“If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat;
and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink;
for you will heap coals of fire on their heads,
and the Lord will reward you.” (Proverbs 25)
Heap Burning Coals?!?
The Letter to the Romans quotes Proverbs 25. Growing up in the Midwest, with a lot of “Nebraska nice,” the “heap burning coals… on their heads” part always struck me as passive aggressive. Again: “No, ‘If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12: 20-21)
For a long time, this seemed like a “kill them with kindness” sentiment that might actually hurt. I understand giving folks water when they are thirsty, and I have delivered enough casseroles to comprehend the, “If your enemies are hungry feed them,” bit. But the “heap burning coals on their heads” snippet from Romans did not have any real meaning to me. Until a historian or two pointed out that people once carried objects on their heads, and perhaps in some places around our globe, people still do. We may have backpacks with wheels, shopping carts and wagons that fold up and down for your convenience, but historically when folks needed to carry water or goods a long distance, they balanced them on their head and made their way across the countryside.
The phrase, “heap burning coals,” is about offering the fire from your hearth, the flame and ember which can keep another's house warm, bake their bread, and cook their food. A burning coal is essential; its fuel and faith is about sharing the heat and keeping everyone warm…even if they top your enemies list.
Warming Rooms and Fire Altars
Irish abbeys contained warming rooms. The blue prints and drawings historians and anthropologists created illustrate warming rooms at different abbeys. However, it’s usually not the only fire lit in an abbey. Even today, you can see there were fireplaces in the dormitory and probably the Prior’s office, where all the paperwork was pushed and enormous hearths cooked community meals.
I love the name “warming room,” and I love imagining a monk, or a team of monks, with the sole job of tending this fire; distributing it where it is needed, mindful of the fuel and willing to keep this fire alive should anyone else need an ember to rekindle their own flame.
St. Bridget’s Abbey had a fire altar. You can still see the great stone outline of its later configuration with a magnificent stone cathedral. In Bridget’s day (1,500 years ago), the abbey sat atop a beautiful hill of great oaks, surrounded by several cozy beehive huts. Here, folks slept and cooked and prayed and wrote and tended the fire. Kildare means “Church of the Oak,” and Bridget’s fire altar, just like the sacred oak grove, had ancient roots. Her fire altar was likely in use 2,000 years before her community gathered around to warm their hands, share the flame and break their bread.
Fire is taken far and wide into the community. At the Altar the fire is a space of devotion; learning and listening, paying attention to ancient wisdom. At the forge, Bridget (the Pre-Christian Goddess and the Saint) blesses the work of clarifying and purifying the metals, burning away what isn’t needed and allowing the smith to craft something useful and beautiful out of the metals for the community. At the hearth, the fire transforms the cold into a warm community gathering space, the dough into bread that nourishes and draws folks together. Fire is sacred.
Community Fire
Fire is essential in the pre-Christian Irish spirituality. Important hilltops hosted community fires for generations. The most important being the Hill of Tara, where the leader of the Celtic people, pending consent by the hill, would dance naked to the top and be crowned king. The Druids, and perhaps even earlier peoples, on the island designed not only great burial mounds but also a remarkable celestial calendar with many similar hilltops. From Tara, you could see Newgrange, Knowth, Slane, and beyond. These hilltop fires and centers created ways for folks to communicate across the Island. The Druids didn’t believe in writing their knowledge down, as knowledge is so powerful it could be misused if entrusted to the wrong person. One needed to look a person in the eyes before sharing their knowledge. Thus, it is difficult to ascertain what these pre-Romanized folks believed, but given the state of social media today, “I told you so” seems reasonable.
Every spring, the people extinguished the multiple hilltop fires and then celebrated new life and the coming of spring's rebirth. The “king” lit a new fire at the Hill of Tara, and from his enormous bonfire, folks carried torches, olympic style, to light all the new fires across the hills.
They heaped burning coals and shared the fire with each other. Fire connected them.
Wow Patrick, just Wow.
All of this is moving along with its normal human drama (which is to say that folks are prone to war and harm just as much as they are to love and peace), until Patrick (Pre-Saint, not Irish) envisions a plan. On the day everyone is celebrating and getting ready for a new fire, Patrick conveniently chooses to celebrate Easter, with a brand new Pascal fire. Before the King can light the fire on the sacred Hill of Tara, Patrick lights a fire on the Hill of Slane; this fire is Christian.
The King assumes danger and hostility from Patrick’s fire, believing it represents a warning or a threat. With his crew ready to fight, the Druids go to Slane and find a Priest. The official story implies that Patrick convinced people of and converted them to Christianity, at least enough people that no one hurts him. That's how the Christian story becomes an Irish story, at least in the official church history.
