We were glad to receive this from Michelle who led our Spring Creative Workshop for us…

Spring is almost here! That’s what so many of us are trying to hold on to in these cold dark days of winter. In the Celtic Christian tradition, Spring has already begun - 1st and 2nd February marking the start of the season with the festival of Imbolc, celebrating the first ewe’s milk and new life. So with this is mind and with signs of new life all around us, Retreat House held the first event of our 2021 programme with a Creative Workshop at the start of the month.

As well as being Imbolc, 1st February is the feast day of St. Brigid, and the next day is Candlemas (traditionally the end of Christmas). The workshop combined all three of these feast days, to mark the start of Spring and encourage hope for the year ahead. Our workshop craft was to make a St. Brigid cross; but before we did that we spent some time getting to know this “grace-filled” saint, and here below is a chance to spend a little time with her too, at the start of Spring. (Jan Richardson’s book In the Sanctuary of Women was a helpful and inspiring resource in finding out more about Brigid.)

Ireland is often described as the Isle of the Saints, as it has a history full of women and men who dedicated their lives to God. Of the Irish saints, one of the most beloved is Brigid of Kildare. Brigid was born in 452 AD, just as Christianity began to take root in Ireland. The first written evidence of Brigid’s life didn’t emerge until about a hundred and fifty years after her death, so she inhabits the land between history and legend. It is written that Brigid was the daughter of a pagan chieftain and a Christian slave girl. Many of the tales of Brigid’s life read much like those of other female saints from back in time: her saintly qualities were evident from an early age; she refused to marry, in order to live a monastic way of life; and she was thought of as a miracle-worker, having influence over illness, the weather and animals. Today, we might especially respond to her as a woman of justice and one who is described as “ground-breaking”. Active and intrepid, Brigid is known to have founded a number of monasteries, the most influential one being the double monastery, for both women and men, which she established at Cill Dara (the “Church of the Oak”), now known as Kildare.

The tales written about Brigid particularly emphasise the hospitality that brought her renown. Brigid is described as someone who “found the poor irresistible” and ministered to them with “a habit of the wildest bounty.” Her lavish generosity tended to put her at odds with her family and her monastic community. In one account, her father became so exasperated with the generosity she displayed with his possessions, that he carted her off to the king, intending to sell her to him. While Brigid waited for her father to talk with the king, a man with leprosy came along; she immediately gave him her father’s precious sword. When her father returned and inquired about the sword, Brigid responded, “Christ has taken it.” She wasn’t sold to the king, thankfully; maybe the king was worried for his own possessions!

In Jan Richardson’s book In the Sanctuary of Women she writes this: “A strong domestic homeliness pervades Brigid’s miracles. A sense of gracefulness shimmers in the utterly mundane.” Another writer, Esther de Waal, says: “She has made the mundane the edge of glory”. In this, she is truly Celtic, finding the divine in the ordinary. Brigid was not only a worker of domestic miracles but also a woman of power. She was a charismatic leader, who was influential in monastic, civic, and natural realms; she was ever at ease among kings and bishops. Brigid possesses a sense of justice that prompts her to secure the freedom of prisoners and slaves (and even, the story goes, to move a river in the cause of fairness...).

Sometimes the stories we hear about the saints can be hard to understand in our modern culture, but the writers of their “lives” wanted to show that the power the saints possessed did not originate from the saints themselves but instead flowed from their union with Christ and their intense desire to model him in their lives. In addressing our imagination, the stories seek to not simply inform but to inspire us. The stories may make us raise an eyebrow now and again, but they may also raise our spirits.

Brigid died around 525. St. Brigid is remembered as a woman of generosity, hospitality, justice, and friendship – values it’s hard to argue with. For Brigid, this rose from great faith and the grace of God. Her physical grave remains a mystery, but Ireland continues to be full of reminders of her legacy, with towns, holy wells, and churches all named after her.

And so to our craft of St Brigid’s crosses. One of the legends tells us that as Brigid sat by the bedside of a pagan chieftain—possibly her father—while he lay dying, she gathered up some of the rushes from the floor and began to weave them into a cross as she told him about her faith and Christ whom she loved. These crosses are still made today and hung above the door of people’s homes, as a welcome to visitors. As we welcomed the coming of Spring, gathering companionably together on Zoom each in our own home, crafting crosses from very ordinary material, and mindful of the RHC blessing ‘Peace to this house’, it seemed a wholly fitting way to celebrate.

from a visit to the ‘Isle of the Saints’, and a glimpse of something more….