.
GR: And that is part of his confession. His grandfather was a priest and his father was a deacon. A lot had to do with their position in the Roman Empire and the collection of taxes and the tax exemption that was enjoyed. So not only were they exempt from tax but they were also responsible for collecting.
I don’t think Patrick’s family was extraordinarily wealthy but they were by no means poor. That is evident by the Latin terms he used for his childhood home. So, it is fairly evident that he had slaves; he had land. They were in positions of authority within Britain which was part of the Roman Empire.
RJC: I am always fascinated by what I discover I did not learn in my history classes and one of them is that I never knew that Ireland was not part of the Roman Empire.
GR: It was considered too remote. We show one of the maps and Ireland is considered the end of the world. Keep in mind this is before Columbus and no one went to Ireland. It was a place where the uncivilized were and the people who did not know God. And so, for him to take on the task “I want to preach the Gospel to the ends of the Earth.” He took the great commission literally.
This is something all Christians do and need to be a part of and again. That is another goal of the film: I want to inspire people to people to consider the life of a missionary, the life of someone who goes to announce the Gospel to those who have not heard it.
RJC: It comes out intensely in the movie, and I am not sure that I learned this growing up myself, just how much he really had a daily encounter with Christ. I am not talking necessarily mystically. He is a person who learned really to rely on God and to be in prayer every day.
GR: He did and that was a part of his regular life. We tried to show the depth of that relationship — show the daily encounter of that relationship even in times of suffering and even in times that Patrick is literally starving as a slave. He learns to entirely trust God, ‘God will see you through.’
If you are on God’s mission he is going to watch over you, provide for you and make a way for you.
RJC: I think it is safe to say that there will come a point that you will have to learn that and it will appear that God is not helping you but he is leading you to that point where you will understand that he is helping you all along.
GR: There is a great mystery Paul talks about in Colossians the fellowship of suffering where you don’t understand what Christ did, the depth of his love and the depth of his perseverance for each one of us until you have had experiences like that. I like to tell people that untested faith is no faith at all.
It is something that you need to go through these times and realize that God is with you in the middle of that. Yea though, I walk through valley of the shadow of the valley death I fear no evil for thou are with me. (Psalm 23) You don’t get that until you walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
RJC: That is a powerful testimony right there. What were the actors like, were they onboard with this or were they actors in this movie.?
GR: Well, Seán T. Ó Meallaigh (Patrick as an adult) was on board with it. Curiously, we learned during the shooting that he played younger Patrick for a version of St. Patrick’s life for an Irish television show more than a decade ago. So, he was definitely on board with it and definitely onboard with the spiritual side of things.
John Rhys Davies (Patrick writing the Confessions) is as sympathetic to Christianity. He views Christianity as the vehicle for modern civilization and all the rights we enjoy whether in Europe and the United States but, he says, ‘I am rationalist’. So, he is not a believer. He says ‘I am a skeptic and a rationalist’ but very sympathetic.
And Then Robert McCormack, I will let him speak for himself. He definitely played the younger Patrick with a view that he understood that story.
RJC: I see this as in the lives of so many saints — He has an argument with the Church and the Church has an argument with him.
GR: Well, it is curious the argument seems to be based on him speaking in the vernacular. He goes to preach in their tongue. He learned it as a slave. He was six years as a slave. So, he learned the language.
If you track mission history, speaking in the language of the people has always been a controversial thing and whether that of Catholic mission tradition or the Protestant mission tradition that always seem to come up.
The second thing and that is the thing that led to the attempt to recall him and drum up charges for something that happened thirty years before. He had confessed before he had been made a deacon let alone a bishop but he had confessed and had been forgiven of the sin but they brought it back up and the reason was that he was ordaining ordinary Irish men to the priesthood.
And then he was accepting women and calling them virgins to Christ calling them into the monastic life and into service to Christ.
It is a method that still works today it is a method that St. Paul used. Going into a village you preach the gospel and you convert and from your converts you select the minister who will be a minister to that flock. It is a wonderful way to reproduce Christianity.
I think western civilization fails to realize the monastic literary tradition that St. Patrick started the emphasis on reading the bible on the local level became a monastic tradition that became the university. The tradition of copying scripture and copying ancient writing all of that was preserved in Ireland during the dark ages. There is whole book on how the Irish saved civilization but it is true that there are monastic traditions from back out of Ireland and when back into Europe and obviously came back to America and there is an emphasis on how everyone should read the bible.
So this seems to be a powerful movie that people are going to hopefully see and I have already talked to some of my parishioners including some of my Irish parishioners. It really seems to have a lot to say and I think it is going to inspire a lot of people.
Well that is my hope, I hope it inspires people to believe that they too can hear from God. And you just follow the same principles that St. Patrick followed and he would go out and walk the hills of Ireland and talk with God.
You read the Confession and there is scripture throughout. He is referred to as a man of one book and the one book is the bible.
The second thing I wanted to take away is that there are still people in the world today who have not heard Christ, who have not heard the good news and literally in our generation. Here we are in our generation, we have the capacity now to finish the task and if it is not in our generation it can be in the next generation. What are we doing to make sure that every one hears every tribe every nation every tongue has the scripture, has the ability to hear this wonderful news that God has set us free from sin?
So those are the two take aways I want people to have.
The third piece is that this is St. Patrick in his own words. You are seeing his confession, his letter to Coroticus
GR: There is only scene — where the pastoral fire that he lit on the hill from Easter — which was recorded about a century after his death, it is not in the confessions but it is a dramatic moment in Irish history. I thought it had to be part of the film and included it as it is such an act of defiance. There is a living God and he reigns supreme particularly on Easter. That scene is in it. The rest of it is Patrick in his own words.
Distributed by Fathom Events, I AM PATRICK is in movie theaters nationwide March 17 and 18 only. Visit FathomEvents.com for tickets, locations and showtimes.
