CELEBRATING ST BRIDGET
Part of a Sermon preached on St Bridget’s Day 2005
by the Rev
Canon Trevor Dennis, Vice-Dean of
Chester Cathedral, now dedicated to
“Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary”, used to be the Benedictine Abbey of St Werburgh. Henry VIII came along, closed the monastery down,
and turned the place into a Cathedral. We still have St Werburgh’s
Shrine in our Lady Chapel, battered, but nevertheless charged with its own
particular holiness. The trouble is, we don’t have
many good stories to tell about St Werburgh.
Except one: A flock of geese settled on the convent land
and were eating the crops; she ordered them into an enclosure as a punishment. That night a servant stole one of
the geese, and cooked and ate it, leaving only the bones. In the morning St Werburgh set the geese free with a warning not to eat the
crops again. Instead of flying away, the
geese circled the convent making a great noise. Realising that one goose was
missing, she had the bones brought to her and restored the goose to life! The flock flew away, never to be seen on
convent lands again !
You have far more to play with as
far as St Bridget is concerned: baptised by St Patrick no less, she became, so
the story goes, a nun when still a girl; she founded a monastery at Kildare and
was its Abbess; once (and here it gets really interesting) she changed her bath
water into beer when some priests turned up unexpectedly and had a rare thirst on them. A Bishop Ibor consecrated her as a Bishop! Did you know that? Does the Archbishop of Canterbury know that?
Perhaps most interesting of all, her day falls in the Calendar in February 1,
already associated with the ancient
pagan festival of Imbole, a festival of fire when
people looked forward to the warmth and spring, with the darkest months already
behind them.
And what does all this mean for you? Clearly one thing: visiting priests should be
given a lavish supply of beer (can I suggest Guinness ?),
though this particular visiting priest would rather it wasn’t made from the
Rector’s bath water ......
And what more?
A patronal festival in a parish offers a
chance for a congregation to reflect, together with friends from other
churches, on what its purpose is. What is this place here for? What are you here for? I can’t tell you what your particular role
might be in this particular community. You have the local knowledge and I
don’t. But I can offer a few reflections of a more general kind.
This is a holy place, a significant
place. It lends its holiness and its significance to everything that takes
place within its walls, and to all who come here. When babies are baptised
here, it marks them on their foreheads with its holiness; it proclaims their
significance, their worth, their mystery, their large dignity held within their
small bodies. When couples are married here it puts them centre stage, perhaps
for the first time in their lives, and makes holy the vows they exchange with
one another. When people are brought in coffins for their funerals here, then
they too are placed centre stage and their worth as human beings is told for
all to hear, held up for all to see.
Life is not cheap here.
This is a place that goes back a
long time, dedicated to a woman who leads us towards the very beginnings of
Christianity in these islands. It puts us in our place, reminds us of the
history to which we belong, warns us against taking ourselves too seriously,
roots us, anchors us, and gives us a sense of belonging.
Above all, this is a place of God.
When we cross its threshold we enter another world. We cross the shining line
into the circle of the Divine. In this church dedicated to St Bridget, the
Divine crackles with the fire and this festival with the hope of warmth and
spring and new life.
There is an earthy God here, not a
God shut up in heaven on a high and inaccessible throne, but a God with the
smell of wood smoke in her hair, and a pint of beer in one hand, and a milk
pail in the other; a domestic God who would have us sit and eat and drink and
enjoy ourselves in her presence, a God who would be quite at home in the
peasant villages of Nazareth and Capernaum, as indeed once he was.
We have needed God’s company in
these past few weeks. On 26th December there was the worst natural disaster of
our lifetime, on the 27th January the 60th anniversary of the liberation of
So this
For some single people it can be
uncomfortable.
For children and young people it can
be unwelcoming.
For people who have been divorced it
can be accusing and heedless of what they have been through.
On gays and lesbians it can come
down like a ton of bricks and be for them the last place where they can be
themselves or even recognise who they are.
For all these, for all those who too
often are excluded, misunderstood, belittled, scorned and abused, St Bridget’s
must be a safe place, a truly Christian place, where, to their great surprise,
people find themselves in God’s circle, eating and drinking with her, while
(wonder of wonders !) she waits upon them, anoints
their heads with oil, fills their cups to overflowing, and even stoops to wash
their feet; stoops to wash our feet, yours and mine.
This earthy, down to earth God of St
Bridget, with the smell of wood smoke in her hair, a pint of beer in one hand
and a pail of milk in the other; who holds in her arms the girl of Sri Lanka
who saw the waters snatch her three year old sister from her and who has no
family any longer; who does not turn aside from the door of the gas chamber, so
that they also might find resurrection - this is the God we celebrate today.
My word, we have something to
celebrate, you and I !
A fitting occasion indeed for a choir, an orchestra and a Haydn Mass !
Trevor Dennis