Curtayne’s Book "Saint Brigid of Ireland" on Internet Archive!

 The first full book on St. Brigit that I ever read, thanks to our public library. I read it in the ‘80s, it was written in the ‘50s, and it still stands up as one of the best books about her. A couple of years ago this long out-of-print book was reissued by a new publisher, and now I discover that the old edition is available to borrow on the Internet Archive.

Twenty Years Young - Celebrating Brigit Since 19 September 2004

 

I can hardly believe that it's been twenty years.

Twenty years ago I decided to start a blog about Brigit because I just liked thinking about her so much. I had this habit of combing the internet (and books, but that rarely got on the blog) to see if I could find anything at all. At first, it was a real score to find something. A few years ago I gave up on posting everything I could find. I can’t even read it all, now.

For a long time I didn't think anyone ever looked at it but me, so I didn't worry about posting regularly. Then one year my sister went to a Brigit conference in Ontario and told me my blog was on the resource list. Bit of a shock! I still didn't get much in the way of comments or anything like that, but at least I started to believe that now and then somebody besides me would wander by and read it, and that was cool. Still is.

In celebration of twenty years of maintaining this intermittent but beloved (by me!) blog, I am re-issuing the first post I ever put out. Written by a Dominican, it looks into the idea of Brigit being Jesus’s mother. 

Enjoy!

*** 

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2004

Mothering God: Gilbert Márkus

Mothering God

The Irish in the Middle Ages had an intriguing way of expressing devotion to the Child Jesus. And it was more than mere fancy, writes Gilbert Márkus.

