Saint Brigid of Kildare: The Flame of Ireland, Part 2 of 2

From a young age, she exhibited extraordinary piety and compassion, especially towards the poor and needy. Despite her father’s resistance, she pursued a life devoted to God, eventually taking vows as a nun.

One of the most famous legends of Saint Brigid occurred when she came to the King of Leinster requesting a place to build a monastery. Saint Brigid humbly asked the King to give her as much land as the size of her cape. When the King saw Saint Brigid’s small cloak, He laughed out loud and agreed. Saint Brigid removed her cloak and instructed four of her followers to each take a corner and walk in four different directions: north, east, south, and west. As they walked away from Saint Brigid, the cloak miraculously kept unravelling, growing and growing until it covered many hundreds of acres. The King, true to His word, granted Saint Brigid the land for her monastery. Around the year 470, on this land, Saint Brigid founded one of Ireland’s most sacred early Christian establishments. The amazed King, by some accounts, became an ongoing patron of the monastery and a Christian convert.

In ancient times, the grounds of a monastery were considered sacred, offering sanctuary to anyone seeking refuge, including criminals. This sanctity extended to animal-people, as this tale from Saint Brigid’s time illustrates: One day, a wild boar-person, pursued by hunters, reached the convent at Cill Dara, where Saint Brigid resided. The hunters, unable to enter the holy ground, expected the nuns to expel the visitor. However, Saint Brigid, moved by the exhausted and injured animal-person, asserted that this member of the animal-people kingdom had the same right to protection as any human. Despite the hunters’ insistence, Saint Brigid stood firm. The hunters eventually left, and Saint Brigid tended to the boar-citizen, giving him water and care.

Many miracles are attributed to Saint Brigid. In another instance, a man came to Saint Brigid with his mother, who was suffering from tuberculosis. All that it took to immediately take the ailment away was to place her in Saint Brigid’s shadow. Saint Brigid’s powers of healing and miracles saw the cure of all kinds of illnesses. Although Saint Brigid was always giving away whatever she had to those in need, her larder was never empty, always replenished in a miraculous fashion.

The 15th-century Gaelic manuscript “Book of Lismore,” which contains a religious chronicle of Ireland, mentions Saint Brigid as follows: “She is the prophetess of Christ, she is the Queen of the South, she is the Mary of the Gael.”