Remarks at Pilgrim Gathering re. St. Brigid’s Flame
Solas Bhríde 22 January 2025
I am delighted to be associated with the welcome for the ten pilgrims from St. Brigid’s Church, Noorbeek, Netherlands. Noorbeek’s association with Brigid goes back, I’m told, to a cattle plague, 400 years back.
My first connection with St. Brigid was watching my dad every February faithfully putting a fresh St. Brigid’s Cross on the wall of our milking parlour at home. Years later I came to understand more of Brigid and her patronage of cows. Did it help with the milk yield or indeed the progeny? I’m not sure, but what I now realise is that this was something which went far beyond the shores of Ireland, with scholarly evidence suggesting that this tradition was well practiced across dairy farms in France[1]. And here today in Solas Bhríde, we have our pilgrims from Noorbeek.
You have come for the flame of Brigid, which will be taken from the flame that never goes out here at Solas Bhríde. Back to that milking parlour, I grew up in Slane, County Meath. Slane is defined by a hill where St. Patrick is reputed to have lit the flame, that defied the Pagan King Laoghaire over at Tara.
I visited Lumiar, outside Lisbon in October 2021, where the lower part of the head of St. Brigid is venerated. My visit was with the hope of acquiring a relic for Kildare. I was privileged to hold the Lumiar relic in its splendid brass casket. But that’s as far as I got, there seemed no way to open the reliquary, without a risk of fracturing the relic completely. Lumiar of course means ‘flame’.
St. Brigid’s Day, now a recognised Bank Holiday, boasts of its own stamp, one that features the Cross, similar to the one my dad erected in the milking parlour at home all those years back. In ancient times St. Brigid’s Day became the reference point for all the seasons that followed. It dictated the ploughing, the sowing, the turning of the sod, even the milking of the cows!
“in the milking of cows and the tending of the hearth,
In threading the loom and gathering the peat,
The breath of prayer blessing each movement,
A naming of Creator upon each mindful deed”[2].
My prayer for all of you pilgrims from Noorbeek, is as you carry the flame from Kildare this day, catching the ferry that will bring you to Cherbourg, then across Belgium into the Netherlands and Noorbeek, arriving on St. Brigid’s Day, that it will bring something of the peace and warmth that Brigid exuded in her life to all who meet or encounter that flame.
[1] Picard, Jean-Michel: ‘The Cult of St. Brigid in Continental Europe and the Manuscripts of Cogitosus’s Vita Brigitae’, lecture during Brigid’s World, Maynooth University, 13-14 September 2024.
[2] Rupp, Joyce: A Celtic Moment.