Cover art from Madeline L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet. Painting by Rowena Morill. 

My first and deepest memories of this hymn are not in the jeweled light of stained glass windows at church, but in the comfortable darkness of my bed. My mother used to sing it to me at bedtime to help me sleep. I often asked for it because it was long. I don’t know why she often agreed to my request, a transparent bargain to extend her presence in my room. Maybe she went along with it for the same reasons I’d later sing it to my children regularly: because a long song, if familiar enough, allows a certain amount of autopilot while your mind wanders; because singing a lengthy and detailed prayer of protection feels like a good way to commend a child to the night; because, well, she liked it, as I do. 

I did sing St. Patrick’s Breastplate at church too. We showed up just about every Sunday at St. George’s in Riverside, California until I was seven, when we moved and became regulars at St. John’s in Lafayette, Indiana. But yet again, my relationship with this hymn would deepen not in church but with my nose in a book. As a kid I read two different “chapter books” in which this ancient prayer formed a significant plot point. The first was The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull, one of John Bellairs’s spooky YA novels. While my memory of it is hazy, I recall that before some boss battle with the demons who served as the antagonists of this particular book, the main character’s priest friend tells him to use this the words to this hymn for protection. That’s the first time I remember realizing that the familiar hymn was something more than just a hymn. The second book was Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet, my favorite of her books. L’Engle uses what seems to be her own version of the first verse of Patrick’s prayer as part her story of a cosmic battle between good and evil. This version of the prayer - At Tara in this fateful hour I call on Heaven with all its power… - lives in my heart, alongside the hymn. 

For a child deep in the thrall of various fictional worlds more obviously enchanted than our own, it was an appealing idea: that this hymn, previously primarily notable for its duration, was actually something special and powerful, something bordering on the magical - although Bellairs and L’Engle, both Christians, were careful not to suggest that divine power could be commanded, only invoked. 

The way this ancient hymn-prayer was used in these books is perhaps more true to its origins than singing it at St. John’s, Lafayette, on an ordinary Sunday morning. The earliest fragments of the Irish text behind the hymn date from the 9th century. In an 11th-century text, a more complete version of the prayer is accompanied by the explanation that Saint Patrick, who lived in the fifth century, composed and sang it as a prayer for protection when a local king was trying to prevent him and his monks from spreading Christianity in eastern Ireland. In the 19th century, the fiercely talented Anglo-Irish hymn-writer Cecil Frances Alexander translated the text and turned it into a hymn. Her version became what appears as number 370 in The Hymnal 1982, minus a couple of verses that were evidently deemed too odd to make the cut. If you need a prayer for protection against lust or evil wizards, you’ll have to find the original full text online. In my household we often refer to this hymn-prayer, in all its versions, as the Lorica - a Latin word for a breastplate or body armor, which by extension came to mean a prayer for protection in the early Irish church.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I_bind_unto_myself_to-day_(no_source)

On regional church retreats in college, I learned and sang Fran McKendree’s setting of the Lorica. I wish I remembered all the words; I haven’t been able to find the song online in any form. But I remember the thrilling energy of these phrases:  “Stability of the earth! Firmness of rock!” Fran’s version nestled into my heart too, adding more memories and associations to Hymn 370. 

Years passed. I went to graduate school; I made a home in new churches. I got married. I began discerning a call to priesthood while finishing my dissertation. I had my first baby. And eventually, inevitably, I found myself sitting in holy darkness and singing a child to sleep. Sometimes, I would sing Hymn 370 - favored, as ever, for its length, somber gentleness, and sense of weaving God’s protection around a beloved child. Our two children tolerated us singing to them at bedtime for an astonishingly long time. We probably spent nearly fifteen years singing to a child, or two, for some portion of each evening. How many times did we sing the Lorica? Two thousand? Three? 

Our oldest child is nineteen now, and away at college. She faces clear-eyed a complex and dangerous world - risky for her as an LGBTQ+ person, risky for her generation as climate crisis deepens and global currents of fascism rise. Like many her age, she’s facing it all with courage and compassion, building community and developing skills to make the best of a challenging season in the life of the world. I learned recently that she often carries some version of the Lorica with her. That ancient prayer calling on the powers of Creation for protection, by God’s grace, holds meaning for her in the face of the dangers of the world she faces. 

I don’t sing the Lorica often anymore. Generally, I only sing it when it comes around at church a couple of times a year. I miss singing my children to sleep, not least because it was a chance to sit in the dark and tell them how much I love them for half an hour every night. Maybe I need to find a place for St. Patrick’s Breastplate in my daily prayers for them - and for all whom I love. Perhaps I need to call on sun and moon, earth and sea, the vigilance of angels, the witness of the faithful departed, the strong Name of the Trinity itself - 

All these I place

By God’s almighty help and grace

Between my child and the powers of darkness.