Saint Brigid of Kildare, Patroness Saint of Ireland (#150)

You know what? It’s been a while since we did an episode on awesome women of history. But since it’s the new year, why don’t we give it a little twist and do an awesome woman of theology instead? Now I’m not religious, but after hearing about the person I’m about to talk about in a little book amazingly titled ‘100 Nasty Women of History’ by Hannah Jewell I could not resist (BTW it is an excellent book, I highly recommend it).

Saint Brigid of Kildare or Brigid of Ireland (born approximately in 451 AD – died 525 AD) is the patroness saint of Ireland, and one of its three national or patron saints along with the very well-known St Patrick and, certainly in my opinion, the slightly lesser known St Columba.

There is debate over whether Brigid was a real person or not. There are few historical facts about her, and early hagiographies (a hagiography is a biography of a saint or an ecclesiastical leader) are mainly anecdotes and miracle stories, some of which are deeply rooted in Irish pagan folklore; indeed, she has the same name and many of the same attributes as the Celtic goddess Brigid, and there are many supernatural events and folk customs associated with her which I will get onto in a moment, and like the saint, the goddess in Irish myth is associated with poetry, healing, protection, smithcraft, and domestic animals. Some scholars suggest that the saint is a Christianisation of the goddess; others that she was a real historical figure whose mythos took on the goddess's attributes. Whatever the truth is, I’m still going to talk about her because some of the stuff she gets up to is pretty cool.

Brigid was born and raised around the year 451 in Faughart, just north of Dundalk in County Louth, Ireland. Her mother was Brocca, who was either believed to be born in Portugal, but had been kidnapped by Irish pirates and brought to Ireland to work as a Christian slave, or was a Scottish slave, but either way she was believed to have been baptised by Saint Patrick himself. Her father was Dubhthach, a chieftain of Leinster, who named her after the pagan Goddess of Fire herself.

Now I’m guessing that a little extramarital cheating happened here, because Dubhthach's wife forced him to sell Brigid's mother to a druid when she became pregnant, and so Brigid was born into slavery. Legends of her early holiness include her vomiting when the druid tried to feed her, due to his impurity (records don’t say why he was impure but just on the basis of conversations we’ve had in the past about Christian attitudes towards pagans, I’m guessing it was because he was pagan?) and a white cow with red ears appeared to sustain her instead.

As she grew older, she developed a reputation for being extraordinarily kind and generous to others, and was said to have performed miracles, including healing and feeding the poor. According to one tale, as a child, she once gave away her mother's entire store of butter. The butter was then replenished in answer to Brigid's prayers. Around the age of ten, she was returned as a household servant to her father. While growing up, Brigid cooked, cleaned, washed, and fed the animals at her father’s farm, but when turned eighteen she heard St. Patrick preaching and wanted to work with the sick and poor instead, living in a way that she felt called to by God. Brigid’s father, on the other hand, was insistent on her marrying a wealthy poet that he had promised her to, but she did not want to get married.

It is said that Brigid was very beautiful, and so she prayed to be made ugly so that she would not have to worry about being attractive to men, which would allow for her to devote her life to service. God answered her prayer, and Brigid’s beauty faded. She also began giving to the poor, wherein her habit of charity led her to donate her father’s belongings to anyone who asked.

Dubhthach was so annoyed with Brigid for giving away all his stuff (and for not wanting to get married) that he took her in a chariot to the King of Leinster to either sell her or marry her to him (or both) according to differing sources. While Dubhthach was talking to the king, Brigid gave away his bejewelled sword to a beggar to barter it for food to feed his family. The king recognised her holiness and convinced Dubhthach to grant his daughter freedom.

So Brigid was veiled, entered the convent of St. Macaille and made her vows to dedicate her life to God. After making her vows, it is said that her beauty was not only restored, but that she was made to be even more beautiful than before, as a bride of Christ.

