Friday, February 1, 2013

The Feast Day of St. Brigid

Today is the feast day of St. Brigid, one of the patron saints of Ireland. She is one of the early Christians who stood at the intersection of Christianity, Druidism and the other pagan religions of Ireland. She is also one of those extraordinary women who did amazing things, despite the patriarchal culture in which she lived.


To learn more, see this post that I wrote for the Living Lutheran site.  It's also got a beautiful picture of St. Brigid's well in Kildare.

There are so many ways we might celebrate her feast day.  To celebrate her generosity, today would be a good day to give away some of our stockpile, secure in the knowledge that we'll find abundance as we need it.

To celebrate her miracles, which involved abundances of butter, milk, and beer, we could bake some bread and slather it with butter.

To celebrate her artistic tendencies, we could start an illuminated book of our own.  How would our lives change if we kept a daily book that illustrated all the miraculous abundance that we found in the world?

But above all, today is a good day to consider our own lives.  If centuries from now, a middle-aged woman read about your life as you’re living it, would she be inspired?

Across a space of centuries, Brigid inspires me.  I'd like to be a similar inspiration.

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