February 1

Today is Imbolc, an Irish pagan holiday celebrating the goddess Brigid. It is also the feast day of Saint Brigid, which was a way of Christianizing the holiday, but is not entirely fabricated since “Brigid” was a common name and there are credible stories about her. One of my favorites is that when Brigid was ordained as an abbess, Mél, the presiding bishop, accidentally-on-purpose used the words for ordaining her as a bishop. When another priest tried to correct him, he replied, “No power have I in this matter. That dignity has been given by God to Brigid, beyond every (other) woman.” (She was not the only ancient female bishop: Bishops Cerula and Bitalia are also memorialized in catacombs in Naples). 

It is also the birthday of Irish-born Presbyterian pastor Thomas Campbell, in 1854. He was influenced by Enlightenment-era philosophy, and became part of the Second Great Awakening in the United States. He believed that the church should more closely follow the pattern of the first-century church. The inclusive movement he started would eventually lead to the creation of a new denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

Today is also the birthday of Langston Hughes, poet and activist of the Harlem Renaissance, in 1901.

Reflection: 

I believe a lot of American Christian theology is insufficiently incarnational, and I love Hughes’s poem “God” as a critique of it: 

(It also reminds me of the song “What if God Was One of Us?” by Joan Osborne.)

One of Thomas Campbell’s theological principles was this:

Prayer: This is a prayer attributed to Saint Brigid: