Wednesday, August 19, 2009

IN GALLARUS ORATORY by Seamus Heaney




You can still feel the community pack
This place: it’s like going into a turfstack,
A core of old dark walled up with stone
A yard thick. When you’re in it alone,
You might have dropped, a reduced creature,
To the heart of the globe. No worshipper
Would leap up to his God off this floor.

Founded there like heroes in a barrow,
They sought themselves in the eye of their King
Under the black weight of their own breathing.
And how he smiled on them as out they came,
The sea a censer and the grass a flame.

Having been inside this oratory, I can relate to the feelings of constriction and diminution experienced in this “core of old dark.” It was built around the 6-9th century AD on the Dingle Peninsula, one of the most beautiful places on the planet. Once you step out, you realize that THIS is where one can experience the divine. The divine can be found in Nature not within an always second-rate, man-made structure.

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