I'm dedicated to helping women in particular develop their spiritual path in life. I'm focused heavily on Brigid in Ireland, although not all my followers are! I teach, speak, coach and mentor people to help them along their own individual path, based on what lore we have, but also allowing for each individual path to develop as it needs to.
đ I couldn't reconcile Brigid and Catholicism. Then I went back to the lore.
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For a long time, I had a problem I couldn't solve. My relationship with Brigid was growing. My Catholic upbringing wasn't going anywhere - not because I was still practising in any conventional sense, but because it's in me, in the way that anything you're raised inside is in you. And I couldn't work out how to hold both things at once. I've written about this conflict recently - the specific discomfort of being a pagan Catholic, of loving figures who belong to a tradition you've also had complicated experiences with. What helped, in the end, was going back to the lore. Not to find ammunition for one side or the other. Not to prove that the pre-Christian Brigid was more real or more valid than the saint. But simply to find out what our ancestors thought worth recording about her - and to sit with what that revealed. What I found surprised me. The Brigid of the old texts is not primarily a warrior, though she can fight. She's a mother who loses her sons - one, or three, or four, depending on which text you're reading - and who grieves that loss publicly and completely. She appears at crucial moments in the mythology not as the central protagonist but as the person who responds, who supports, who shows up for others at the worst possible moments. I recognised something in that. I hate crowds. I can't stand people in general until they become individual persons with me. I genuinely prefer to stay out of the limelight - but I also genuinely want to help, and I find meaning in the kind of support work that often goes unnoticed. The lore gave me a way of understanding that tendency as something Brigid herself embodied, rather than a personality quirk I needed to work around. It also helped me understand the saint. When you see how the goddess adapts and evolves through the written record - how the monks and bishops who preserved her stories were making active choices about what to keep - the saint stops looking like a corruption of something purer and starts looking like a continuation of something resilient. That's what this week's post is about - what the lore can tell us, what it can't, and why it's worth knowing regardless. [Read it here ] BrĂd libh Ărlagh Check out the links below: âBrigid's Forge Schoolâ âWebsiteâ |
Hi, I'm Orlagh, of Brigid's Forge
I'm dedicated to helping women in particular develop their spiritual path in life. I'm focused heavily on Brigid in Ireland, although not all my followers are! I teach, speak, coach and mentor people to help them along their own individual path, based on what lore we have, but also allowing for each individual path to develop as it needs to.
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have climbed Croagh Patrick. Once. In 2001, I think, or thereabouts. It took about three hours up and considerably less time down, partly because my knees had opinions about the descent that I couldn't ignore. It was a college weekend away...) It's a remarkable experience. I won't pretend otherwise. Standing at the top of a mountain on the west coast of Ireland, with the islands of Clew Bay laid out below you, is genuinely moving - whether you're doing it for Patrick, for the pre-Christian...