A blessed St. Brigid’s Day to all of you!
St. Brigid has always been one of my favorite saints, and we even named our little house church here in Waterloo Township after her (you can see our icon of her along with her cross up above). My Irish great-grandmother’s name was Bridget and I always wanted to name one of my daughters after my grand-grandmother and the saint who is also known as “the Mary of the Gael.” Apparently my wife, Bonnie, had a two-headed babysitter named Bridget, so she resisted my naming strategy for a long time. The same thing had happened with the boy’s name Jude—but I finally prevailed with the birth of our youngest, Daniel Jude. Our three daughters are named Mae, Zelie, and Isabel and, as we were running out of names, I was sure the next girl would be named Brigid. I had Bonnie right where I wanted her. But, alas, no more girls were to arrive; and now I look to my children to set the universe to rights in the naming of their daughters. They’re my last hope.
As with the wonder-tales of many of the Irish saints, the story of Brigid is filled with miracles... and milk. The early Celtic Church was a rural and not, like most of early Christianity, an urban affair. So there’s a bit of wildness there, a condition my friend Martin Shaw describes as “still having the fur on it.” Many of the stories include cows and milk or of Brigid turning water into milk or into ale. According to the legend, Brigid was born to a slave woman bound to a druid, but that the druid recognized the wonders that accompanied the child’s nativity and her early life, such as this one:
“The druid, the female slave, and her child were at Loch Mescae, and the druid’s mother’s brother was there too, the latter being a Christian. They were there at midnight and while the druid was watching the stars, he saw a fiery column rising up from the house, from the very place where the slave and her daughter were. He woke his uncle, who saw it too and said that she was a holy girl. ‘That is true,’ he said, ‘if I were to tell you all the things she has done.’”
At her weaning, the child Brigid could not get accustomed to solid food and would become violently ill. The druid concluded that this was because the food was too impure for such a holy one and so “a white cow with red ears was assigned to sustain her, and she was healed as a result.” A white animal with red ears, however, indicates the beast came from the Otherworld. The story of Brigid, then, is a tale as laden with magic and folk religion as it is with Christianity, which, before it got into the business of politics, was a fountainhead of wonders and marvels. It is no accident that brother Martin calls Christ “the Galilee druid.”
Indeed, part of what attracts me so much to the Irish saints is the way in which the border between history and legend, between Christian and pagan, is so difficult to limn. Which is as it should be: just as the border between the natural and the supernatural should be (and is) so difficult to distinguish. But, if we’re not awake to it, we’ll never see it. We have to learn a new vocabulary of vision.
The placement of Brigid’s feast day—shared with the pagan festival of Imbolc at the half-quarter between the feasts of Christmas and the Annunciation (or Lady day)—illuminates this very “betweenness” (metaxu) so characteristic of Celtic spirituality, as well as the lack thereof which contributes in great measure to the spiritual impoverishment of the iteration of Christianity to which we’ve been abandoned.
As one will find in many scholarly examinations of St. Brigid, the story of the Irish saint and the Celtic goddess who shares her name are similarly difficult to disentangle. Nevertheless, in his book The Stations of the Sun, the great British historian Ronald Hutton succinctly describes their characteristics:
“In legend the goddess-figure was associated with learning, poetry, prophesying, healing, and metal-working, and was in general the most pleasant Irish female deity. The saint was portrayed more as a provider of plenty and a friend of animals, with a very close association with the natural world. She could also be a battle goddess…”
One of the more beautiful aspects of St. Brigid’s Day/Imbolc (February 1st) is one about which a lot of people might be unaware. But farmers and beekeepers, at least those of us in northern latitudes, certainly know about it. That is to say that at this time of the year the hens begin to lay their eggs in earnest (the laying usually gets out of control later in February and into March); likewise, still invisible to the world, nestled as she is in the darkness of hive, the queen bee also resumes the laying of her eggs. In addition, lambing and kidding season begins—which means more milk. This is a time not only of the light’s increasing victory over darkness, but of life’s victory over death. Brigid is particularly a saint of milk. As Hutton writes,
“The goddess may have been linked to Imbolc, or it could be that the festival’s association with milk drew the saint to it, because of a popular medieval Irish legend that she had (somehow) been the wet-nurse of Christ.”
