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Keeping the Hearth: February 1, 2010 marked our second anniversary at Brigid’s House. Alongside our three-fold mission of
poetry, prayer and peacecraft,
it has served as a place of hospitality. St. Brigid,
and her pagan predecessor, Brigid, were both known as protectors of the hearth-fires and all
domestic concerns. In my experience, there is a particular
flavor about Brigidine hospitality that is unique.
Those familiar with one of St. Brigid’s more famous prayers will say that flavor is beer. But we’ll get to that. Early in my tenure as Hearthkeeper
of Brigid’s House, I made a pilgrimage to Kildare
to visit some of the holy places associated with Brigid.
The morning I arrived in Kildare town, a rare snow storm
had turned to cold rain. I didn’t know exactly where
I was going, but experience of the friendly natives of Ireland gave me
confidence that I would find my way. Indeed, with the generous loan of an
umbrella and directions, I eventually found myself standing uncertainly
outside of Solas Bhride
(Light of Brigid), which turned out to be a modest
home on a street of modest homes that all looked very much alike. Another
hearty soul making his way through the grey slush and sideways rain had
assured me that Sr. Mary’s place was just down the street, and told me to
look for the statue in the window. Which is why, as I was standing indecisively outside
the house, I was startled to see what I had taken for a
statue start to move. It was Sr. Mary herself, in her blue bathrobe, with a
fuzzy orange scarf wound around her neck, holding a cell phone. The next
thing I knew, I was being bundled into the house, invited to take off my wet
things, have some coffee and, of course I would be
wanting to see the Brigid room. Sr. Mary’s warm,
musical stream of talk allowed me no chance to be embarrassed that I had
surprised her, still in her pajamas; in fact, she called it a stroke of luck
that a friend had called at that moment or she mightn’t have see me wavering on the sidewalk. The Brigid
Room turned out to be a shrine of sorts in what would have been the living
room. What I noticed almost immediately was the flame―the inheritor,
surely, of the eternal flame of Brigid. It had, according to legend, burned at least since St. Brigid’s time in the 6th century, been
extinguished during the Reformation, and ritually re-lit in Kildare in this
decade. About thirty minutes earlier, I had been standing
outside St. Brigid’s Cathedral, which in this
holiday week following Christmas was locked tight
behind a tall, wrought-iron fence. I stood shivering and gripping the rails,
and I reflected that the Brigid I had come to find
was not in that beautiful but imposing church. Here, warming my hands around
a cup of instant coffee and looking at a tall, red glass sacramental candle,
I realized that the eternal flame of Brigid was
here, in the living room of this little house on a back street of Kildare,
tended by a nun in a blue bathrobe. I resolved, as I left Solas
Bhride, that I would remember that welcome and try
to have the grace to practice hospitality in the same spirit. I have had the opportunity to welcome many people to Brigid’s House in my two years here—for programs, for
overnight stays, for meals and prayers and music and writing. There have been
artists, monks on foot, evangelical pilgrims, an alcoholic neighbor at the
bottom of his luck. I have even, on occasion, welcomed
guests in my pajamas. There have been many times that the doorbell rang when
I didn’t feel prepared to suffer an interruption. I can’t say I have always presented the open and generous
face that Sr. Mary did, but as I have more consciously assumed the mantle of
the Hearthkeeper, I have tried, when called upon,
to set aside my own agenda (and my dignity) on the chance that my real work
is waiting on the doorstep. In St. Brigid’s day, the
monastery stood in the place of our motels of today. It was, in fact,
required by law to offer hospitality to travelers, but the monasteries were
situated conveniently near cross-roads for that purpose.
St. Brigid, as Abbess of a great monastery, a home
to both men and women religious, valued hospitality as a spiritual imperative
even more than a legal one. The stranger would be welcomed and made
comfortable because that is what Christ would have done. I have heard of one
Indian priest who put it most simply: the guest is God. For the medieval
traveler, an essential part of that welcome would have been ale. We recount,
with some relish, the miracle in which St. Brigid
turned the bath-water into ale to accommodate some
unexpected guests, and enjoy saying the blessing of St. Brigid,
with its “vats of good cheer” and its “lake of beer” around which all of
heaven’s family may drink for all eternity. But the
fact is the good Abbess was not encouraging drunken revelry so much as
providing an important source of nourishment and refreshment to her guests.
To borrow the famous slogan about that well-known brew from Ireland, it
really was good for you. The goodness is not only in the ale, but
in a quality of the welcome itself, which comes from the heart of the
hostess. Being the woman of the house has awakened an unknown Martha-like
tendency, and I have had to temper it by remembering that sometimes a guest’s
hunger is for companionship and compassion more than coffee and cookies. Food
and drink are reassuringly concrete, and give an easy sense of competence,
but what is that indefinable something that makes a person truly feel at home
in one’s home? In an article on hospitality that appeared in a 1994 edition
of Weavings, W. Paul Jones
reflects on the disposition of hospitality, the inner work, out of which any
act of hospitality naturally flows. Part of that disposition is the
confidence that comes from letting go and being free oneself:
Sr. Mary did not have to be embarrassed to come to the
door in her bathrobe; she was clothed in love. Thomas Merton also reminds us
that the spiritual work of hospitality begins long before the guest arrives:
Henri Nouwen’s
beautiful reflection on hospitality in Reaching
Out touches on an aspect of hospitality close to my heart: opening
a creative space. “Hospitality,” he writes “wants to create a friendly emptiness where
strangers can enter and discover themselves created free; free to sing their
own songs, speak their own languages, dance their own dances . . .” Creating that friendly emptiness, that fertile space,
is no small work. It means, in part, freeing myself of fear, that there will
be enough, that I am enough, and simply being present to answer the door. The work of Brigid’s House―as
home to the Sacred Heart Peace Community; as a center for the writing,
reading and sharing of poetry; and as a place for prayer―depends upon
the sincerity of our welcome. The welcome is not only for guests, but for our own creativity, ideas, hopes, and
disappointments as we work for peace and justice. Hospitality is the door
through which all of these other ministries enter and, we hope, find a
friendly space to flourish. Come to enjoy the hospitality of the House soon! Cassie
MacDonald Cassie is the Hearthkeeper of Brigid’s House, located at 1719 Ferry Avenue in Camden, New Jersey. Contact her at peacecatcamden@yahoo.com or at 856-361-7887 for more information about meeting times and programs. |