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.
📖 I couldn't reconcile Brigid and Catholicism. Then I went back to the lore.
|
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 ] BrÃd libh Órlagh Check out the links below: ​Brigid's Forge School​ ​Website​ |
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.
I want to be honest with you about something, because I think it might be useful. The last few months have been hard. I've been struggling with anxiety - properly struggling, not just the background hum that most of us carry, but the kind that makes the ordinary things feel effortful and the future feel unreliable. I'm getting professional help, and that matters. But alongside that, I've been going to the sea more than usual. On the rougher days - the ones where everything felt loud and sharp...
Last week, Ireland decided to have actual summer. Thirty degrees. Proper heat, the kind we're categorically not built for. We don't have air conditioning in the house. We do have a €30 mini air conditioner from Amazon that makes a heroic amount of noise for very little cooling effect. What we also have is a car with functioning air con - so I did what any sensible person would do. I invented a reason to drive to Waterford. I had exam scripts to collect. This was true. It was also, I'll be...
I want to tell you something about how this all began for me. I moved to England at twenty-two. I grew up Irish Catholic — properly Irish Catholic, which is its own very specific thing, shaped by history and survival and a particular fierce relationship with certain figures and practices that don't translate neatly anywhere else. When I walked into a Catholic church in England, I didn't quite recognise what I found. Same name. Different texture. The things that had meant something to me...