Good Monday morning, Substack.

One last tidbit from the Celtic retreat. There are many legends linking St. Brigid to the Christ child—for example, a tale that she was midwife at the birth of Christ. The attached image shows her being ferried to Palestine from Iona by two angels!

Brigid’s mother was said to have given birth to her on the threshold of her house; consequently, Brigid has come to be associated with threshold spaces, liminal spaces.

Because many people of this time lived in one-room houses, women might labor by using the doorposts as leverage while they bear down, with the midwives kneeling beside them.

I was baptized Catholic and raised in that tradition for a time. It’s a tradition in which people kneel in prayer. It’s never been my preferred posture. I appreciate the need for humility, but have read enough feminist and womanist theology to know that subjugation can hide within that virtue.

However, I’m so taken with the image of Brigid the midwife kneeling, not in quiet pious devotion but as an active participant in the new thing that God is bringing into the world.

Image: St. Bride by John Duncan