An old Irish way of exploring a gospel text: Here in Erfurt the Irish, when they’re drunk,  state that among the saints the first one on the list  is Saint Brendan, and that the God of gods supreme  is Brendan’s brother, and that Brigit is God’s Mum. These lines were written by an anonymous German poet in the thirteenth century, mocking the Irish monks who lived in Erfurt at that time. He went on to describe how most folk think the Irish are completely mad (not to mention blasphemous) in saying such things. He repeats the kind of argument that the monks might use to prove their strange theory. ‘Whoever does my Father’s will,’ Jesus said, ‘is my sister and brother and mother.’ And if they are brother and mother of Christ, they are brother and mother of God. Deviant Irish monks It’s clear from the mocking tone of the poem that the Erfurt poet has no time at all for this kind of argument. ‘What else would you expect,’ he seems to ask, ‘from a bunch of Irish drunks?’ He wasn’t the only German to see the Irish monks abroad as a pretty deviant mob. One wrote to suggest that if a married woman disappeared, the first place you should go to look for her was among the Irish monks. At first sight the German might seem to be right: why would anyone want to describe Brigid as the ‘mother of God’? Surely that title can only be applied to the Virgin Mary. And yet the Irish did speak of Brigit, their own great female saint, in exactly this way, and before we dismiss the idea as the German poet did, we should ask just what they meant. Mothering the Infant Christ An early Gaelic hymn prays: ‘May she destroy within us the taxes of our flesh,/the branch with blossoms, the mother of Jesus.’ But this is a hymn about Brigit, not about Mary. Another Brigitine hymn says of her that she did not love the world, but she perched in it ‘like a bird on a cliff’ and that: ... the saint slept a captive’s sleep for the sake of her Son. Not much to blame was found in her with the noble faith of the Trinity. Brigit, mother of my Lord… In this hymn Jesus is referred to again a little later as Brigit’s son: A tree that the host could not lift at another time – excellent tidings – Brigit’s Son brought to her… Elsewhere, in an Old Irish Life of Brigit, she is referred to as ala-Máire már Choimded máthair, ‘another Mary, mother of the great Lord.’ Enough has survived of this devotion to Brigit as ‘mother of the Lord’ to show that there was something in the Erfurt poet’s accusation. The Irish did seem to have an unusual way of expressing their devotion to Brigit – and not just when they were drunk, as the poet suggested. But though it may have been unusual, it is not at all unorthodox if we read it in the devotional sense in which it was intended. Of course, no one believed that Brigit had actually given birth to the child Jesus, but the image was a powerfully suggestive way of thinking about her sanctity. Medieval Irish writers explored this imagery in which motherhood was used to express Christian devotion – not only speaking of God as the mother of the Christian believer (an image which has always been part of the Christian repertoire), but by speaking of the Christian as the Lord’s mother, nursing the infant Christ. And they did this not only for Brigid, but also for other saints. Jesus against one’s heart A tenth century poem written in honour of Saint Ite, put into her mouth words that reflect exactly this image of the nursing mother. It is little Jesus who is nursed by me in my little hermitage. Though a cleric have great wealth, it is all deceitful save Jesukin.  The nursing done by me in my house is no nursing of a base churl.  Jesus with heaven’s inhabitants is against my heart every night.  Little youthful Jesus is my lasting good: he never fails to give. …Though little Jesus be in my bosom (im ucht),  he is in his mansion above. The poem is put into the mouth of a woman, here a sixth century nun, and it was written to be sung by women. And we might imagine that it would naturally be of more interest to women readers – especially perhaps women in monasteries whose work would very possibly include fostering and caring for abandoned children and others. Two other nuns have a similar story in the Martyrology of Oengus: ‘Eithne and Sodelb used to nurture Christ … and Christ used to come in the shape of a babe, so that he was in their bosom, and they would kiss him, and he baptised them.’ What better validation of their work could there be than the belief that the love such women poured out on children should join them to Christ? Men in a ‘maternal’ role But it is not only women who are shown taking Christ in their bosom and acting out this ‘maternal’ role. Adomnán, the ninth abbot of Iona, is seen in his Life in the same posture: ‘At another time when Adomnán was on Iona, he fasted in his closed house for three days and nights and did not come into the monastery. A few of the faithful went to the house to see how the cleric was. They looked through the keyhole and saw a very beautiful little boy in Adomnán’s lap (in-ucht). Adomnán was showing affection to the infant in a manner which convinced them that it was Jesus who had come in the form of a child in order to bring solace to Adomnán.’ We hear a similar story about St Moling after he has given assistance to a leper. The sick man disappears, and Moling thinks he may have been deceived and declares that he will neither eat nor drink till the Lord comes to him. An angel asks him, ‘In what form would you prefer your Lord to come and hold speech with you?’ And Moling replies that he wants to see him as a child. Some time afterwards Christ sat in his lap (ina ucht) and Moling caressed him until the morning. So both women and men were able to express their closeness to Christ through this imagery of nursing or caressing a child, and perhaps through the ordinary and everyday practice of caring for children in their own households, or their own monasteries. A perfectly natural picture of maternal affection is given new depth when it is seen as an image of the soul’s union with God – not the more usual one of the psalmist who says of his soul, ‘A weaned child on its mother’s breast, even so is my soul.’ This is a reversal: now it is God who is pictured as the child, and the Christian as the mother, protective, nourishing, playful. In a sense it is an unfolding of Christ’s teaching about welcoming children: ‘Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; and whoever receives me receives not me, but him who sent me’ (Mark 9:37). Doing the Father’s will The same kind of language is also found in an early scholarly text with Irish connections, the Catechesis Celtica. Here the author looks at the story of the woman who cried out to Christ, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that gave you suck.’ Or as the author understood her to say, ‘If only you were my son!’ He notes Christ’s actual reply, ‘Blessed, rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it,’ and he combines these words with Christ’s words elsewhere: ‘Anyone who does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.’ (Matthew 12:50) In other words, the author claims that Jesus is saying, ‘You can choose to be my mother, for it is within your reach. For if you keep the word of God, you will be my mother and you will not envy Mary. For Mary is blessed more in her having faith in Christ than she is in holding him in the flesh.’ Here there is less stress on the physical gestures of affection, the dandling and nursing of the child, and more on the Christian response to Christ in faith and love – doing the will of the Father. But it still points towards the same image of the Christian, male or female, as the Mother of the Lord. If at first sight the cult of Brigit as ‘mother of God’ looked a little strange, as it did to the Erfurt poet, on a deeper reading we begin to discover a certain richness in the idea. We find a sense that in caring for children, the weakest people in any society, men and women draw close to God. We always need images for our faith, ways of imagining the unimaginable. Here we find a new and fertile image of God, where feelings of tenderness and playfulness might offer a counterpoint to, for example, the holy fear of the just Judge, and an interplay with such images as the Potter, the Father, the Shepherd. Not just the Irish And we should also note that it is not an entirely novel image that the Irish invented, drunk or otherwise. Augustine offers an initial exploration of this very imagery in his short book On Holy Virginity. There he writes: ‘So they are mothers of Christ, along with Mary, if they do the will of the Father. … So every devoted soul is also his mother, as it does the will of his Father in a most fertile love…’ It was not only among the Gaels that this kind of imagery was popular, and in the middle ages women especially were to find ways of articulating their experience in the context of their faith in this kind of way. As Caroline Walker Bynum writes: ‘Secular society expected women to be intimately involved in caring for the bodies of others, especially the young, the sick and the dying… To some extent women simply took these ordinary nurturing roles into their most profound religious experiences. … Not only did female mystics kiss, bathe and suckle babies in visions and grieve with Mary as she received her son’s dead body for burial; they actually acted out maternal and nuptial roles in the liturgy, decorating life-sized statues of the Christ-child for the Christmas crèche.10 So we find examples outside the Gaelic world of simple and tender images such as those in this anonymous English poem in which the mother laments that she has no cloth to wrap up the infant Jesus to protect him from the cold, and instead she will hold his little feet against her breast. Jesu, sweete, be not wroth, Though I n’ave clout ne cloth Thee on for to fold, Thee on to folde ne to wrap, For I n’ave clout ne lap; But lay though thy feet to my pap And wite thee from the cold. Many nations and cultures, not only the Gaels, explored this imagery of the Christian disciple as the mother of God. The application of the Gaelic title már Choimded máthair to Brigit, ‘mother of the great Lord’, is not some kind of weird error or deviation. It is a natural flowering of the creative mind in love, part of that ever unfolding process of finding new ways to express the love poured into our hearts. This article first appeared in Spirituality, a publication of the Irish Dominicans.

