Lessons from Ireland 5000 years ago

by Sarah-Leah Pimentel · September 15, 2016

As I write this, you’ll find me in Ireland. It is a beautiful country with a deep sense of the religious. I’m not just talking about the fact that you find a Catholic church with the most incredible religious art on every corner—there is a deep spirituality here that precedes Christianity.

A 5000-year-old burial mound in Ireland (Photo: Sarah-Leah-Pimentel)

A friend took me to see the neolithic 5000-year-old passage tombs at Knowth and Newgrange. These are burial mounds built out of layers of rock — carried many kilometres prior to the invention of the wheel — and earth before the start of the Iron Age. They stand several metres high above the surface of the ground and have not collapsed for five millennia. They are older than Stonehenge and the pyramids.

Many of the large rocks along the outside of the mounds are decorated with spirals, concentric circles, triangles and zigzags. Historians have no idea what these symbols mean because these ancient practices pre-date the oral and written traditions of later civilisations.

However, they agree that these megalithic representations are the oldest forms of art found in Ireland and they appear to have some connection with the sun and the moon, based on the direction of the entrances of these mounds in relation to the summer and winter solstices.

As impressive as all of this might be, what touched me was the importance that these ancient people gave to their dead. I don’t imagine they would have gone to so much effort to create these structures if this final rite of passage held no significance.

To me, this suggests that they may have seen the cycle of life extending beyond death and may have believed in some kind of afterlife and a higher power.

This made me think of the ancient traditions in Africa that also preceded the arrival of Christianity. The role of the ancestors and the existence of a supreme being also testify to the deep spirituality of the peoples of Africa who placed their faith in something greater than themselves.

This is the case with most of the traditions of the ancient civilisations. These cultures had no contact with one another, and yet, the animist religions share a common belief in the life after death and a supreme life that is greater than human endeavour.

What, you might ask, does all this have to do with our faith today? Pre-historic religions have now mostly been associated with the myths of the ancient world. Well, what strikes me most was their reliance on a higher power to order their daily needs — provide rain, a good harvest, deliverance from illness and famine, and safe passage to the afterlife. These people realised that they were not the masters of their own fate and that they could not control the elements.

We have come so far since then. Just tonight I sat on a train and watched how almost everyone was glued to their phones, consuming media of one form or another and fully trusting that the train would soon bring them home. Arriving home, they were likely to stop by the shop to pick up some food and prepare it quickly in a microwave or on the stove. And tomorrow morning, the alarm on their phones will wake them up and begin a new day.

In the globalised world, we no longer have the same reliance on the sun to order our days. Rain or lack thereof might mean only the inconvenience of increased food prices as stores source produce from different places.

Travel is also something that happens almost without us thinking about the human ingenuity that led to its invention in the first place.

We have become so reliant on ourselves that we struggle to see beyond ourselves. We no longer have a “need” to rely on a higher power to give us the basics of our everyday lives. Many of our friends even ridicule us for believing in God, saying that belief in a higher power is only for those who need the comfort of believing that there is something beyond ourselves.

Yet the human spirit thirsts for something more. That is why we constantly feel the desire to build better and faster technologies, find ways to become more efficient.

The criticism of our age is that we perhaps try to become God. But I think it is more than that. Deep down, we know that our human ability has its limits, and so we push it to the extreme. Like the builders of the Tower of Babel in the Old Testament, our generation pushes its intellect and its resourcefulness to the limits of human imagination in an effort to reach that something greater. However, the more we search, the more we become lost in ourselves.

This is where our neolithic ancestors have a lesson for us. Sometimes it is not in the building of the great structures that we touch the higher power. More often, God appears in the waiting.

The Newgrange burial mound fills with light once a year — at sunrise on the day of the winter solstice. When this happens the symbols inside the mound are visible for just a few minutes. And then the inner corridors of the structure return to darkness for another year.

It is only in the quiet of our hearts that we truly encounter God. Sometimes it is a heart that has suffered in the darkness of sorrow, pain or the chill of the world gone cold with hatred. Sometimes it is the stillness of joyful hope that grows day by day to see the revelation of God in our lives and to be united with him in eternity.

Like the people who built the burial chambers at Knowth and Newgrange, we wait for the resurrected Lord who touches our hearts and lights up our days.