I wrote about Brigid and nuance a few months ago. Now that post received mixed responses, leading to the edits and subsequent emails I sent hoping to clarify my position. Let me be clear – I can want Gaza free from oppression and violence, to allow those poor people to recover from the rape and torture they have suffered (possibly allow them to rebuild their lives and prosper as opposed to survive?) want the Israeli hostages sent home where they might have a chance to recover from the rape and torture they have suffered.
But honestly, that’s not what I want to talk about today.
OK, let’s leave that particular conflict to one side for a bit.
I decided to write this because of an email I received when I started this series on spirituality and religion. Chelsea asked the following:
1) Was there anything in Irish Spirituality, particularly while working with the goddess Brigid that helped you move away from an oppressive view of good and evil that we see in Christianity? Feel free to elaborate on how this relates to challenging the pro-life pro-choice dichotomy. I understand this may be an ethnocentric problem the rest of the world doesn’t seem so bothered with.
2) Were there any resources that you used to help contextualize or deconstruct from said view of good and evil?
Quote from an email I received from Chelsea
Now, I explored this a bit in the video over in patreon (if you’re not over there, why not join!) but I want to explore a bit further now.
I have said before that Brigid links with nuance, with liminality, with the grey in life.
And this feeds deeply into how I separated myself from hard and fast rules about good vs evil. Binaries just don’t work in most situations. There is nearly always nuance, nearly always grey area.
I’ve spoken about this before, but it bears repeating:
As humans, we live in the grey, the liminal, the uncertain.
There are probably things we can all agree on with regard to human life and human rights. We generally agree with the notion that people should not be imprisoned. Except, that pretty much every country in the world has laws which allow for people to be imprisoned, under certain circumstances. Grey. Liminality. Brigid Nuance.
This is the area in which Brigid operates a lot. She is strong in the nuance game, in the extraction of specific situations and applying general principles to a specific circumstance.
She is the goddess of poets after all, and in Gaelic Ireland, the poets were the lawgivers. And, WOW were they masters of nuance. When I say they thought of a lot of circumstances where the law would apply and the different nuances that would apply. There are entire books on things like cats, beekeeping, stray cattle… No wonder they chose Brigid as their deity!
Dichotomies are man made
And yes, I’m deliberately using the term “man made” there. Binaries don’t really exist in nature. Dichotomies don’t really exist in nature. Brigid’s nuance does. We don’t have clear boundaries between seasons, between stages of life, between survival and growth versus death. Sometimes it can be as little as a blade of grass, other times there’s no obvious reasons for one species to survive and another to fade.
And yes, I don’t believe there is a dichotomy between pro-life and pro-choice, again it’s man made. I maintain that a world where abortion is readily, freely and legally available but never needed is the best solution. (Brigid and nuance have links here as well, given her connections to fertility, women, women’s rights, etc)
But this means that politicians can’t stand up and explain their situation in simple soundbites. Nuance doesn’t help win elections. (If it’s different in your country, please let me know!)
Brigid doesn’t really give a damn about artificial dichotomies like this. Brigid is comfortable in the grey, as I’ve said. The problem is that a world where abortions are never needed is a world with a lot of education. When we provide proper, accurate, effective education about sex, gender, reproduction and all the rest… we see a massive improvement in all sorts of areas. Mental health, sexual health, expressions of sexuality, teenage pregnancies… all these metrics move in the right direct (in the direction of greater health) when we provide proper education.
So why don’t we?
Good vs Evil
As Christians, we often hear that sex is inherently wrong. That people don’t need to know about sex. At least not until they are in a good, God-fearing, Church-defined marriage anyway. And even then… only under certain circumstances. Technically, the Catholic Church teaches that sex should only be happening in the interest of producing children. I’m not joking.
Now, one way people get around this, especially for post-menopausal women, is to quote the story of Mary’s cousin Elizabeth (John the Baptist’s mother) Elizabeth gave birth long after the age it was considered possible. So, having sex after menopause is just providing God with the opportunity for another miracle…
Binary thinking can lead to a lot of cognitive dissonance.
And we see this continually. Black and white thinking forces people into cognitive dissonance. Brigid and grey areas, help. I mean, sex is a relatively normal human activity, right? It happens in the animal community as well. Without sex, our survival as a species? A bit under pressure, to say the least!
How to manage the grey areas then?
How do we deal with these grey areas? It’s unfortunately up to individual choice.
We must conduct our own personal work here. Using abortion as an example, I read up on some of the many studies done on the effects of appropriate sex ed, sexual health resources and abortion resources. I educated myself. Ultimately this lead me to a sexual health diploma last year. I made sure, to the best of my ability, that I was as informed as I could be.
Do I believe abortion is the correct choice in all cases? Absolutely not. But I do believe that a pregnant person’s right to choose what happens to their body is paramount. I don’t have the right to make that choice for anyone else – whether by supporting a so-called “pro-life” politician or by agreeing to cut funding to essential education and health services.
Having strict rules and black and white areas makes life easier. I get that. But Brigid isn’t here to make our life easy as such. She can and will provide guidance. She is excellent at outlining what she wants from us!
But essentially, it is up to us to educate ourselves on the decisions we make. We live in the grey.
