On the feast of St Columba this year we took possession of an icon of our parish patron St Bride (St. Bridget) of Kildare. What might be more true to say is that the icon has taken possession of us, as icons normally do! The beauty of the work made an immediate impact both on me and the people of the parish – we took it to our hearts.    

It has snuggled into its place in the Church and one felt an immediate connection, through this icon, with the patron who has watched over the parish through thick and thin. She might have been able to see us over the years, but we somehow missed out putting up something whereby we could see her.  The image of Bride now looks out at all of us very compassionately and reassuringly from her place on the edge of the sanctuary. 

The work has been executed by Sister Petra Clare, a Benedictine sister of Ryde, who has established a small monastery in the Highlands of Scotland. Sister Petra Clare has been engaged as an icon painter for some time and has completed some interesting commissions and is clearly becoming very skilful in the intricate procedures of painting icons. 

The idea of commissioning an icon came, I suppose, from myself as I have come to find something deeply spiritual in them rather than the commercially and highly manufactured conventional religious objects of art that adorn many churches. They have a quality that draws the person who is looking at them, you feel that you are in the presence of the transcendent, the holy, the power that comes from heaven. The icon has a way of reaching out to the person who is reaching in, the searcher becomes the one who is found, the one who is looking becomes the one who is looked at. Another motivation for me was that no one seemed to know much about Bride, neither children nor older people, all this despite the parish being 127 years old. I thought we must do something to teach people about her and to forge a link between Bride and the parish that bears her name. 

Our initial contact with Sister Petra Clare came when she visited us in the dark days of a Sunday in winter. She had come to speak with parishioners and to show some of her previous work. I think the visit was especially useful to her as she found a great fondness for the parish patron but not much evidence of a devotion. The visit also was useful for her because it showed the limitation of real space in the church for such a work because of the omnipresent radiators keeping at bay the aggressively damp Scottish winters. After the visit, aware of the difficulties and limitations, she scurried back to her Highland isolation to begin the work. Next