Friday, October 19, 2012

Stonehenge


My spiritual experience at Stonehenge was second only to my profound experience at Canterbury.   It was so simple to get to from Salisbury.  I walked over to the bus station, got on the bus, bought a ticket that included entry to the field, and arrived shortly in a parking area.  It seemed so prosaic that I began to think that it might not be a very intense experience.
I have been fascinated by Stonehenge since I first heard about it maybe 30 years ago.  Before leaving home I read a novel called "Stonehenge."   Bernard Cornwell, the author, had studied well the theories about how and why Stonehenge had been built.  He composed an interesting fiction around its building.  I'm convinced, along with most, that it was a temple to the Sun God.  It is a holy place.
In his book "The Experience of God," Raimon Panikkar points out that the sun is accepted universally, even by Catholics, as a symbol for Divinity.  The origin of the word God is Sanskrit, Dyau, which means "day."  It suggests brilliance, light.  Light gives life and makes it possible to see. 
I spent two hours, walking three times around the stone circle: first just taking pictures, then listening to the taped explanation, and finally simply finding God in the stones and in their arrangement.  I felt connected back through 5,000 years to the people, so unlike me, who were in such awe of the Sun that they went to physical extremes to bring the stones from a distance and get them into this arrangement.  This impulse to honor some Ultimate Power seems part of our human makeup.  I was quietly drawn into worship.

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