Has St Brigid Gone the Way of the Enneagram?

HAS ST BRIGID GONE THE WAY OF THE ENNEAGRAM?
By FATHER DÁITHÍ Ó MURCHÚ

From one point of view, the Enneagram can be seen as a set of nine distinct personality types, with each number on the Enneagram denoting one type. It is common to find a little of yourself in all nine of the types, although one of them should stand out as being closest to yourself. This is your basic personality type.—The Enneagram Institute, 2004

I REMEMBER in the seminary having to sit through a workshop on the Enneagram as described above; that a Catholic Seminary would engage in an exercise that finds its source in ancient Sufi mysticism is alarming indeed.

That this was seen as beneficial, normal even, is very telling. In the years since I am astounded how so many Catholic Retreat Houses, Convents, Religious Houses and Parish Centres offer not only the Enneagram but a myriad of events that are completely out of sync with and injurious towards Catholic teaching.

Now what has all this to do with Saint Brigid? Let me begin by quoting an article by Brian Wright (2010) in History Ireland:

Brigid, goddess and saint, the second most important Irish saint after Patrick, is well known not only in Ireland but also in many other parts of the world. Thousands of books and articles have been written about this influential figure since the first by Cogitosus c. AD 650. Yet some historians have claimed she did not even exist! Brigid is unique in still being venerated not only as a saint but also as a goddess.

So where does the idea of Brigid as goddess and saint come from? There are both ancient and modern reasons, and the two are interlinked. The ancient reasons date back to the Celtic Feast of Imbolg. The Bath Chronicle (2007) in a features article put it very well:

Our ancestors welcomed Imbolg as the reawakening of life. As the first crocus pushed through the earth, it was seen as the first sign that winter was stirring from her sleep. It is a time to look to the future.

It was common practice for the Christian church to Christianise pagan feasts on the conversion of the populace in a region. This canny piece of marketing and evangelisation meant that the people did not lose their important calendar dates, but had their god/ gods/ idols replaced with the one true God. It also meant that the previous feast days would not be left in situ to tempt the people to return to them. Three classic examples of this would be the Feasts of Christmas, the Annunciation and Saint John the Baptist taking place around the dates of the winter and summer solstice and the spring equinox.
Canny evangelisation
In the case of St Brigid, the Feast of Imbolg became her feast day. It was an inspired choice to Christianise the pagan feast of spring for the woman who would become Ireland’s secondary patron, and to have it as a prelude to the Feast of Candlemas. The life of Brigid was marked by Paschal joy, the fire lit at her monastery in Kildare exemplifying this. She, with Saint Patrick and Colmcille, would become figureheads for the fervour with which the Irish people embraced Christianity and brought it to the ends of the earth. As Irish children the stories of her life that we learnt were indeed the stuff of miracles, from her birth in Faughart, County Louth to Dubhtach a chieftain and Brocca the former slave, her mother, who was baptised by Saint Patrick, to the conversion of the pagan chieftain by picking up the rushes on the floor and weaving them into a cross to tell him the story of Christ and His death on the cross.

We made the crosses every year in school, and brought them home as a beautiful reminder of our nation’s heritage and the ever present power of the cross. We learnt about the principal foundation, mentioned above, of Brigid at Kildare or Cill Dara, the Church of the Oak. This latter event is the basis for my own personal favourite story where Brigid asked the local chieftain for the land and he refused. Eventually she asked him for as much land as her cloak would cover, and, laughing at the supposed ludicrous nature of such a request, he agreed, only to witness Brigid’s cloak spreading and growing, eventually covering the area she desired. We saw St. Brigid’s crosses over doorways, heard of them in rafters of houses, and how, on the eve of St. Brigid’s Day, if you hung the cross over the door of the byre Brigid would bless your land and cattle. There was also the belief that hanging a cloth outside on the eve of the feast would allow Brigid to touch it, and so give it curative powers.