One of the most popular legends of St. Brigid is that she was transported in a dream-state through time to be midwife to the Virgin Mary (which is no doubt associated with the wet-nurse legend Hutton shares). Bonnie and I have a long and loving relationship with midwives (most of our children were born at home, and I may or may not have caught a couple of them—I don’t remember! Birth is intense), so this aspect of Brigid’s story has always been dear to me.
St. Brigid’s Day falls on the day before the feast of the Purification of the Holy Virgin (Candlemas), and, as with her pagan goddess namesake, her qualities have similarly blended with the Virgin’s. In The White Goddess, Robert Graves explains:
“In medieval Irish poetry Mary was equally plainly identified with Brigit the Goddess of Poetry: for St. Brigit, the Virgin as Muse, was popularly known as ‘Mary of the Gael.’ Brigit as Goddess had been a Triad: the Brigit of Poetry, the Brigit of Healing and the Brigit of Smithcraft. In Gaelic Scotland her symbol was the White Swan, and she was known as Bride of the Golden Hair, Bride of the White Hills, mother of the King of Glory. In the Hebrides she was the patroness of childbirth.”
As far as I’m concerned, this is ALL THE GOOD STUFF.
As you can probably see, St. Brigid’s legend is fairly oozing with sophiological implications—the betweenness, the connections with the natural world, with agriculture, with poetry, with pregnancy and nourishment and children, with the Glory of God; and, as Sir James Frazer long ago observed, “Probably, [St. Bride] is no other than Brigit, the Celtic goddess of fire and apparently of the crops,” though I’d like to push against this a little.
I think Frazer’s need to “get it right” was actually a way to get it wrong. What’s important about Brigid is precisely the metaxu, the elusiveness by which she defies being contained by definitions or allegiances. She can’t be controlled by our puny categories.
What Brigid points to is the way of the regeneration of Christianity, by reconnecting the Church year with the agricultural year. What we have is impoverished, but it doesn’t have to be that way. One of my other patron saints, the 20th century English writer H. J. Massingham, describes this sensibility with great sensitivity in the final paragraphs of his important book, The Tree of Life. And though he uses England as his focal point, what he describes and hopes for his native land is equally true wherever men and women allow the Glory of the Lord (Sophia) to renew all things:
“When the parson blessed the fields at Rogation, the church was in the fields; at the Harvest Festival, the fields are in the church. Such integration is true to the nature of the universe. It is this synthesis—religion, nature, craft, husbandry, all in one—we have to rediscover.
“Let the church come back to earth—the church in the fields, the church above the cottages like a hen with chicks. For the first church was the Manger and to cut the eternal bond between them is to drift in the void between heaven and earth, belonging to neither. And let the fields come back to the church, looking up from their labour to the tower that rises from the fields. The connection between the church and fields has been lost as the connection between work and play has been lost. Just as the right kind of work is play and the right kind of play is work, so the cornfield that has the shadow of the church upon it becomes the ‘orient and immortal wheat’ and the church becomes the Tree of Life, rooted in the earth but its crown in heaven.
“‘Wait,’” wrote Adrian Bell in Apple Acre. “‘and you will see this green England reborn, waking in the cool of the morning with dew upon it; the sails will stir, the plough and the chisel go forward; every man in his own sanctuary of spirit, holding steadily to the whole through detail. In every village there is a monument to the skill and faith of the past. This is the power-house of the future, whence men will draw practical wisdom and integration for what they do. They will rediscover worship. Except for that the whole of humanity would be destroyed.’
“We pray for that morning, since, when it opens, Christ is born again in England.”
This is an absolute and undeniable truth, embodied nowhere more beautifully than in the legend of St. Brigid. Such integration is true to the nature of the universe.
The genealogy of the holy maiden Bride Radiant flame of gold, noble foster-mother of Christ. Bride the daughter of Dugall the brown, Son of Aodh, son of Art, son of Conn, Son of Crearar, son of Cis, son of Carmac, son of Carruin. Every day and every night That I say the genealogy of Bride, I shall not be killed, I shall not be harried, I shall not be put in cell, I shall not be wounded, Neither shall Christ leave me in forgetfulness. No fire, no sun, no moon shall burn me, No lake, no water, nor sea shall drown me, No arrow of fairy nor dart of fay shall wound me, And under the protection of my Holy Mary, And my gentle foster-mother is my beloved Bride. ~ Carmina Gadelica
Fittingly, I saw a bumblebee today, for the first time in several months.
Beautiful, thank you. By the way, I am reading Adrian Bell's book Corduroy right now.