I rarely do guest posts – I haven’t had one on this blog in over five years. But after I heard Cynthia Talbot’s sermon at Denton UU last Sunday, I knew it needed a wider audience. This was exactly what this congregation needed to hear at this point in time, and I think her message will resonate with many of you.
I will be honest: I have written and rewritten this main reflection so very many times this last week. My emotions swinging wildly about. I am a Brigidine: Brighid, Brid, Brigit – by whatever name – is my patron deity and so I maintain that hospitality is her greatest miracle, greatest virtue that I too can aspire to. And yet… I am only human and I can not be hospitable to hatred.
My despair has given way to flaming anger. And while yes I am a Brigidine, another of her names is Brigantia, and so I like to think that the Briganti tribe and their allies the Iceni knew her too. So maybe did Boudicca. And I am not short on matches to burn sacred fires, and I am not short on anger to want to use our New Londinium for fuel.
And yet…
It is easy to feel discouraged in these times. And no amount of telling myself that other people, my ancestors who lived through wars and genocide disguised as famine and invading armies and all manner of horrors, have survived harder times than this and so I too can do it is enough.
And yet…
The sisters of Solas Bhride are indeed nuns. And they structure their lives around prayer and study. Prayer is, at least to the Brigidines, a meditative practice. Brigid is the patroness of hospitality yes but also of healing, poetry, smithcraft, music.
Poetry is one of my favorite ways to meditate.
And as both goddess and saint, she is known for using the fire to forge practical things, things that help, and often of shaping people into people who help as well. She is also a goddess of crafting both words and weapons and of teaching others to use her tools to protect themselves and those who need protection. One of the prayers of poetry goes:
May the fire of your forge
Enable us to shape our future
With courage and determination,
Using the flame of justice,
Tempered by compassion.
I don’t know about you but I need that courage and determination these days. I am already in need of more of both than I have.
And justice tempered by compassion. Well, mention that idea and you get death threats. Even if you are an Anglican… er Episcopal bishop. Brigid bless you Bishop Budde.
Bishop Budde was asked whether she hoped to inspire others to push back against Trump’s policies. “I would love to have people present another alternative, yes,” she responded, “and to bring compassion and breadth into our public discourse.”
Compassion… is now a sin, depending on who you ask. Well, thank Brigid for the news. I’d hate to be a practicing witch for 30 plus years only to find out I’ve been doing something these arsehats wouldn’t think was a sin.
Ah… the anger has rekindled from the embers of despondency. Too much anger, I know can be bad for me. But… a little anger, well that just stirs up the fires of good trouble, right?
Did you know that the first thing the Brigidines of Kildare did when they were finally able to reestablish their order after over 300 years of it being illegal to have a Catholic abbey in Ireland? They went to the old cathedral of Brigid in Kildare, which was then a Church of England building, and lit a fire in the sacred hearth that had been extinguished in 1533. (Bang!)
And then kept it burning in their new one room abbey about 9 miles away. It’s still burning in Kildare to this day.
And then they set about starting a school for Catholic children, and not only did they teach Catholic children. They taught Catholic girls.
Lighting the right fires and causing the good trouble comes naturally to some I suppose.
I’m sure you’ve all heard about Jennifer Rubin, who left The Washington Post in protest and started The Contrarian? Did you see the opening statement of the Contrarian?
Democracy faces an unprecedented threat from an authoritarian movement built on lies and contempt for the rule of law. The first and most critical defense of democracy—a robust, independent free press—has been missing in action. Corporate and billionaire media owners have shied away from confrontation, engaged in false equivalence, and sought to curry favor with… yeah I’m going to let you fill in the name here… It is hardly surprising that readers and viewers are fleeing from these outlets. Americans need an alternative.
In Dublin to this day there is a plaque to Pearse, and Connolly and Plunkett and many others, and there’s a quote that I love. “We Serve Neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland” (Remember this was in 1916 so it meant a bit more). Serving Ireland and not a Ruling Monarch. Such a radical notion. And they died for it. But 5 years later others took it up and Ireland was free at last… well most of it .
Not the point, Cinti.
Just this last year, 2024 marked the 1500th anniversary of St. Brigid’s death. And to commemorate it, Portugal returned a relic of St. Brigid to Kildare that is believed to have been taken to Portugal for safe keeping. And so, there was a lot of pageantry but the most dramatic event occurred Sunday with the return of the relic to Brigid’s hometown, with a short procession to St. Brigid’s Parish Church from Solas Bhride — which was recorded in the Irish Times as a Christian spirituality center led by Brigidine Sisters in Kildare with a mission of welcoming “people of all faiths and of no faith.”
Bishop Denis Nulty of Kildare & Leighlin preached at the mass that followed, calling on hearers to practice the welcoming values that Brigid championed, particularly at a time when some are protesting migrants being housed in Ireland — including some at institutions named for St. Brigid, he noted.
“It’s too simple to install a relic,” Nulty said. “Brigid would call us to do much more. She was hospitable. She was a peacemaker… What amazes me is, 1500 years later, she’s still remembered with love in Kildare and Ireland,” he said. “Her words, her wisdom and her actions mean more today than they ever did, when you think about how we treat our land … how we treat each other and how we treat ourselves.”