This move is so wild to me. It could be stunning and brilliant as activist art, except Patrick doesn't seem to be protesting any injustice by the king and druids and community. Mostly, it’s so on brand for an empire, domination-driven Chrisitanity: past and present included. Patrick lights a new fire on the pagan’s holiday, making it his holiday. It’s astounding. His fire is Chrisitan and their fire is Pagan. Patrick appears to say, “This fire is right and that old fire is wrong; you need to pack it up and move on.”
Bridget’s Fire
But Bridget is a few hills away in Kildare tending the same kind of fire. She continues minding the fire and adding new fuel to it. Brigid hears the story of Jesus; power that is vulnerability and strength that is weakness. She lives in a world that needs peace and justice. She falls in love with this message and honors it by building community. For Bridget, the stories of Jesus align with the stories that root her in the soil of Ireland. For Bridget, Jesus and his teachings enhance the teachings she learned as a druid. In fact her title, Bridget may not be her given name but a symbol of her leadership role in the Druidic community and as a leader she draws connections and meaning and new life from this new wisdom without diminishing the light of the more ancient wisdom of her people.
She keeps the fire and milks the cows because connection doesn't come through debating the finer points of fire's metaphor for life, but by nurturing life. Knowledge, philosophy, or theology that upholds systems of enslavement, violence, domination, and injustice are a problem for Bridget, whether it’s from her Druid Dad or her Christian co-workers.
Bridget and Patrick show us two choices on how to be Christian in this world. Patrick claims someone else's fire and Christian. Bridget adds more fuel to the flame that gives life linking all the wisdom around her for her community.
We are invited to choose.
Feminist Emancipatory Evangelism
In seminary, we were required to take an Evangelism class. I hated the idea because for the most part, the church has used evangelism as a way of making people over into the kind of people they thought they should be. Helping folks find Jesus, even if it was through random door knocking, pressure, shaming and of course pamphlets.
At the same time I was reading my favorite professor's book on worship and language. Dr. Marjorie Procter-Smith imagined feminist emancipatory worship, beyond non-sexist and inclusive models of God-Language in worship, to emancipatory language, which makes women visible. Language is important, it seeps into our bones and so the words and songs and prayers we sing need to inspire us. She named that just using non-gendered language for God is not liberating enough, we still see Santa Clause when we hear the word God and that just doesn’t go far enough, it doesn’t help anyone see and value women as sacred, particularly women. Her work is similar to James Cone when he said, “God is Black” and to the Liberation Theologians who call us to look at the brown faces caged by our border as divine. For Procter-Smith, emancipatory language challenges and transforms through “reinterpretation of terms of derision” and remembering as well as through new “collective identity” and imagining (Marjorie Procter-Smith. In Her Own Rite: Constructing Feminist Liturgical Tradition. (Akron, Ohio: Order of Saint Luke, 2003, originally 1990.), 55.) Emancipatory language, liturgy, and preaching assume “that God is engaged in women’s struggles for emancipation, even to the point of identifying with those who struggle” (Ibid, 56). God is in the vulnerable.
I believe our work in Evangelism is emancipatory, it is liberating, even if my professor did not care for my thesis of Feminist Emancipatory Evangelism. I stand by it. Relationships weave us into one another and our faith invites us to lay our stories up against the stories of those long past who found abundance in a world of scarcity, connection in a world of control and worth in a world that wants to place a value with each pay check, test score or dress size. That’s why people invited their friends to join the journey with Jesus, it wasn’t because he had skinny jeans or a smoke machine in worship, it was because people mattered and he built relationships that empowered people, inspired people and liberated people. It mattered so much they would risk everything in love to share that gift with someone else. It was a love strong enough to make folks brave. And I pray that every invitation and connection ties us together in love and makes us more.
Bridget’s community will tend the fire, the ancient fire, for generations to follow. 500 years later, a “righteous” church leader will come to town to extinguish that “pagan fire.” The formal stories suggest the nuns tried to protest, but ultimately lost. Of course, the people of Kildare, with a spark of fire in their eyes, say, “Did you think we would let that happen?” The fire lived on in kitchens where bread was baking and forges where metal was hammered and hundreds of thousands of other candles and fireplaces and hearths, too.
Patrick and Bridget, not that far apart in history or place, both have fires and stories, but they couldn’t be more different. We, too, have a choice.
What kind of people do we want to be? What kind of abbey do we want to be? How will we heap burning coals and gather round to tend these fires?
May we have the courage.
Amen.