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!
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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:
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 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 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:
In this hymn Jesus is referred to again a little later as Brigit’s son:
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
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 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 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 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, 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
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