Covered with Grace

Today is the Feast of Saint Brigid and in Celtic culture the festival or Imbolc, or the beginning of spring.  Saint Brigid is said to have visited Uist, or the Islands of the Outer Hebrides.  There while being pursued by villains, and collapsing, exhausted down and expecting death, she was saved when “oystercathchers” covered her with seaweed, hiding her from those with evil intent.

 

Christine Valters Painter writes a poem about this event in her book The Wisdom of Wild Grace.  She ends the poem this way

 

Sometimes we have to yield

Our bodies fully to earth’s embrace

to taste the end so near

to feel hope slip away like a boat

across sea’s foam surface,

before we can feel the truth again

of how things hidden can become a revelation

and heaven is there in the cries

of birds, among waves and sand

 

how often in this life

we have those moments when

we sink to the earth

 

exhausted perhaps

or hopeless

 

for all our striving

and for all our pleas to

whatever is greater than ourselves

 

our path has lead us to that place

that dark night of the soul

when we can go no further

 

but can only sink into the darkness

and lie there still and exposed

as one dead

 

but then grace comes

on healing wings

and covers us softly

 

and we can rest to rise

from our little deaths come little resurrections

 

our moments of desolation

of letting go

throwing our hands up to heaven

 

transforming into something

deeper and greater

something new

 

descent leading to ascent

unknowing to knowing

death to life

 

spring