Celebrating Brigid of Kildare

The Celtic Festival of Imbolc was one of the four great quarter days in the Celtic calendar.  As the first day of spring, it thus marked the beginning of rebirth of the agricultural year.  In pre-Christian Ireland, the festival is bound up with the female deity Brigid, a mother goddess associated with healing , fertility, learning and the arts.  A cross of straw or rush was made in every home in Ireland and hung inside the front door as a symbol of protection and good will. 

Brigid of Kildare, revered in Irish and Celtic history as the mid-wife of Mary and the God-Mother of Jesus, is one of the most potent symbols of Christian womanhood for all times, rivaling St. Patrick in popularity, who life is packed with ancient tales, whose soul life gives impetus to women in a church still learning how to integrate their gifts.  Mystic poet, light-bringer, Brigid protects land and harvest, and her aura suggests healing and harvesting at Agape, solar, organic self-sustaining “power,” the nonviolent energy of Brigid who in her abbey in Kildare, Ireland, admitted both men and women, as well as representing the “Green Martyrdom under a huge oak, the sacred tree of the druids, Kildare, meaning ‘Church of the Oak’.”  Green martyrs left “behind the comforts and pleasures of ordinary human society, retreated to the woods or to a mountaintop, or to a lonely island, to one of the green no-man’s land outside tribal jurisdictions--there to study the scriptures and commune with God.”   (Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization).

Preserving Brigid's Spirit

At Agape, on the Saturday closest to Brigid’s feast day and the beginning of Celtic Spring or Imolc, on February 1st, preserve and honor Brigid’s spirit under star and sky, immersed in the cycles and rhythms of life, reading poetry, trudging the often snow-filled sacred walk from Francis House, representing the male spirit of earth and devotion to ecology, to Brigid House, the female symbol of hospitality, known most historically by the Brigid Cross. As we slowly walk the path, often to the sound of an Irish drum or Bodhrain, guided by luminaries, we arrive at Brigid House, to dedicate ourselves as peacemakers, in the spirit of Brigid, the mystery woman, patroness of the arts and poetry, who, legend claims, was ordained a bishop.

As the door to Brigid House is opened by a mystery woman figure, guests enter the straw bale house named after Brigid to the sounds of mandolin and tin whistle, in the cave like protection of stucco and candlelight and the sweet smell of the wood burning stove, melting the frigid January night.  We arrive at the Brigid Hearth where a stone rests in its center, a gift from the caretaker of the Brigid Tower in Kildare, perhaps as ancient as Brigid herself, bestowed on the community in 2000 when the Shanleys visited Ireland.