Celebrating Saint Brigid: the younger generations believe and they don’t believe

It was an icy afternoon in mid-January when I walked into my local village of Ballycastle on the north Mayo coast. A bright winter sun shone through the pink and purple clouds of the big Atlantic sky. Pretty lights twinkled along the street as I passed the bakery, the cafes, the Ballinglen Museum of Art, the school, St Brigid’s Church, and on up past the newly renovated townhouses, the pubs, shops, reception centre for refugees and the Ceide Coast Eco Campus. It is a 19th century Irish village that reaches simultaneously back into the far past and into the unknown and unshaped future.

I had an appointment with a group of women who call themselves, Young at Heart. They meet once a week in the recreation room of Suífin Way, an independent housing development for the elderly. With the approach of the second St Brigid’s holiday, I wanted to know if they planned to celebrate, and if they had any rituals and customs to pass on to those of us looking to integrate some of the old ways with our new and expanded sense of Brigid.

The room was warm and bright. A long table was set with a big, buttercup-yellow teapot and plates of cakes and buns. The seven women present laughed and joked and made good-humoured fun of each other. On the subject of St Brigid, Cauleen Barrett began to speak of the Brat Bríde, a piece of red cloth, left outdoors on Brigid’s eve, to be blessed by the passing saint. This piece of cloth was believed to have medicinal powers that could help ease aches and pains if tied around the afflicted area. The talk triggered more memories and many of the women recalled seeing calving cows with scraps of red cloth tied around their tails.

Most of the women remember St Brigid’s crosses being woven by schoolchildren. They would be left at the church for parishioners to pick up after Mass on St. Brigid’s Day. These were hung up on the rafters of the house, or over the hob in the kitchen, or out in the cow shed.

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Nuala Delaney Whelan, the estate manager, recalled her mother lighting a candle on St Brigid’s eve and putting it in the kitchen window to welcome Brigid and the coming season. Others remember the candle being placed on the kitchen hob. Some of the women continued their mother’s rituals at home. They say the younger generations no longer believe in the old “piseogs”, yet they will still ask their mothers and grandmothers for prayers, or blessed candles, and one of them still likes to see the Brigid’s cross out in the cow shed. As one woman put it, the younger generations believe and they don’t believe.

To believe and not believe is, I think, a good place to begin with St Brigid. In recent years, she has emerged as a powerful symbol of creativity, because, perhaps, she is not a static figure. She moves in the imaginary, in transitional and liminal spaces; a connection between the Celtic and Christian, winter and spring, the Irish at home and abroad, the Ireland of the last century and this one.

St Brigid’s Celtic counterpart is goddess of poetic inspiration, the forge and healing. In the fire of the forge, one material is made malleable and shaped into another. In this mailable moment, endless creative possibilities exist. A moment out of which new forms and alignments can be made.

I encountered Brigid while living as a young Irish immigrant in New York City. St Brigid’s Church in Manhattan’s East Village was about to be demolished and converted into apartments. Local community groups organised in protest against the ongoing gentrification that was destroying neighbourhoods and the soul of the city. I watched with interest as their fight grew legs and marched all the way to the New York Supreme Court.

It seemed the whole city was talking about this little church that was built by Irish Famine migrants in 1848. Today, it is still known as “The Famine Church”, and its adjacent buildings have served the local community in various iterations as a school, shelter, soup kitchen, meeting place, and most recently, as a temporary migrant accommodation. In 2008, just as the wrecking ball was about to strike, an anonymous donor stepped in with a gift to preserve the building as a community institution.

I wondered why these earlier Irish immigrants chose to dedicate their church to Brigid. Maybe because pagan rituals were still practiced all over Ireland well into the 20th century. Brigid, as a Christian saint based on the earlier Celtic goddess, was a potent mix. She is at once associated with the domestic and the ethereal. Her realm is the reality of experience; the home and hearth, milkmaids and mothers, planting and fertility, runaways and poets. She could illuminate points of transcendence in everybody and in the everyday. In this light, one can see why James Joyce had a devotion to her, or why she endeared herself to other Irish emigrants, who carried her far and away with them to new lives all over the world.

[ Brigid, a thoroughly modern 1,500-year-old saint ]

I grew up in the Ireland of the 1970s and 1980s. It is no secret today that women’s history was actively ignored in the 20th century in service to a church/State alliance that tried to keep women reduced and subservient. I found myself approaching midlife reckoning with the part of myself that had been shaped within that system. A part I tried to reject but would not leave, just because I demanded it do so. Brigid, I found, offered a way to integration and this transformation inspired me to write my memoir, In Ordinary Time.

[ Ordinary Time by Carmel McMahon: A gripping memoir of emigrating, getting drunk and getting sober ]

New St Brigid’s celebrations will be happening all over the island. Sligo County Council Arts Service with artist Catherine Fanning are planning the inaugural Bríd Festival. There will be poetry readings, art exhibitions, willow weaving, beach and forest foraging, gardening and printing workshops, “all inspired by St Brigid’s diverse legacy as patron saint of creativity, healer, environmentalist and protector of the land”.

We have in Brigid the ancient and the ever-new, a symbol of the malleable moment that opens new possibilities. I wonder if Joyce felt this, as he moved his novel through multiple genres to tumble over the edge of the form in the final chapter, and into Molly’s soliloquy, and the new and then-unexplored territory of the female consciousness.

Carmel McMahon is the author of In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History

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