Brigid, in her time, is recorded as having founded a number of monasteries, most notably a monastery in Kildare called the Church of the Oak, which was built above a pagan shrine to the Celtic goddess Brigid, served by a group of young women who tended an eternal flame beneath a large oak tree, about which the modern town of Kildare now stands. Brigid and seven friends also organised communal consecrated religious life for women in Ireland, and the community in Kildare quickly became a double abbey for monks and nuns, with the abbess ranking above the abbot – essentially, it became the first nunnery in Ireland!

She then invited a man named Conleth, a hermit from Old Connell near Newbridge, to help her in Kildare as pastor, to help govern the church along with herself. For centuries afterwards, Kildare was ruled by a double line of abbot-bishops and of abbesses, the Abbess of Kildare being regarded as superior general of the monasteries in Ireland. Brigid is also credited with founding a school of art, including metalwork and illumination, which Conleth also led, and she was active in founding other communities of nuns.

Her monastery attracted many people who studied religion, writing, and art there. As the head of a community that became Ireland's centre of learning, Brigid was an important female leader in the ancient world and in the church. She eventually assumed the role of bishop—an unusual position for a woman in fifth-century Ireland. An eighth-century text, "Life of St. Brigid," claims that her ordination was actually an accident, and that while receiving her nun's veil, the bishop—"being intoxicated with the grace of God"—read the wrong passage from his book, thereby consecrating Brigid as a bishop. A later account claims the bishop was merely drunk.

There are several legends of miracles that are associated with Brigid (because of course, to be canonised as a saint, y’all need to perform some miracles) one of the loveliest and most gently profound of which is the story of Dara, the blind nun, for the restoration of whose sight Brigid prayed. When the miracle was granted, Dara realised that the clarity of sight blurred God in the eye of the soul, whereupon she asked Brigid to return her to the beauty of darkness.

Brigid, who had a reputation as an expert dairy woman and brewer, is also said to have miraculously changed water into beer for a leper colony and provided enough beer for 18 churches from a single barrel (she is sometimes considered to be one of the patron saints of beer because of this).

Speaking of lepers, another miracles occurred on the bank of the River Inny, Brigid was given a gift of apples and sweet sloes. She later entered a house where many lepers begged her for these apples, which she offered willingly. The woman who had given the gift to Brigid was angered by this, saying that she had not given the gift to the lepers. Brigid was angry at the nun for withholding from the lepers and cursed her trees so they would no longer bear fruit. Yet another woman also gave Brigid the same gift, and again Brigid gave them to begging lepers. This woman asked that she and her garden be blessed. Brigid then said that a large tree in the virgin's garden would have twofold fruit from its offshoots, and this was done.

After Brigid promised God a life of chastity, her brothers were annoyed at the loss of a bride price. When she was outside carrying a load past a group of poor people, some began to laugh at her. A man named Bacne said to her, "The beautiful eye which is in your head will be betrothed to a man though you like it or not." In response, Brigid thrust her finger in her eye and said, "Here is that beautiful eye for you. I deem it unlikely that anyone will ask you for a blind girl." Her brothers tried to save her and wash away the blood from her wound, but there was no water to be found. Brigid said to them, "Put my staff about this sod in front of you", and after they did, a stream came forth from the ground. Then she said to Bacene, "Soon your two eyes will burst in your head", and it happened as she said.

Then again when Brigid was of marital age, a man came along to woo her. Since Brigid had offered her virginity to God, she told the man that she could not accept him but that he should go to the woods behind his house where he would find a beautiful maiden to marry. Everything that he said to the maiden's parents would be pleasing to them. The man followed her instructions and it was as she said.

In one story, Brigid protected a woman from a nobleman who had entrusted a silver brooch to the woman for safekeeping but then secretly had thrown it into the sea. He charged her with stealing it, knowing that he could take her as a slave if a judge ruled in his favour. The woman fled and sought refuge with Brigid's community. By chance, one of her fishermen hauled in a fish which, when cut open, proved to have swallowed the brooch. The nobleman freed the woman, confessed his sin, and bowed in submission to Brigid.

