Ireland: One Last Look (for now)....

Giant's Causeway, near Bushmills, County Antrim

For now, one last post from Ireland (actually, from Northern Ireland, to be more precise).... 

The picture you see was taken at Giant's Causeway, one of the more stunning geological formations found on the northern coast of Ulster.  This was a longed-for destination for my wife, which had to be scuttled a few years back because of this little thing called a global pandemic.

The mythic stories of the Causeway abound: of Fionn MacCumhaill (Finn McCool), the giant who thought he'd bully his Scottish counterpart, Benandonner.  As with many male myths, there's a lot of chest thumping and bravado – which eventually disappears like fog in the hot summer sun once McCool sees exactly who he's up against.  Wit, as always, wins the day (and saves his Irish hide).

But apart from the tall tales, what's mostly compelling about this National Trust site (along with an ingenious welcoming center that blends in perfectly with the landscape) is the presentation of the tectonic plates that shifted, collided, and drifted apart – over the course of 500 million years.  There was something incredibly humbling about looking at those timelines, when viewed from our ridiculously brief stay on this worldly sphere.

For we are but a nanosecond in Mother Earth's scheme of things.  And if, as we profess and sing, God is the Author of All Time, then taking in these basalt formations as a sort of time capsule gives a vivid illustration of just how vast that creative hand must be.  

We humans build things, write books, try to conquer the air and space, continue to try to unravel the puzzles of our universe.  I wonder, though – are we any less barbaric now than we were when giants were picking fights across the waters? Solve that one for me, if you can.  That would be the true shifting of a tectonic plate, in my humble opinion.

We'll be back in Ireland in a couple of weeks, for yet another wedding at Newman University Church!  In the meantime, our travels take us tomorrow to Amsterdam, to the ingenious people of the Netherlands – the culture that figured out how to raise a nation from the sea....