An Irish Temple

Today, on St. Patrick's Feast Day, I am thinking with millions of other people about Ireland. Rosean and I visited the island ten years ago or so at the invitation of good friends. It is the only place I have ever been off the continent of North America.

On Ireland is one of the most powerful religious sites I have ever visited. It is called Newgrange, and it is 500 years older than the Great Pyramid in Gaza. Think about that for a moment. The Pyramid was built in 2500 BC. That means Newgrange was built long enough ago to be older than our entire Christian civilization, two and a half times.

In North America we have little connection to history like that. The indiginous peoples of this land lived lightly on it, leaving behind few traces. We do not dwell among our ancestors like Europeans do. This makes us all a bit deranged.

But that is a topic for another time. I want to tell you about Newgrange. Newgrange is called a magalithic passage tomb because of when it was built and because human remains were found in the inner chamber. No one knows what it's function really was -- burial site, temple, maybe both. The civilization that built it has passed entirely out of history. All we know about them is that the Celts, who were according to story the sixth race of peoples to settle Ireland, called them the Tuatha De Danann, children of the goddess, and ascribed to them godlike powers.

Newgrange is a covered passageway leading to a cross-shapped inner chamber. It was built entirely by humans, using huge stones piled atop one another and covered with earth. The mound covers an acre, the passageway alone being around 60 feet long. The inner chamber is 20 feet high. It has a corbelled roof so skillfully designed that it has suffered little damage in over 5,000 years.

The most remarkable feature of Newgrange, though, is the alignment of a structure called a roofbox, built above the entrance to the passageway. It is so calibrated that it lets in the light of the winter solstice sunrise. Just at dawn (actually, these days a couple of minutes after dawn, but 5,000 years ago just at dawn) the sun creeps down the passage and illuminates the inner chamber.

Rosean and I visited Newgrange one morning in a group with our friends, a guide, and fifteen or so other tourists. The finale of the tour is a re-enactment of the winter solstice event. After we had walked down the passage -- narrow enough in places that we brushed the walls -- and had stood in the chamber for awhile having the salient features pointed out to us, our guide turned off the lights. She had warned us she would do this, of course, and had explained the procedure for exiting the site quickly. Many people have a strong claustrophobic reaction to Newgrange. Even with the warning and explanation, it was unnerving. We were plunged into megalithic darkness.

In this darkness, we stood quietly for long seconds. My ears rang with the silence. Though bunched with all those other people, I felt profoundly alone. I imagined what it would have been like for the people who built this temple. Maybe they walked the passage by torchlight in the middle of the longest night of the year. Or maybe they went in days earlier, fasted and prayed. I imagined them coming away from their daily routines, gathering to worship God in this special place they had prepared.

Then light came creeping down the passage and into the chamber -- the orange light of sunrise. I felt my heart lift with a profound joy. Even though this light was not the actual sun, it spoke to me with force and power, of the return of growth after stagnation, the return of hope after despair, the return of life after death. I felt it in the very fiber of my being.

Thousands of people enter a lottery each year to try and win a spot at Newgrange for winter solstice dawn. The event is webcast and also shown on Irish TV. It speaks deeply to all of us.

Perhaps we are a dawn-loving animal, a solstice species. We are capable of living in darkness. We can endure long nights, both of the world and of the soul. But our hearts are tuned to the moment when light hits the sky. No matter how rough it gets, no matter how gut-wrenching, no matter how dire, we wait for the promise of the birth of the sun. We wait for the wheel of fate to turn. We live by the moment when the wheel does turn; it is the most important of all our moments. We meet God's promise there.