« Update: Full transcript of Valerie Plame's sworn testimony before House panel | Main | Providence Geeks to meet Wednesday, with presentation of free software for schools »

March 18, 2007

Being Irish: feasting, music and one fiery female

Later: I wrote this overnight and added a bit more when I woke up.

6:06 a.m.

Dijon-Glazed Corned Beef with Cabbage & Potatoes looked like this last night at our house.

Tender, moist, but not waterlogged, since it steamed under foil in the oven, this corned beef may be the best I've ever had. The vegetables cooked in the bottom third of the oven, protected by a coat of butter, horseradish and green onions. They far surpassed the plain boiled-dinner versions.

(I can praise it lavishly without boasting, because half-Irish Joe actually cooked it all. I was napping on the couch with a book on my lap. All this overnight blogging catches up.)

For dinner music, I tuned to Seasonal Sounds on cable. The two songs I best remember from my earliest childhood came up -- Bing Crosby's Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ra (An Irish Lullaby) and Macnamara's Band. I mentally toasted the McQuillians, Gaffneys and Lennons in those memories -- all gone now, like the Victrola and the piano on which Dad played those tunes, and the happy postwar times they shared.

But the bouncy stuff just doesn't ring true to my modern ear, or to ancient stirrings. Church and state and many a mother have tried to tame that wild creative streak, box it in and make it respectable, or at least jauntily harmless. Molly Bloom was not a stepdancer. The goddess-saint Brigid is a woman of fire.

So I was more than relieved to hear two songs that spoke to another strain of Irishness: Na Connerys (The Connerys), a quiet air by a group of Irish musicians who assembled to make this Celtic Sessions album. (A comment on that link at Amazon names them.) I instantly bought the track at eMusic. I'll post the tune for just a few days, so listen up: Na Connerys.mp3.

And Lad O'Bierne's Hornpipe/Byrne's Hornpipe by Dave Miller, a Philadelphia classic violinist turned unfrantic fiddler. He offers a different mp3 track from I Love Irish Fiddle Music on his site: Bobby Casey's Hornpipe/The Gravel Walks. I like the fusion.

Both tunes might be easy to hear on a Sunday morning.

St. Patrick's Day now is a generic ethnic celebration -- Irish Day, to be followed Monday by St. Joseph's Day and zeppole. But its stars, the leprechauns and grand marshals, Bing Crosby and the bishop himself, seem to be the traditional old-boy network.

Head of the Celtic goddess Brigit Kerguilly en Dineault, Finistere, France, 1st C AD. Musees de Rennes. Photo: Werner Forman Archive

To the average American, Irish spirituality pretty much boils down to one towering figure: Saint Patrick, the fifth-century Christian evangelist who supposedly evicted the snakes from Ireland and today is commemorated on a day associated more with parades and pub crawls than with piety. But American knowledge of Celtic spirituality and culture is too often limited to the basics. Sure, Patrick may be Ireland's most prominent patron saint, but he's not the only one. Of the three (!) patrons affiliated with Ireland, one is a woman who has a powerful and fascinating history that links her not only with Christian spirituality but with the ancient mysticism of the pagan Celtic past. This figure is Brigit, the Abbess of Kildare.

Understanding Brigit-you'll see her name spelled in a variety of ways, including Brigid, Brighid, Bride, and Bridget-means understanding two different figures who may in fact be the same persona-although they are seen in very different ways by different groups of people...

-- Is Brigid a Pagan Goddess or a Christian Saint? Yes.
at BeliefNet

The Goddess Fires at Candlemas: Notes on the Poem by Jani Farrell-Roberts, "a woman of Ulster":

...Brighid was also seen as a triple Goddess - of poetry, of healing and of smithwork. One of her main symbols was that of the serpent. (Thus Patrick was said by Christians to have driven the serpent from Ireland.) However, after the rise of Christianity in Ireland, Brigid became Saint Brigid and it was her nuns that tended the everlasting flame kept at Kildare - the original symbol of a sun goddess.

Beliefnet continues,

For centuries, the nuns of Kildare tended a sacred fire dedicated to Brigit on a 20-day cycle. Each of nineteen nuns would watch over the fire for a day, while on the twentieth day the fire was left for Brigit to tend herself. The practice continued until the seventeenth century, when nervous church officials attacked it as a pagan practice. Although the flame was extinguished for some 260 years, a small community of Brighidine nuns returned to Kildare in the early 1990s, and relit the flame, where it continues to burn as a beacon of hope and peace.

"Brigid's Fire"... was relit in 1993 by (Sister) Mary Theresa Cullen, then leader of the Brigidine sisters, in the Market Square, Kildare, at the opening of a justice and peace conference... entitled Brigid: Prophetess, Earthwoman, Peacemaker...

The tradition extends beyond Kildare. Thanks to the connections made possible by the Internet, there is an international, multifaith group called Ord Brighideach, "an order of flamekeepers" who actually tend the flame, wherever they live, of a candle that has been lit from the fire in Kildare.

Fire of Brighid:

· Fire in the forge that shapes and tempers.

· Fire of the hearth that nourishes and heals.

· Fire in the head that incites and inspires.

Their Web distributes the tasks over a network of more than 600 "nodes" so the flame is always burning somewhere. They sign up for shifts online and the homepage poll is "Are electronic candles OK to use for flamekeeping?"

All this makes being Irish more interesting and deeply mysterious than the watered-down trappings of St. Patrick's Day, especially the green beer.

How to make St. Brigid's cross.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 2:15 PM | Permalink

Comments

Posted by: Richard Walton on March 18, 2007 10:44 PM