St. Brigid, Druidic Ecumenism, and the Divine Female  

One story tells us Brigid’s mom was a Christian and her father a Druid or religious chief in pre-Christian Celtic society.  Iona was a sacred website for Druidic pilgrims earlier than St. Columba within the sixth century.  The identify “Hebrides” means “the islands of Brigid or Bride.”  

Thus she stands for “an emblem of continuity within the Celtic world between one age of knowledge and the subsequent.” The pre-Christian and Christian merge with Brigid.

The E book of Leinster, a twelfth century Irish manuscript, says Brigid was a Druidess or chief in that neighborhood to which the oak tree was very sacred.  With its roots within the earth and its attain for the sky, it “related heaven and earth.”  “Kildare” means “Church of the Oaks” and Brigid noticed Christ as her Druid. 

The pre-Christan earth goddess was “brigid” or the “nice one” or “shining one.”  Says Newell, “the earth goddess was the shining or brightness deep in all issues.” 

Recall that Hildegard of Bingen calls Mary “the bottom of being” and Eckhart calls God “the bottom of being.”  The “shining” component of being can be the Cosmic Christ.  Hildegard and Aquinas speak of the “radiance” in all of being.  

Within the centuries following her loss of life, St. Brigid “took on lots of the attribute of the goddess” and was remembered although the ritual of the perpetual fireplace, a ritual that lasted a thousand years proper as much as the Protestant reformation when it was extinguished.

Says Newellhis: This marked a tragic shift in Eire’s dominant type of Christianity away from the divine as immanent and female towards concerning it solely as masculine and transcendent.

Certainly this parallels the shift within the Hail Mary prayer within the sixteenth century that we mentioned in a earlier DM and set the tempo for the fashionable period of patriarchal extra. 

As an abbess in Kildare, Brigid celebrated Mass together with different girls—we all know this as a result of a synod of bishops in Rome in 520 denounced the follow as “abominable.”  “She had episcopal standing within the Celtic world.”*

*Philip Newell, Sacred Earth Sacred Soul: Celtic Knowledge for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know And Therapeutic the World, pp. 48-54.

See Matthew Fox, Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint For Our Instances, pp. 17, 111-131.

And Fox, Ardour For Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart, p. 472.

Banner picture: St. Brigid’s Properly, Cullion, Eire. Wikimedia Commons.

Queries for Contemplation

How does Brigid’s story communicate to you and to the patriarchal extra we try to maneuver past as we speak?

Really helpful Studying

Matthew Fox writes in Hildegard of Bingen about this wonderful girl and what we are able to be taught from her.
In an period when girls had been marginalized, Hildegard was an outspoken, controversial determine. But so visionary was her perception that she was sought out by kings, popes, abbots, and bishops for recommendation.
“This e-book provides sturdy, sterling, and unvarnished proof that every part – every part – we ourselves turn into will have an effect on what girls after us may additionally turn into….This can be a really marvelous, helpful, profound, and artistic e-book.” ~~ Andrew Harvey, creator of The Hope: A Information to Sacred Activism.

Ardour for Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart

Matthew Fox’s complete translation of Meister Eckhart’s sermons is a gathering of true prophets throughout centuries, leading to a spirituality for the brand new millennium. The holiness of creation, the divine life in every particular person and the divine energy of our creativity, our name to do justice and follow compassion–these are amongst Eckhart’s themes, brilliantly interpreted and defined for as we speak’s reader.
“A very powerful e-book on mysticism in 500 years.”  — Madonna Kolbenschlag, creator of Kissing Sleeping Magnificence Goodbye.