Published in the February 2026 Grapevine, the monthly magazine for the Nenagh Union of Parishes
I am sitting down to write on the 1st day of February, Imbolc, traditionally the first day of Spring here in Ireland. And God’s good creation does not disappoint. Snowdrops and crocuses are spreading sheets of colour around the garden, so welcome after the short dark days of winter.
It is also the Feast Day of St Brigid of Kildare, one of our three Irish patron saints alongside St Patrick and St Columba. It is right and proper that we now celebrate her with a new and welcome springtime public holiday weekend.
St Brigid is an enigmatic figure. As a Christian saint we believe she lived about 1,500 years ago, at the cusp of the conversion of pre-Christian Ireland. We know remarkably little about her, apart from biographies filled with myth and legend written down long after her death. She shares her name with an ancient goddess in Irish mythology, associated with wisdom, poetry, healing, protection, smithing, and animal husbandry. Some scholars doubt that St Brigid ever existed as a living woman, believing pious Christians merely transferred the myhs of the goddess to an imaginary woman. But I prefer to see her as a real woman of firm and practical faith, a worthy saint to emulate.
Brigid the saintly woman was born into slavery. The early biographies name her mother as Broicsech, a slave who was christened by St Patrick, and her father as Dubhtach, a Leinster chieftain. She spent her childhood as a farm worker, churning butter, shepherding flocks, and tending crops. As she grew older, she performed miracles, including healing and feeding the poor. The King of Leinster recognised her holiness, and persuaded her father to free her from slavery. She entered the religious life and was given the powers of an abbess, broadly equivalent to a bishop. According to tradition, with seven companions she organised communal consecrated religious life for women in Ireland at her monastery at Kildare in 480AD.
This was no ordinary monastery. It was a double monastery, one for women and one for men. She recruited a man, St Conleth, to lead the men’s monastery alongside her, but she was in charge. It developed into a centre of faith and learning, with a famous school of metalwork and book illumination. For centuries Kildare was ruled by a double line of abbess-bishops and abbot-bishops.
St Brigid reminds us that women are called, just as men are, to leadership in Christ’s church. Sadly, women continue to be denied leadership roles in many churches, despite St Paul’s insight that ‘in Christ there is no male or female’. Just last December a Vatican commission ruled out the possibility of ordaining women to the diaconate. In the Church of Ireland, we have been blessed in recent years to receive the ministry of women leaders as deacons, priests and bishops, including in this parish. I pray that our brothers and sisters in Christ in other traditions may soon receive the same blessings.
Let us give thanks for the example
of St Brigid, and all the women of strong faith whom the Holy Spirit calls to
leadership in our churches.
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