ABSTRACT
Brigid, a young female servant to an archbishop—a girl loving and lovable, unworldly and selfless—is tormented by a secret: She receives visitations, advice, and instructions from her name-saint, Saint Brigid, with whom she converses regularly. The archbishop, her employer, is a cynical and domineering man, certain of his wisdom. Except for the uncharacteristic tenderness he feels for his servant, he is privately tormented by his own secret: his inner isolation and absence of authentic spiritual or human feeling despite his uncompromising adherence to accurate interpretation of church doctrine. His genuine wish to help the young girl is framed by his conviction that her experience is simply a symptom of the illness from which she must be rescued, because true religious experience cannot take such a personal form. In the course of his efforts to help her, he finds that Brigid’s resistance slowly leads him to encounter painful aspects of his own nature; Brigid cannot claim her perceptions of him as her own, however, and can confront the canon only as a conduit for the words of Saint Brigid, who commands her to speak them. He tries to dismiss her perceptions as further evidence of her illness, but (to parody Samuel Johnson) a diagnosis of psychotic transference is the last refuge of a beleaguered analyst. His insistence on the priority of his own truth only makes her more and more desperate to reach him personally. Ultimately, but too late to save her from death, he is able to allow her humanness to directly reach his, where the absolute rightness of his own truth gives way to a shared reality and to his ability to experience the world through her eyes as well as his own.