 

 Illustration: Brigit as Mary, holding Jesus. Parker Fitzgerald with Brittany Richardson, Brian Gage Design

"Brigantia (Volume 2)” Kickstarter Kicking Off Today!

 

I love the Brigantia graphic novels and have been supporting Chris Mole’s project from the beginning. This is the end! Brigantia (Volume 2) collects issues #4-#6 of the acclaimed indie fantasy/pagan comic series Brigantia as a 128-page graphic novel. Vol. 1 is also available and for today only there is a discount for acquiring one or both issues, in digital only or physical form.

29 days to go and we are already half way there!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chrismole/brigantia-volume-2

Image: of red-haired, white-skinned goddess between two large grey beasts, hovering over her. Art by Alaire Racicot & Rebecca Nalty.

Brigit Music on Bandcamp

 

There are some lovely Brigit inspired or Brigit directed pieces of music on Bandcamp, an app where you get to listen to and support artists directly. This is what I found. Let me know if you find something else! Or upload something else!

Some of these link to the songs, some to the albums. And SOME of these songs don’t really fall into the “lovely” category...

Brigid’s Birds by Margaret McLarty

Gabhaim Molta Bride (Prayer for St. Brigid) by Gabdaw and Krimmel 

Ode to Bridget (Gabhaim Molta Bríghde, with Nóirín Ní Riain on vocals) by Paul Winter 

Songs to Brigid by memoriata 

Welcome Brigid by Katy Taylor 

Celia Farran - Brigid Songs

Brigid by Mists of Serenity

St. Bridget’s Mantle by Magical Strings 

Prayer for St. Bridget/Gabriel’s Message by Winter Harp 

Kusnacht/St. Brigid’s Day by Seasons 

The Well of St. Brigid by Trish Flanagan 

St Brigid’s Coracle by Margot Krimmel 

St Brigid by the Armagh Rhymers 

Brigid by Madeleine Smyth 

St. Bridget’s Cross by The Sparklers 

St. Brigid’s Day by Eamonn Flynn 

Brigid’s Cradle by redbrd

Invocation to St Bridget by Culture Vannin 

St Brigid Cross by Aaron J. Burke 

St. Brigid’s Day by Desert Golfer 

St. Bridget’s Bathwater by Chucky Arla & the Petrol Bombers 

Air for St. Brigid by Nessa Music 

Hymn to St. Brigid by Darren Brereton ALSO Acoustic version

Brigid - of the night by Wykan

St Brigid’s Feast Day by Jordan Klassen

Song of Brigid (St. Brigid) by Laura Ash

Tears of St. Brigid by Joesf Glaude 

Tears of St. Brigid by Joesf Glaude and James Ruggles

Brigid’s Air by Loren Connors 

The Vision of St Bridget by Meschplan 

Brigid the Dark, Brigid the Light (St Brigid of Kildare) by Awen (Communion of Saints by Various Artists) 

S/T by St. Brigid (Er, this one is just really a band named for her that doesn’t seem to have anything about her.)

