Rite and Reason: Even before the tsunami, the Leviathan gods now walking the earth had stunned me to silence, writes Dr Mary Condren.
The gods of infinite justice, of ultimate vindication, of instant retribution, (with lethal weapons and nuclear capacity to prove it), have left the Irish gods of delayed gratification in the ha'penny place.
Their pathological, armoured images have split the earth apart. Who brought them to birth? What feeds their fantasies? Where are the great deconstructors, the prophets, to cry out on behalf of ailing divinity, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice"?
Then, when the tsunami hit, I remembered: the stories, myths, and sacred texts and their promises. "Worship me only, exclude all others, and I promise you [among other things] control over your lands, wives, children, and cattle - not to mention, everlasting life."
Did I say wives? Well, the texts spoke to men, and enshrined all male divinities. Natural disasters were punishments from God. "Bow down before us, eliminate uncertainty, control your women" - these were the injunctions. At best, women were liabilities.
Eve, Pandora, and the wily serpent all went to prove that nature was unpredictable; female rule, disastrous.
And the reward? The perfect theodicies (the systems of meaning that explain suffering, evil, and death) were born. "Girls keep out" notices were pinned on the sacristy doors of the major world religions. (And that goes for earthquakes, too!)
And thus they reigned: subjugating nature, crushing opposition, and feeding the omnipotent ruling fantasies that have brought the world to its knees. Where in the darkness of Irish winter, in the midst of crushing despair, does one search for light? How does one dare speak? What images might sustain us?
Various Irish groups have asked those questions over the past 10 years. Digging deeply, we have trawled the embers. Our hope? If omnipotence is the problem, perhaps humility is the solution. At this time of Imbolc, we look toward Brigit, goddess, saint and muse.
Her early Lives tell us she was virginal, whole and intact in the sense that "she could not be bought nor sold". She plucked out her eye rather than consent to forced marriage. She consistently opposed the warmongers, giving away her father's sword to feed the poor; placing clouds between opposing battle sides, or giving them sweet dreams so that when they woke up they could go home happy, having shed not a drop of blood.
When the Babylonian, Hittite and other major world legal codes called for the stoning of a raped woman, given the slightest evidence of her consent, Brigit invented a whistle to ensure that resisting women would be heard.
Rather than collude in deception and dishonour, the patron saint of whistleblowers' followers - Keepers of the Flame - were women who could be entrusted to hold the collective by cultivating personal integrity.
But where is her God in the tsunami? Does Brigit have a theodicy, a grand plan to make the world safer; evil, suffering and death meaningful? Not quite.
However, if we cannot claim she could control earthquakes, we know that the great abbesses of Kildare were known as She Who Turns Back the Streams of War" - an extraordinary accolade for women of those times, and an equally extraordinary challenge for women today: to challenge these omnipotent gods and their human tsunami.
For Brigit the human suffering that lay in her path was more than enough. If Simone Weil once argued that "suffering and pain are like false currency passed from hand to hand, until they reach the one who does not pass it on", Brigit would have added conversely that grace is given to us in nature and its flow impeded only by those who refuse to pass it on. When a woman objected that Brigit had given her donated apples to the poor, she cursed her orchard. When a healed leper refused to heal his brother, she re-infected him.
In Brigit festivals, dancing in her spirit, we aim to excavate, liberate and meditate on her traditions. Whereas many religious and military rites foster collective abdication of responsibility, her rites call us to personal integrity. We forge psychic fires rather than weapons.
We encourage gratitude and responsibility, rather than worship and obedience. We seek resources to wake up the neart (life-force) within. We promise to cultivate our gardens, tend our hearths, nurture the flame and weave our fates for the coming year.
And when we contemplate her humble snowdrops, plúríní sneachta (tears of snow), pushing their little heads through an ice-bound earth, we bow before the mystery of life itself.
We give thanks to the god/dess of small things, and pray that we too might bear witness in the year ahead to the power of hope over despair, life over death.
For details of Brigit festivals in various parts of Ireland, and related seminars, see www.instituteforfeminismandreligion.org
Dr Mary Condren is a feminist theorist and theologian and director of the Institute for Feminism and Religion