Speaking of animals, it is believed that she once touched a cow that had already been milked dry and blessed it to help hungry and thirsty people. When the starving people milked the cow, they were able to get 10 times as much milk as they had expected.
On an occasion when Brigid was travelling to see a doctor for a headache, she stayed at the house of a Leinster couple who had two mute daughters. The daughters were travelling with Brigid when her horse startled, causing her to fall and graze her head on a stone. A touch of Brigid's blood healed the girls of their muteness.

She is associated with the preservation of a nun's chastity in unusual circumstances – there is an account of Brigid's ministry to a nun who had failed to keep her vow of chastity, and become pregnant. According to translations, a certain woman who had taken the vow of chastity fell, through the youthful desire of pleasure and her womb swelled with child. Brigid, exercising the most potent strength of her ineffable faith, blessed her, causing the child to disappear, without coming to birth, and without pain. She faithfully returned the woman to health and to penance." The Brigid Alliance, an American NGO that assists people seeking abortions, was named after St. Brigid, in reference to this miracle.
The prayers of Saint Brigid were said to still the wind and the rain.

But the most famous miracle associated with Brigid tells of her confrontation with an Irish King for land. She told the king that the place where she stood was the perfect spot for a convent. It was beside a forest where the members could collect firewood and berries, there was a lake nearby that would provide water and the land was fertile. The king laughed at her and refused to give her any land. Brigid prayed and asked God to soften the king's heart. Then she smiled at the king and said, "Will you give me as much land as my cloak will cover?" The king thought that she was joking and agreed. She told four of her sisters to take up the cloak, but instead of laying it flat on the turf, each sister, with face turned to a different point of the compass, began to run swiftly, the cloth growing in all directions. The cloak began to cover many acres of land. "Oh, Brigid!" said the frightened king, "what are you about?" "I am, or rather my cloak is about covering your whole province to punish you for your stinginess to the poor." "Call your maidens back. I will give you a decent plot of ground." Brigid was persuaded, and if the king held his purse-strings tight in the future, she had only to allude to her cloak to bring him to reason. Soon afterward, the king became a Christian, began to help the poor, and commissioned the building of the convent.

St. Brigid died on 1st February 525AD at the grand old age of seventy-two, and was said to have been given her last rites by Saint Ninnidh of the Pure Hand when she was dying. Afterward, he reportedly had his right hand encased in metal so that it would never be defiled, and became known as "Ninnidh of the Clean Hand". Brigid is said to have been buried at the right of the high altar of Kildare Cathedral, and over the years her shrine became an object of veneration for pilgrims, especially on her feast day, 1 February. Her Christian feast day also happens to be the date of the pagan feast day of Imbolc. Now Imbolc is up there with Bealtaine, Lúnasa and Samhain as one of the four great pagan seasonal festivals, and because it was equidistant between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, Imbolc (and therefore St. Brigid’s feast day) is celebrated as the beginning of spring in Ireland.

Around the year 878, owing to the Scandinavian raids, Brigid's purported relics were taken to Downpatrick and reburied in the tomb of St. Patrick and St. Columba, although her skull was brought to Lisbon, Portugal, where can be found in the Church of St. John the Baptist in Lumiar to this day.

St. Brigid is the patron saint of (almost many other things) babies, children whose parents are not married, dairy workers, farmers, Ireland, midwives, nuns, poets, printers, and sailors.

A special type of cross known as "Saint Brigid's cross" is popular throughout Ireland. It commemorates a famous story in which Brigid went to the home of a pagan leader when people told her that he was dying and needed to quickly hear the gospel message. The man was delirious and upset when Brigid arrived, unwilling to listen to what she had to say. Brigid sat with him and prayed, taking some of the straw from the floor and weaving it into the shape of a cross. Gradually, the man quieted down and asked Brigid what she was doing. She explained the gospel to him, using her handmade cross as a visual aid. The man then came to faith in Jesus Christ, and Brigid baptised him just before he died. Today, many Irish people display a Saint Brigid's cross in their homes, since it is said to help ward off evil and welcome good.

And as of this year, St Brigid’s feast day will become a public holiday in the Republic of Ireland, the first to be named after a woman!