On the Life of the Saint
Morwenna
S
aint Morwenna lived in the British Isles in the fifth and sixth centuries; during the so-called Dark Ages, she was a ray of light in a land of long northern nights. The Orthodox prayer service devoted to all the saints of the British Isles calls St. Morwenna a holy virgin. She is also known as a hermitess and a teacher. Morwenna is an Irish name meaning “sea maiden.” The twelfth-century record in which she first appears names her as the daughter of the Irish-born King Brychan, himself a saint and the father of many saints. We can imagine she was raised on tales of St. Patrick, whose ministry to Ireland had taken place within her parents’ living memory. It was in Wales that Brychan became king, and Morwenna seems to have regarded Wales as her homeland, later choosing to die where she could see its shores. However, our holy mother is most beloved not in Ireland or Wales, but in Cornwall, on the southwesternmost peninsula of England. It’s a land that has produced many saints; there are more saints in Cornwall, the old joke goes, than in heaven itself. Many among these saints were Morwenna’s siblings, King Brychan’s twenty-four children (twelve sons and twelve daughters). These could have been either his own offspring or spiritual children chosen for his great mission to the southwest and raised in his house. Along with her sisters, Morwenna probably studied under a mother abbess, preparing to take on the role of evangelist. At a time when hardly anyone, least of all women, could read or write,
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