St Brigid and the Beer

There are always new stories coming to light about St Brigid and this year I especially enjoyed the one about the beer!

I heard again on Lá Fhéile Bríde some of the more familiar tales. How she asked her father, a pagan chieftain of Leinster, to give her land in Kildare on which to build a convent. And how he replied that he would give her as much land as her cloak could cover, upon which her cloak spread out to cover acres of land. On another occasion, she gave her father's precious sword to a poor man so that he could barter it for food to feed his family.

It was on the land covered by her cloak that Brigid founded not just a convent but a double monastery, one for women the other for men, and ruled over both as Abbess. And she took her full share of the manual work of the monastery. She miked the cows, shepherded the sheep, helped with the harvest, and made large quantities of butter which she would give to the poor. She was also an expert brewer of ale and legend has it that when she working in a leper colony she was horrified to discover that they had run out of beer.

In those days, beer was much weaker and was drunk throughout the day by children and adults alike since it was both safe from contamination (unlike water, the drinking of which could be fatal) and nutritious. Therefore, running out of beer was serious indeed. Brigid called upon a little divine intervention and succeeded in turning the bathwater used by the lepers into beer. And it wasn't just any old beer, it was a truly brilliant ale. It is said that when a group of priests was visiting the leper colony, Brigid turned the dirty bathwater into beer for them too. And another time, she ensured that a sole barrel of beer was enough to supply eighteen churches from Holy Thursday till the end of Easter.

There are parallels with this in the gospels. According to St John, the first miracle of Jesus was not the giving of sight to a blind person or the curing of a leper, important as these later miracles were. Rather it was the turning of water into wine at a wedding feast. And it wasn't just a little bit of wine; it was six enormous containers, far more than was needed. And it wasn't just any old cheap plonk; it was the very best.

We all have perhaps our ideas of what heaven is like. One of my favourite images from the bible is that of the wedding banquet. For one of the learning-disabled men at L'Arche, whose mum had died, heaven was, "Me…and mum…down the pub." It seems that Brigid's picture of heaven was not so different, if we go by a 10th century prayer-poem which begins:

I would wish a great lake of ale for the King of Kings;

I would wish the family of heaven to be drinking it throughout life and time.

From this year, Brigid has her own public holiday in Ireland, the first woman to be awarded this honour; and quite right too. Sláinte to her!