At Newgrange, some 40 km northwest of Dublin in Ireland, there's a mound of earth, about the size of a football field, raised to the height of a four-story building.
        Unknown people built it, over 5,000 years ago.
        Like the much better known Stonehenge, erected a whole millennium later, those ancient people built this mound as an observatory. A tunnel burrows 60 feet into the heart of the mound. At dawn on the winter solstice, when the sun is at its lowest in the winter sky, the rising sun penetrates right to the end of that tunnel, to illuminate the floor of a cross-shaped chamber.
        That winter solstice must have mattered enormously to those people. They didn't have trucks, or even wheels. But they moved 200,000 tons of earth to bury that chamber. They brought quartz and granite over 100 km for a facing around the mound. They dragged great slabs of flat rock 20 km from a quarry in the opposite direction to build their tunnel.
        Those people recognized that their life, their survival, depended on the warmth of the sun.
        Irish winters can be bitter. Sleet slants down near horizontally. Even sheep bundle up in their thickest coats and turn their woollen butts to the North Atlantic gales.
        Those stone-age inhabitants needed assurance that the waning sun would return, that the great circle of seasons would sweep around once more, that the worst had passed.

Annual sense of awe
        Five thousand years later, we have no idea what kind of religion they believed in. All we know is that they believed enough to create dozens, perhaps hundreds, of these mounds, oriented to the winter solstice.
        As the solstice drew closer, the priests would gather in the pitch black pre-dawn darkness. They would process to the tunnel, and feel their way into the even deeper darkness at the heart of the mound.
        And in that utter darkness, they waited for sunrise.
        Each day, as the sun rose over the horizon, a shaft of light would reach part way up the tunnel.
        Each day, as the solstice grew closer, that shaft of light would filter further along the flagstones lining the tunnel.
        But not until the one day of the year when the sun rose far enough to the south would that finger of light poke all the way into the chamber where the priests sat, waiting, waiting…
        Can you imagine their sense of awe – indeed, of rejoicing, of celebration?
        Then, perhaps, you can also imagine the awe of the shepherds in the fields of Bethlehem, hearing the angel chorus in the night. The confusion of the disciples, seeing their leader transfigured on a hilltop. The wonder of the women climbing the hill to a tomb, and finding it open.
        Somewhere, I saw a quotation: “Religion depends on our sense of wonder. Take away the awe, and the world simply becomes a marketplace.”
        I have felt the awe, in Newgrange. And having felt it, I can recognize it elsewhere.