It is very easy to see the fantastical in the above tales, also the rubrics of pagan ritual and Celtic culture. Fire, one of the elements, is an ancient ritualistic symbol predating Christianity. Miraculous events and magical powers are seen in the cloak story, and the invocation of protection on crops, land, houses and livestock garners another facet of the same. The St. Brigid’s cloth has an echo of the clootie tree, which Lyndsay McEwen (2009) describes: In different parts of Britain, Ireland and northern Europe, there is a tradition of fastening a piece of cloth to trees (usually hawthorn) near holy wells. After taking the water people tie a piece of their clothing to the tree. The tree is a symbol of long life and health. In Scotland these are known as clootie (cloth) trees.

These then are the ancient reasons for how Brigid as goddess and saint came to be. We can see the ingredients of both and how they came to be interlinked. We see ultimately how the two were not uncomfortable bedfellows, and how, in the telling, the story of the Christian Brigid was not uncomfortable with the blurring of the demarcation line, but embraced it, Christianised it and cleverly used it to bring a newly converted people along holding ribbons of their past ideology to give them comfort in embracing the new beliefs.

When it comes to the modern reasons, what has happened in the last fifty years is a lot of the old certainties have crumbled, and the structures of Catholicism have been shaken, as the Post-Conciliar Church has sought to engage with the modern world, and examine new ways to live the life of faith. The misinterpretation of this concept has been a fiasco for the church, as the baby has often been thrown out with the bathwater, and the dialogue has led, in many instances, to an abandonment of traditional rituals and an embracing of new points of reference which are not only not compatible with Catholicism but sow confusion and a distrust of all that went before. In the midst of this we have the results of the new moral order which put down roots at the very time of the Second Vatican Council, the permissive society of the 1960s with its promotion of free love and an enthusiasm for eastern philosophies.
Brigid the goddess
Brigid has been a victim of this confusion particularly since, in the last twenty years, there has been a renewed interest in Celtic belief systems, and so we now, tragically, have Brigid, not as Muire na nGael or Mary of the Irish, but Brigid the feminist, the goddess, the Brigid who may not even have existed, the Brigid who the cruel church debased of her Celtic powers and fabricated into a coy and demure nun, rather the same as they are purported to have done with Mary Magdalene in Dan Brown’s infamous novel, The Da Vinci Code. The old tale of St. Mel ordaining Brigid a bishop has surfaced as an argument for the ordination of women, and as proof of a Pre-Roman influenced Celtic church free from ultramontane oppression. In short, Brigid has been stripped of her Christian elements and become a cause célèbre of the confused mentality and belief systems of our time.

In conclusion then, can we say, as we set out to at the beginning, that she has gone the way of the Enneagram? It would certainly seem so. The brassy madam presented to the world today bears no resemblance to the Brigid I learnt about in school who found her strength in the power that came from God alone. This imposter would seem more comfortable consulting her crystals than the Blessed Sacrament. Therein, however, may be the answer or at least the consolation. This Brigid is exactly that, an imposter, wearing the cloak of modernity rather than the cloak of Christ. We need to reclaim her to what she was before this silliness. The Church needs to rescue her and present her anew to a world that needs her gifts now more than ever, particularly her giftedness in confronting a pagan world, not unlike our own in its barbarity, with the truth in Christ, the truth in love.

Brigid, Muire na nGael, pray for us.

Bibliography
McEwen, Lyndsay. Clootie Tree? What is it? (2009)Available: http://www.clootietree.co /whats_a_clootie_tree.htm. Last accessed 15th Nov 2013.

Pontifical Council for Culture/Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue (2003). Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life: A Christian reflection on the “New Age”. Available: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/interelg/documents/rc_pc_interelg_doc_20030203_new-age_en.htmlhttp://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/interelg/documents/rc_pc_interelg_doc_20030203_new-age_en.html.. Last accessed 13th November 2013.

The Bath Chronicle. (2007). Light candles for the coming year. The Bath Chronicle. 247 (30), 22.

The Enneagram Institute. (2013). How the Enneagram System Works. Available: http://www.enneagraminstitute.com/intro.asp#.UoOiN3C-06Y. Last accessed 13th November 2013.

Wright, Brian. (2010). “Did St Brigid visit Glastonbury?” History Ireland. 18 (1), p14-17.

An tAthair Dáithí Ó Murchú is a priest of the Galway, Kilmacduagh and Kilfenora Diocese currently on loan to the Wrexham Diocese in Wales.

The Brandsma Review, Issue 130, January-February 2014