The Feast Day of Saint Brigid and This Moment in Time

It is the feast day of Saint Brigid*, and we are fighting off colds.  We are trying to cough quietly because we have people sleeping in the front bedroom.  I think of monastic vows of hospitality, especially when I wish that our guest room was more luxurious.  This morning, our guests are sleeping 4 mattresses high, with boxes piled around them.  But it's a place to sleep, with clean sheets and a relatively clean bathroom.

It is the feast day of Saint Brigid, and we have a moving van parked outside.  My sister-in-law begins moving out of the cottage today with the help of her significant other (sleeping in the front bedroom) and his brother (sleeping in the cottage).  The weather forecast calls for thunderstorms, some of them intense, so I'm not sure how this impacts her plans.  They will likely hit the road later today or tomorrow.  I think of those Celtic Christians who moved through the world in their little boats or on foot.

It is the feast day of Saint Brigid, the day after the Senate effectively finished their impeachment trial.  It is a good day to remember that the nation has survived many challenges, and this one is not the worst.  It is a good day to pray for deliverance from those worse times.

It is the feast day of Saint Brigid, and there is news from abroad that makes me anxious:  the British have finally formally left the European Union, the new corona virus continues its blistering approach, glaciers continue to melt faster than we thought they would.  It's a good day to follow the model of Saint Brigid, to care for those who are closer to our orbits.

It is the feast day of Saint Brigid, in a week where a friend looked into my refrigerator and said, "This looks like the fridge of a single person."  She meant that there was no food and that it was clean.  Because there was no food, I had scrubbed the shelves the day before, the first time I scrubbed the shelves in a long time (years, if we're being honest).  I've wiped them, but I rarely take them out and thoroughly clean them.  Now I have clean fridge shelves and the rest of the house is a bit grubby, a constant state of affairs.  I like to think that saints like Brigid probably had better skills than I do in terms of balancing the daily tasks with the larger work, but I suspect there were times when Brigid looked at the abbey she had founded and wondered why it was so hard to keep clean.

It is the feast day of Saint Brigid, which is also the day before the Super Bowl in Miami tomorrow.  I will leave my house to go to church tomorrow, but other than that, I'm staying put.  I have a vision of time to read; I started Nell Freudenberger's Lost and Wanted last night, and it's amazing.  I have a vision of doing some sketching.  I'm not creating a focused book of illuminations, like Brigid did with her Book of Kildare, but the work feeds me.  I have a vision of doing some cooking, of channeling Brigid's abundance by baking bread or a huge casserole or a sour cream coffee cake.

*To find out more about Saint Brigid, go to this blog post; it also includes a poem of mine.