At the intersection of Pagan and Christian

 It's the feast of Saint Brigid of Kildare.  

Here are some interesting pictures and information about her.... and perhaps, about us.

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02/01/23 St Brigid of Ireland (451?-525) She was born at Faughart, near Dundalk, in Ireland. She was a milkmaid who was converted through the preaching of St Patrick, and with whom she prays as the patron of Erin.

Indeed, the legends of her life abound. A beautiful woman who saw, in her society, her beauty as an obstacle to the will of God in her life, it is said she was temporarily disfigured so as to pursue the Monastic vocation.

Please note this is no pious eccentricity. In a world in which women were either the possession of one man or doomed to be possessed by every man; in which women were either seen as chattel or a sorceress, to choose monastic chastity was to state loudly that in Jesus she had found a Saviour that gave her worth in and of herself.

Her name is that of the pagan goddess of fire, her symbol the Cross, made of reed from her cell. She is known to have imitated her Saviour in making beer from water, and was a healer and reconciler of factions. She founded the first monastic communities in Ireland, made of men and women, and died at her monastery in Kildare in 525.

She is buried next to her friends St Patrick and St Columba.

She remains an ancestor in faith that reminds us all that in Jesus we are chosen for love, selected for life and saved for eternity. Wherever we are today, we can find the Cross (Brigid saw it in the straw on the floor of her room!) embrace and proclaim it, wear on the heart and announce it with the mouth.

How? By loving simply, simply loving.

Wear green today, or her cross!

by M. Dennis McCarron