ST BRIGID’S DAY TODAY – A GOOD FEISTY IRISH SAINT.
Arch in Kildare Cathedral grounds Credit Kildare Town heritage Centre
Today is the first day of spring and St Brigid’s birth day
Her father, Dubthach, a pagan chieftain named her after a pagan goddess of fire and poetry.
Her childhood has a familiar current ring to it. As a child and a young woman she went between living in her father’s house and in the house of a Druid. As a young woman her father tired of her excessive giving to the poor and wanted her married her off. She refused saying she would devote her life to the poor and elderly.
. She lived in the 6th century the time of St Patrick. Born into slavery, she was so taken with his teaching she became Christian and worked many miracles.
Folklore tells how as she sat by the deathbed of a pagan chieftain possible her father, she picked up the rushes from the floor and weaved a patterm that resembled a cross. As he watched and listened to her explain the cross would keep evil, fire and hunger from his house he asked to be baptised before he died.
She, asked the King of Leinster for land to build a convent beside a forest and a lake.
He laughed at her.
She prayed.
He mockingly told her she could have as much land as her small cloak could cover. She laid the cloak on the ground; it spread north, south, east and west until there was enough ground to build a convent.
The king kept his word and the miracle of the cloak is given as St Bridget’s first miracle in Ireland.
She founded a Monastery called the Church of the Oak in Kildare and a school of art, metal and illuminations as well as many convents.
And here’s something else. The custom of woman proposing to men in a Leap Year (like 2016) is said to be traced back to St Brigid. She complained to St Patrick that it was always the men who did the asking. Then she asked she asked him to marry her. He refused.
Ever since then a woman can ask for a man’s hand in marriage in a Leap Year.
St Brigid lived until she was seventy-five. She is buried in same churchyard as St Patrick in Down Cathedral Downpatrick.
Her skull is buried in the Church of St John the Baptist UN Portugal
Gemma Hill Writeyou Writeme 