Love, hospitality & care: Open Table communities take inspiration from female soul friends

Brigid and Darlughdach by Brother Robert Lentz OFM. Their names are in Greek on the icon and in Irish on its frame. Brigid and Darlughdach are shown with their arms around each other and a double halo. The two women are dressed in the white gowns worn by Druid priestesses and Celtic nuns. Flames burn above them and on the mandala of Christ that they carry. The icon was commissioned by the Living Circle, a Chicago-based interfaith spirituality center for the LGBTQ community and allies. Four Living Circle members took the original icon to Kildare with them in 2000 for the flame-lighting ceremony at the recently excavated site of Brigid’s ancient fire temple. Dennis O’Neill, the priest who founded the Living Circle, included the icon and an in-depth biography of Brigid and Darlughdach in his book Passionate Holiness: Marginalized Christian Devotions for Distinctive People.

FEBRUARY 1st is the feast of St Brigid of Kildare, a prophetic figure to whom the church where the first Open Table community began is dedicated.

It is also LGBT+ History Month in the UK, an annual celebration of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans & non-binary history. Today the Open Table Network is sharing the story of Brigid and her ‘soul friend’ and claiming them as patrons of our growing partnership of LGBTQIA-affirming Christian communities.

Brigid of Kildare was a sixth-century Irish nun who brought art, education and spirituality to early medieval Ireland. She is Ireland’s most famous female saint. This year the Irish government added Saint Brigid’s Day as a new national holiday, the first to be named after a woman.

Brigid (c. 451-c.525) shares her name with a Celtic goddess. Raised by Druids, Brigid may have been the last high priestess of the goddess, before converting to Christianity and becoming an abbess (the female head of a religious community). The precise date of her death is unknown - celebrations for her 1500th anniversary have already begun in Ireland.

Her name is also spelled Bridget or, in the case of the church where the first Open Table community began in Liverpool in 2008, Bride, an Anglicised form of the name. Construction of St Bride’s Liverpool began in 1829. The reason why it is dedicated to St Bride (Brigid) is unclear, but it is close to a natural mineral spring dedicated to St Brigid found in nearby St James’ Cemetery, now the gardens below the city’s Anglican Cathedral, which opened in the same year as building began on St Bride’s church.

The legend of Brigid says that when she made her final vows as a nun, the bishop in charge was so overcome by the Holy Spirit that he administered the rite for ordaining a bishop instead - women were barred from that role in the Christian church at this time, making this a prophetic act. Brigid started convents all over Ireland and became the abbess of a ‘double monastery’ (a community of both men and women) at Kildare.

A younger nun named Darlughdach [pronounced DAR-le-da] served as Brigid’s anamchara, Irish for ‘soul friend’. In early Irish monasticsm, a soul friend was understood to be a teacher, companion, or spiritual guide. In a seventh century account of the life of Brigid, it was recorded that they shared a bed. After Brigid turned 70, she warned Darlughdach that she expected to die soon. Her younger soulmate begged to die at the same time. Brigid wanted her to live another year so she could succeed her as abbess. Brigid died of natural causes on 1st February. The bond between the women was so close that Darlughdach followed her soulmate in death exactly one year later. She was also made a saint by the Catholic Church and shares the same feast day.

Like the story of Naomi and Ruth from the Hebrew scriptures, and other paired saints such as Perpetua and Felicity, the story of Brigid and Darlughdach has been interpreted as an example of sacred love between women.

Brigid’s main symbol was fire, representing wisdom, poetry, healing and hospitality. The nuns at the Kildare monastery kept a perpetual fire burning in Brigid’s memory for more than a thousand years, until 1540 when it was extinguished following King Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries. In 1993, two sisters of the Order of St. Brigid returned to Kildare and relit the fire, which burns to this day at the Celtic spirituality centre they established there.

St. Brigid's Lake of Beer by Brother Mickey McGrath OSFS - a vision of heaven as eternal hospitality.

Brigid’s spirit of lavish hospitality is also expressed in her reputation for loving beer. She brewed beer for the poor every Easter, at a time when brewing was a way of purifiying water which was not safe to drink. She is said to have miraculously changed water into beer for a leper colony and provided enough beer for 18 churches from a single barrel! In a poem attributed to Brigid, she imagined heaven as a great lake of beer:

I’d sit with the men, the women of God
There by the lake of beer
We’d be drinking good health forever
And every drop would be a prayer.

Brigid and Darlughdach are honored in an Inclusive Liturgy for LGBT History Month created in 2019 by Revd Sam McBratney of Dignity and Worth, a group of Methodists in Britain ‘committed to the full dignity and worth of every person, whatever their sexuality or gender identity’. It features the following prayer:

Merciful God, source of all loving kindness,
you called Saint Brigid and Saint Darlughdach
to teach the new commandment of love
through their life together of hospitality and care;
may their example inspire in us
a spirit of generosity and a passion for justice
that, in our hearts and lives,
all may witness your fearless love:
Through Jesus Christ, your Living Word,
in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

The liturgy ends with a solemn blessing, including these lines:

May God, who in Brigid and Darlughdach,
has provided us the example of
generosity, companionship and care:
keep your ears ever open
to the cry of the poor and excluded.

Amen.

Download the Inclusive Liturgy for LGBT+ History Month here.

As we approach the 15th birthday of the first Open Table community in June, the love, hospitality and care portrayed in the lives of Brigid and Darlughdach are part of the experience we want to create in our Open Table communities. It’s part of what we mean when we say ‘You’re more than welcome here!’

READ MORE: Brigid and Darlughdach: Celtic saint loved her female soulmate, from Kittredge Cherry’s LGBTQ Saints series.