FEAST OF SAINT DAVID – MARCH 1ST
Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus! Happy Feast of St David!
Saint David is the patron saint of Wales and his feast day is 1st March. His mother was St Nonna, a consecrated British woman in the South of Wales in the beginning of the 6th century. She was raped by one of the local kings and fell pregnant with Dewi Sant, or Saint David, eventually she gave birth at her cliff top hermitage where the ruins of a chapel and her holy well can still be found.
Saint David trained as a priest and monk at the monastery of Paulinus at Henfynyw and restored the sight of his spiritual father when he became blind. He travelled across Wales preaching and establishing churches and monastic settlements, and even went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem where he was consecrated a bishop by the Patriarch of Jerusalem.
At the Synod of Llandewi Brefi in Cardiganshire in 550 he was affirmed as Archbishop of the Church in Wales, and he established his See at the monastery of Mynyw, which is now St Davids in South Wales. On one occasion, when he was preaching against heresy he could not be easily heard and the place where he stood was miraculously raised up so that it became a mound and all could see and hear him.
His ascesis was very strict. He ate only bread, herbs and vegetables and drank only water, so that he became known as Aquaticus or Dewi Ddyfrwr (the water drinker. Sometimes he would stand in a lake of cold water, reciting Scripture. Those who shared his monastic life cultivated the fields around the monastery themselves and pulled the plough. Crafts were followed such as beekeeping and the monks provided food and lodging for travellers and cared for the poor.
When it came to the end of his life, St David reminded his spiritual children of what he had taught them, “Be joyful, keep the faith, and do the little things that you have heard and seen me do.”
He was buried in his monastery and his shrine was a place of pilgrimage for centuries. The Pope of Rome declared that two pilgrimages to St David were of equal spiritual benefit to one pilgrimage to Rome, and three pilgrimages to St Davids were of equal spiritual benefit to a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. His shrine was often plundered by the Vikings and then the Normans, but it remained one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in the British Isles until the Protestant revolution made pilgrimage illegal and destroyed the shrine.
In the past few years the relics of St David have been restored to a new shrine, and St Davids is once again an important place of pilgrimage.
May the prayers of St David, bishop, missionary and monk, be with us all.