Bridget the Abbey Maker and Warrior Policy: Lughnasadh 2020

Well.  These are the times, no?

photo courtesy pexels.com

It is Lughnasadh, 2020, and I am making beer bread and celebrating Lugh, the great warrior and sun god/deva/patron saint.  It is a day for grains and harvest, sunflowers, and the middle of summer.  In the great Celtic wheel of the year, we are half way through the summer months as we turn towards the equinox and the end of the growing season.

This midsummer harvest is one of pandemics and failed public health, a rising up of white people - finally - to join Blacks in questioning police and military policies in our neighborhoods and budget priorities, and a questioning time of whether or not children can safely return to school - center of the school to prison pipeline.  Which is where I work.  What does warrior Lugh and Bridget the Abbess have to do with the crises surrounding our lives?

Here in Appalachia, my deeply Republican state has seen its first ever Black Lives Matter Protests, the sale of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline  - which was destroying WV mountains and streams along with the water supply of the Eastern Seaboard, and a GOP governor breaking with the president to issue mask mandates and school closing long before his other conservative brethren.  West Virginia has had surprisingly peaceful BLM protests.  Just north of here in Pennsylvania, a BLM protest was attended by an armed militia.  West Virginia protests benefited from lack of internet in rural and armed parts of the state, keeping militia types away.

All these events were determined by policy.

"So who cares?" you say.

Well.  Saint Bridget, the historical Christian saint who founded a monastery in Kildare, Ireland, around 480 common era, was a policy maker.  She broke with some Christian sects and set up her monastery as coed, a hall for women and a hall for men.  She hired the first male religious leader, Conleth, to lead the men's monastic life, and she led the women.  She determined canonical jurisdiction, setting up Kildare (Cill Dara, church of the oak) as the center of central Irish church life.  Kildare and the abbot and abbesses there were the heads of the early Irish church, because Bridget declared them so.  Bridget in all Christian depictions carries a Bishops's staff, and all of her female successors were Bishops in their own right until the Roman church arrival in the 12th century.  That is 600 years of Irish women Bishops.

Bridget with her Bishop's staff:  Stained Glass of Saint Bridget from Saint Bridget Catholic Church, Seattle, Washington

Saint Bridget set up schools in Kildare.  Like the Goddess/deva before her, Great Goddess Bridget of Celtic contract and myth, Bridget the Abbess decreed Kildare a center for creativity, arts, metalwork, monastic illumination, blacksmithing.  Beyond the mythical stories about Saint Bridget defeating her pagan father with her magical cloak and miraculous healings, the historical Bridget was renowned for her oratory, her teaching and preaching, her work as a dairy woman and brewer. It was said that she could turn water into the best beer in Ireland.  Pilgrims to Kildare began during Saint Bridget's time, drawn to her teachings (and maybe the beer).  The pilgrims continued until Elizabeth I, a full millennium later.

You can't run a double monastery without policies:  policies as to who feeds the visiting pilgrims, who cares for the sick coming for miracle cures, who feeds the men and women in their work and ministry, who takes out the trash.  As the Abbess for all of Ireland, Bridget was the ultimate voice and ultimate decision maker.  She established the customs of an open door to all, of welcoming women and men to monastic life, of creating wards for healing and places for pilgrims to rest.  Without Bridget's decrees, there would have been no Kildare, no pilgrims, no illuminations, no school of art, no millennium of fire, no centuries of women in Christian church leadership.

Policies are central to every crisis we face as a nation, as a world.  Tax policies benefit oil companies and harm poor families.  Policing policies disproportionately target men and women of color and men and women with disabilities.  School policies mimic policing policies exactly.  We as individuals can protest all we want, demanding change, but until policies change, nothing has been accomplished.  Ibram X. Kendi, one of my favorite radical writers, pushes this view in all of his writings and workshops:  it's not enough to "be anti-racist."  Anti-racism requires changing racist policies.

And while many of my friends are now reading books on white fragility and anti-racist theory, I am instead calling on us to be anti-racist policy makers.  Which indeed sounds so boring.  Friends call me to write signs for protests.  Meh.  I am busy trying to change school policies, which is anti-racism work, but not in front of crowds, not with adrenaline and great friends and great speakers.

So how about on this Lughnasadh we name anti-racism (and anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-ableism, anti-ageism, anti-militarism, anti-imperialism) policy making as warrior work?  Changing policy means leaving my Facebook political bubble, working with Republicans, working with people who routinely tell me that children with autism deserve to go to jail at the age of 5, or 7, or 11.  Nothing I can do for any student matters more than getting policies like routine suspensions stopped, and implementing policies of student choice and parent/school communication.  Walking into an Individualized Education Plan meeting for special education, I am absolutely a warrior.

And policy isn't all dry and boring.  Challenge oppressive policies, and watch people who think in their hearts they aren't racist or ableist lose their tempers.  Changing policies means facing intense anger.  The fury BLM protesters are encountering around the country seems overwhelming, but it is the anger of every teacher I encounter who wants to arrest a child more than learn how to actually teach them.  It is the anger from probation officers, police, school cops, principals, special ed. directors - all people who claim to care about children.  It is hard to see every day.  I continue as a "foster mother" to my clients, who like the pilgrims in early Ireland, need miracles.  Stopping school cops from handcuffing a child is the miracle I can offer.

I think it is so easy to view religion as a beautiful Abbey, as religious music, as spiritual connection to, well, Bridget, or Lugh, or Jesus, or Muhammad, or Buddha, or the deva in a creek or a mountain. I love those connections as well.  I write about them.

Celto-Roman Bridget, 1st Century, Common Era.
By Moreau.henri - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11568655

But some of our religious sensibility has to go to the warrior side of religion.  Bridget defied her pagan father and tricked him into land for her monastery; Bridget defying Celtic chiefs who demanded she marry, and hiring her own monks to run her abbey; Bridget rescuing the sick and poor, especially women fleeing violence and poverty.  That warrior spirit is best served, though, by establishing the capacity to actually help others.  Without an abbey, without her schools, without her kitchen hearth she left open to all, there would have been no flaming shrine, no metalworking schools, no illuminated manuscripts, no beer to share.

I work in schools, so I know the policies I need to change:  suspension policies. special education policies, individualized instructional policies, child choice policies.  Wherever you are in your journey, there are other policies that need to change.  It is deeply important to go out and start changing those policies

Pull on your cloak, grab a beer, and get to work.  You are following sacred footsteps.