Look kindly I pray, on the people of Ireland
from all traditions, at home and abroad.
To you O God, we long to sing a new song of
compassion, inclusion and engagement in a
spirit of true freedom.
You know my frail heart and my frayed
history and now another day begins. Help me
to believe in beginnings, and sing a new song
for Ireland.
Moladh go deo le Dia
Brigid is a goddess of the forge, a goddess of fire. She was born with fires about her head. Fires of knowledge, of comfort. But not all Brigid’s fires are comfortable. No, many of them are of inspiration, or change, and of anger and of action.
There is an short incantation to Brighid that I learned so long ago that I don’t actually remember where I learned it.
It goes like this:
Oh great Brighid, I am your ingot of iron
And you are my smith. What will you forge me into?
Isn’t that a scary question?
What do I need to become to do the work of this time, this place?
I’m not so naive as to believe that my actions, my words or my magic can change the world. But like St. Brigid, like the sisters of Kildare, like Bishop Budde I can keep speaking. Keep Lighting New Fires. Forging what needs to be made. (Bang!)
Brigit,
We ask for your protection
Against all that would harm us.
May the beacon of your flame
Show us a path forward
These are hard times. They are going to get harder. 2 years, 4 years, 8 years, 300 years. Who knows. What I do know is that I can not simply go about my life as if it was last Imbolc. Because I have students who are too scared to come to class.
Transformation isn’t sweet and bright. It’s a dark and murky painful pushing. An unraveling of the untruths you’ve carried in your body. A practice in facing your own demons. Both those you’ve created and those you’ve encountered. A complete uprooting of beliefs and practices.
Brigid is a goddess of Smithcraft, childbirth and creating art. Are any of those things easy?
Brigid’s forge is not a sweet warm hearth fire.
It’s a sweaty, dark, dirt floored crucible where you face the very real and frequent possibility of failing.
The Brigidines who saw the sacred fires of Kildare go out in 1533 never expected that to happen. The church had kept those fires lit for a thousand years.
And then some corpulent egotistical arsehat decided that he was going to do what he wanted and if the laws and the church didn’t agree with it to bad he was king and he was going to do it any way. (And fund it by stealing all the money from the churches but that’s another rant and you all want to go home)
History may not be cyclical as we once thought but it may be a lot more than we wished.
I am a Brigidine. But I am not the Brigidine I was last year. But are we ever really who we were? Are you who you were two years ago?
Five years? Fifty?
We can’t afford to be. Our world can’t afford for us to be.
Brighid grant me strength to keep the fires going.
Here’s a hard truth for us all to grasp I think. No fire burns forever. Not even Brighid’s. Sometimes you need to stop working so hard to keep something going and instead, let the fire burn down and once the embers are cool, you can sweep out the firepit and start a new fire.
Have you ever started a fire from scratch? It isn’t easy. And there’s so much care that goes into it. Building it bit by bit by bit. And what if you don’t get it lit?
Well, my witchy Brigidine self would tell you: then you ask Brigid for help.
And my UU self would say: then you reexamine what it is you are trying to build and why and try again, maybe in another location, maybe with different wood, maybe with a better match.
Or you know, a flame thrower.
But Brighid knows it’s a lot of work isn’t it?
And how do we continue to forge lives and dreams and art? Birth children and business and ideas when we are too broken, to old, too poor too afraid to remember to breathe sometimes?
Panic attacks are painful. Fear kills folks. And if you’re lucky you go out in one major heart attack and that’s it… but most of us? No. We are slowly being boiled to death in our own sweat. Neither the smith nor the ingot, just the smoke and steam and the ashes on the floor.
And yet…
We keep lighting fires. We keep fires burning. We keep putting ourselves on that anvil. (Bang)
I’m going to tell you a secret. As a Brigidine, and a witch, I think this is one that we as rational folks really have a hard time with.
It’s okay to get angry. Yes, you. You can get angry. And even more so? You can make other people angry. Even if you aren’t an Angl… Episcopal Bishop.
Brigid is a goddess of the Forge. And of Healing. Of speaking out and inspiration. Qualities I think we can all agree we need more of now, don’t you?
Brigit is the saint of Hospitality. But hospitality does not mean compliance.
I am your Ingot, you are my Smith, what will you forge me into?
Or… perhaps what will you have me forge myself into?
What can you inspire me to become?
How many of the sick and hungry can we care for? Can we feed? How many can shelter? How many can we free? How many children can we teach to read?
How many can we help? How many fires can we breathe new life into?
Fires of commitment, and compassion. Hearth fires, candles, chalices and cauldrons, campfires, and bonfires and Forge fires too. (Bang)
We cannot gather about the hearth fires that have been put out. There is no going back to what was.
But, I have to believe that there is a point to continuing to light the fires together.
Because there are still people, here and elsewhere who need that fire, those lights, the fires of creativity and comfort, of inspiration of change and even of anger.
Let us forge this new fire together, with whatever wood we can salvage, breathing life, together, into tinder that will catch and burn and rage again.
Even if we have to steal it from locked churches.
Or the embers of Londinium.
Benediction:
May your forge be ever ready
May your hammer be ever strong
May each dawn bring you new hope
May your armor be always prepared
Wherever your journey takes you across this green earth
May Brigid always light the way.
And may you never run out of matches.
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