Sunday July 2, 2006
Kinship across the centuries
POULNABRONE, Ireland: It\’s not often I can experience life 6000 years ago. But that happened to me last week here in Ireland. It was a powerful enough experience that I want to set aside my usual commentary on social issues to explore it.
Often, travel today simply means finding some place to indulge ourselves with sun, shopping, and overeating. Other times, we travel to sample different cultures, different environments – to taste, tentatively and safely, the way things used to be, or might have been. The Mayan ruins of Central America take us back 1000 years. Fervent Christians go to Israel to discover sites from 2000 years ago. The great pyramids of Egypt go back 4000 years.
We marvel at their artistic, engineering, or historic achievements. But we don\’t often find ourselves identifying with their lives.
A simple stone structure on the Burren, a few kilometers southwest of Galway in Ireland, did.
Setting the scene
The Burren is a vast limestone plateau. The rock itself is 320 million years old, laid down in a warm sea before two ancient continents collided and thrust the hardened sediments up from the ocean bottom.
From the sea coast along Galway Bay, the Burren broods over postcard-pretty villages like a great grey glacier, cracked and crevassed.
Parts of the Burren still look as primeval as they must have looked when bare rock emerged into light and air for the first time.
The limestone slabs have been weathered and eroded into gigantic paving blocks. In the cracks and crannies between blocks, vegetation ekes out survival – bright buttercups and daisies, sweet clover, various kinds of violets, gentians, harebells, and even some orchids. Some 70 per cent of Ireland\’s entire flora are found in the Burren.
Over 6000 years ago, unknown humans – Stone Age people, before the Celts ever came to Ireland, before the Druids, and long before St. Patrick – used those paving blocks, those slabs of limestone, to build burial sites called portal tombs or dolmen.
If you\’ve ever built a house of cards, you have a good idea of a dolmen. On the sides, you stand cards upright. Then, while you keep them from falling, you rest another card on top to lock them all in place.
Except that the “cards” here are blocks of limestone two feet thick, ten feet long, ten feet across. Each one weighs many tons. Ancient people with no metal tools, no cranes or machinery, pried those slabs out of the vastness of the Burren, stood them on end, and raised the largest block of all into the air so that they could set it gently on top of the other blocks.
Paying honor and respect
They did it so well that the stones still stand, 6000 years later.
Then they buried the bones of persons they valued between the walls.
That\’s a guess, of course. Because those ancient peoples had no writing to leave us records of their reasons.
But the remains within the tomb have been carbon-dated from between 4200 B.C. to 2900 BC. That\’s older than Jericho or Babylon. Older than Moses and the Pharoahs. Older than Stonehenge…
Archeologists say that about 33 different persons had some portion of their remains buried there. The evidence suggests that they may have first been buried somewhere else, then dug up and reburied, as a sign of respect and honor, in this special place.
More than that, no one knows. Did they do the ceremonies at noon under the midsummer sun? At midnight, in the dark of the new moon, with torches flickering on the surface of the limestone? On the spring or fall solstice, as the first rays of the rising sun lit the great standing stones? We don\’t know.
But I can guess, perhaps, at some of the emotions they might have felt. Pride, perhaps, for a warrior. Loss, for a leader. Maybe among the young men a surge of ambition, a lust for power, a desire to achieve a greatness that would match, even exceed, the exploits of this person being buried.
They were certainly not buried in disgrace. Because the common tomb contains valued possessions – stone axes, pendants, pretty crystals, beads…
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The most recent burial is a child. Not inside the dolmen itself, but in front. About 1700 B.C., a thousand years or so after the last of the ceremonial burials.
I suppose it could have been a ritual sacrifice to appease some vengeful god. But I don\’t think so. If the gods had demanded that kind of sacrifice, there would have been other examples, not this one small body.
So I believe it must have been done out of love, and loss.
And I can only imagine the strength of emotions that prompted that child\’s parents or family to choose that place. To come back to a site untouched for 40 generations, perhaps protected by taboos, but that still had special significance. To lay their child to rest for the last time, there, in the company of the greatest of their ancestors…
In truth, I can imagine their feelings. I can imagine the desperate need to offer one last act of devotion to their child. They felt such love that only this place could do justice to their sense of loss. Because the place had been hallowed by those emotions for 2,000 years.
And I realized that I know those grieving parents. Because I have felt the same emotions.
And suddenly the veil of centuries that isolates me is torn apart, split down the middle. It ripples, fades, and dissipates like fog in summer sunshine.
Languages, technologies, social customs – these all change. But we humans don\’t.
Sitting on a slab of ancient weathered limestone on the Burren, I feel a deep and surprising kinship with those people 6000 years ago. They are me, and I am them. Amen.
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Copyright © 2006 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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