To Walk with Saints and Scholars

Three weeks before I came to Ireland for the first time in 2023, I led a retreat about the wonder of bees and introduced my friends in attendance to St. Gobnait of Ballyvourney. St. Gobnait’s feast day is this coming week – February 11 – and this year, I find myself living only 20 minutes from Ballyvourney, her tiny town in County Cork. I am still introducing Gobnait to my friends. She is who I want to be when I grow up.

St. Gobnait is the patron saint of bees, and she is usually depicted with her beloved bees and/or with their hives. Tradition tells us that she lived in the 6th century and that she traveled extensively through the west of Ireland. Along the ways she walked, she was called to establish communities, and then…she was called to leave them. She kept building and leaving until she finally arrived in Ballyvourney. It is there that she built her third and final community after finding God’s sign of nine white deer.

My own fascination with St. Gobnait comes directly from her relationship with bees and all her moving around. I marvel at her loving without abandon as she built places of refuge for men and women of God, and I marvel at her willingness to leave everything behind nonetheless as soon as she knew she must do so. When God said “Go,” Gobnait went. And when it is time to swarm, the bees do the same. They swarm. The bees – and Gobnait – do not sit around pining for all that will be left behind, nor do they arrive to the task of building a hive/community in a new place with anything less than their full efforts. Gobnait, like the bees, built each community she began with total dedication and to the best of her ability. Bees might well be her model. They build each hive to the exact specifications that make a community thrive, and they do not waver in their work just because it has all been done before. Their goal is not to be lauded or to stay forever, but simply to do the best they can to ensure well-being and then also be ready to do it all again. The work is not over just because the hive or the community is complete….and each resurrection requires a death. More on this in Lent….

In my humble opinion, Gobnait is salt of the earth – a light on the hill. Her example – the example of the bees – is an example of the unabashed love and simultaneous non-attachment required to be and to do good in the world. This week as we celebrate her healing powers, I find my healing in her reminder that, like the bees and our beloved saint, we aren’t always called to stay in one place forever. We don’t have to stay in jobs, relationships, or environments no longer meant for us just because they used to be the “just right” thing or because we “worked really hard” to build them to begin with. And the same goes for our religions. Religion that does not remember that the rules are not the “reason for being” is religion that has lost its flavor…lost its ability to be light. Gobnait’s example reminds us we do not have to stay in religion that cannot remember we are meant for more.

This week and always, we can seek the places of our resurrection over, and over, and over again. And we are, in fact, called to do so, for it is in both the “building the best we can right now” and also in the “going when it is time to do so” that righteousness can be found. And that ain’t no easy work…

St. Gobnait of Ballyvourney, pray for us.