Connections: Friendship, Stones, and Walls

I inhabit a world of instant connections, or so I believe. Back home in the States almost anywhere I go I can pull out my laptop, turn it on, find an available WiFi network, link to it with little or no problem, and be instantly connected with the internet. I can check my e-mail, access informational websites, Skype with family and friends – in a word, be connected.

Not so Great Britain. Except for the fact that the housekeeper Clovenfords Country Hotel had to keep unplugging the router to plug in her vacuum cleaner, there was no problem my first lodgings. The next evening, however, I discovered that there is no connection at all on Lindisfarne. Holy Island simply seems unwired. There times my phone couldn’t even send a text message. Now in Whitby, I’m finding that although the B&B where I’m staying advertises “free WiFi”, its router keeps cutting in and out (without the excuse of an interfering house keeper) – good thing its free! I’d be really angry if I was paying for this. (Note: The next day things improved immensely – I actually think the problem was with the ISP because my computer kept showing that I was connected to the router, but the router wasn’t connecting to the internet.)

This matter of “being connected” brings me to the sorts of places I’ve visited the past few days – the Duddo Stone Circle (2200-1400 BCE), Hadrian’s Wall (c. 120 CE), Bede’s Monastery of St. Paul at Jarrow (681 and c. 12th Cent. CE), Lindisfarne Priory (687 and 1150 CE). These are ancient places of varying purposes but all, in a sense, are monuments to human connectedness, our connections to one another and our connections to the divine.

No one is quite sure what the Duddo Stone Circle is all about. It may have marked a burial site, but that cannot be proven because Victorian and early 20th Century excavations disturbed any cremation chamber that may have been there. It may have been a religious site of some sort, but who can tell. It is dated to the Bronze Age principally because of its size. Archeologists tell us that the final phase of stone circle building occurred during the early to middle Bronze Age (c.2200–1500 BCE) which saw the construction of small circles like Duddo, probably by family groups or clans rather than the larger population groups need to build the larger circles and henges.

The purpose of stone circles and henges is forever lost to us. They may have been religious; they have been astrological or astronomical observatories of a sort; they have been talismanic. Still, whatever the Duddo Stone Circle’s purpose and whoever its builders, it remains today as a monument to community and cooperation, to the human need to connect that which is greater than the individual. Though they have fallen been stood again over time, there they remain perhaps 4,000 years after their initial placement on that hillside in Northumbria.

Hadrian’s Wall was built between 122 and 128 CE right across the island of Great Britain; it is 73 modern miles long! About 70 percent of this fortification (more than 50 miles) is made of squared stone outer walls with a fill of rubble and clay between them; these walls were 10 feet thick and 20 feet high! The remainder (mainly west of the River Irthing) was made of turf stacked 20 feet thick and 10 feet high. Forts were built every five to ten miles and turrets or guard posts every mile. It was built by the Roman Legions and they did it, including the forts and turrets, in six years! I visited Housesteads Roman Fort near Hexham and was fascinated by the orderliness of its layout and massiveness of the section of the wall to which it is connected. The wall and its forts are monuments to organization and communication, it nothing else, and sections of it are still standing nearly 1900 years later!

However, the ruins of Hadrian’s Wall are not simply the remains of a secular, military fortification of massive proportions. There is evidence that Hadrian believed it was his duty by “divine instruction” to build the wall to protect the Roman Empire. Furthermore, along the wall there are worship sites. A goodly number of Rome’s Legionaries were Mithraists, followers of a mystery religion which competed with Christianity in the early centuries and with the Christian Church (after made official by Constantine) eventually wiped out. Along the wall are evidences of Mithraic worship sites called Mithraea. One such Mithraeum is found at Carrawburgh near Housesteads Roman Fort. (For some reason it has been given the Celtic-based name Brocolitia, which probably means “badger hole”.

The monastery and the priory were founded by the Celtic missionaries from Ireland at about the same time and renewed five hundred years later. Lindisfarne and Jarrow were re-established as monastic communities by Benedictines from Durham Cathedral in the 12th Century and, if not for the savagery of Henry the Eighth’s disestablishment of the monasteries in the 15th Century, they might still be standing and might still be functional communities today. Like Duddo and Hadrian’s Wall before them, the still-standing ruins of these monasteries are testament to power of human connection and of human desire to connect to that which is greater.

While the Celtic ethos is certainly community-based, as the nature of the Celtic monastic communities of Ireland and those in Britain and Scotland in places like Lindisfarne, Jarrow, and Iona show, the hymns in Dantá Dé do not reflect that. The hymns Ní Ógáin selected are all, for the most part, hymns of individual prayer. However, there is one hymn which refers to God as “King of the friends,” or as Douglas Hyde translated it, “King of friendship.” The notes describe is as a morning hymn and as folk music (ceol na ndaoine, literally “music of the people”) “through L Grattan-Flood, Mus. Doc.” This is the Gaeilge original:

A Rí na gcarad, a Athair an tSlánuightheor’,
Fág in mo sheasamh mé ar maidin drádhachóir;
Déan-sa mo theagasg gan mearbhal, a Shlánuightheoir,
Agus sábháil m’anam ar cheangal an Aidhbheirseor’.

A Rí cruinne, do bheir loinnir ‘sa ngréin go moch,
Dílte troma agus toradh ‘na ndhiaidh go grod,
Innsim Duit-se mo chulpa agus féachaim is glaodhaim Ort,
Agus ná leig tuitim níos fuide bham féin san olc.

And this is a versified translation which Ní Ógáin attributes to Dr. Hyde:

O King of friendship, our Saviour’s Father art Thou;
O keep me erect, until evening shall cool my brow.
O teach and control, lest I unto sin should bow,
And save Thou my soul from the foe who follows me now.

O King of the world, Who lightest the sun’s bright ray,
Who movest the rains that ripen the fruit on the spray;
I look unto Thee, my transgressions before Thee I lay,
O keep me from falling deeper and deeper away.

Friendship, community, connectedness … these are the things that last and those human works which result from them last, as well. God is the King of the Friends, the King of Friendship. If we trust in God and in one another, the things we accomplish will be kept erect like the Standing Stones at Duddo. They will not be inconsistent, like internet connections. They will not fall “deeper and deeper away” but stand like Hadrian’s Wall and the walls of the ancient monasteries, testaments to the power of friendship and of faith.