Enjoy!

Image:  Cover of Brigid - of the night by Wykan: a cartoon of a scantily clad woman holding two torches as if they were smoking guns. There is wild dancing around a bonfire behind her.

 

 

 

 

Brigid's Worlds Conference 2024, Kildare, Ireland

 

"Registration now open on Eventbrite for Brigid's Worlds, a conference exploring the life & times of St Brigid & her Church of Kildare (5th to the 9th centuries)! Sept 13th & 14th. We've an incredible couple of days planned! In person only. Loads of hospitality, tour of Kildare town/Cathedral, extra treats. Excited to welcome you all to Maynooth University. €10 per day but free public lecture by Prof. Catherine McKenna (Harvard), Ogham exhibition & reception Fri night. Full provisional programme, speakers and titles available on the Eventbrite page. You have to register for each day separately. Enquiries to niamh.wycherley@mu.ie” 

Niamh Wycherley

 

Register here with Eventbrite.

Image: Brigid's cross surrounded by text including “Brigid’s Worlds" and "Brigid 1500.”

Call for Submissions: Lady of the Forge: Stories and Art Dedicated to the Goddess Brigid

 

 

Girl God Books is accepting submissions for Lady of the Forge: Stories and Art Dedicated to the Goddess Brigid.

Edited by Isca Johnson, Pat Daly and Trista Hendren

Preface by Dr. Karen Ward

Cover Art by Barbara O'Meara 

Scheduled publication: Imbolc 2025

Submission Guidelines:

Please send your finished piece in a Word document. 2,500 word limit. Calibri size 12 font is preferred. Please do not use any fancy formatting or fonts as it creates more work on our end. Make sure to spell check before you submit. Art should be sent in high resolution as a JPG. You may submit more than one piece for consideration, but due to the volume of submissions, please only send your best work and keep it on topic.  

 

Please note that this anthology will be about Goddess Brigid. We will not be exploring Her later role as Saint in this collection. 

 

We do not accept work created with Artificial Intelligence. 

PLEASE SEND YOUR SUBMISSIONS TO SUBMISSIONS@GIRLGOD.ORG BY JULY 31, 2024 with the book title in your subject line. Please note that we cannot accommodate any late submissions or corrections.

 

Please also include a bio in the third person under 150 words.

Accepted contributors will receive a contributor's copy of the book and the option to order as many copies of the book as they'd like at cost during the pre-order period to sell or gift as they wish.

Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to be the first to receive our Calls for Submissions.

You can find our other anthologies here.

Pre-order your copy here.
 

Note from Mael Brigde: although they don't specify it, poetry, prayers, essays, et cetera are all welcome.

 

Image: painting of red haired woman against a black background. Flames are shooting out of side of her head.

 

 

‘Brigit’s Living Traditions,’ Talk by Séamas Ó Cathain

 

Séamas Ó Cathain was invited by Woman Spirit Ireland to speak about Brigit at their symposium, Brigit of Ireland - An Icon for Today, and to launch the updated and extended second edition of his 1995 book, Festival of Brigit - Celtic Goddess and Holy Woman.* The talk was held on 28th January 2023.

Click here to read more about it and buy from the publisher, and here for his talk. 

Image: Photo of front cover of book, showing four children bundled in winter clothes, holding Brigit’s crosses and standing near a shrine.

* the original edition of the book is available on archive.org.

"St Brigid: Goddess or Saint?" from Treasure Ireland, Irish Dominicans

 

A Catholic perspective on Saint Brigit, “St Brigid: Goddess or Saint?”

“It's become common to say that St Brigid was an imagined figure, an unhistorical ‘saint’ modelled on an earlier pagan goddess. We visited St Brigid’s Well in Faughart, Co. Louth to delve into the evidence for the historical Brigid.”

Artwork: FRIZ (thisisfriz.com) 

Video: Patrick Grant 

Presenter: Conor McDonough OP