The Gallarus Oratory is something of a tourist mecca, but at night the place is isolated and dark, far from human habitation. From the door of the oratory, one looks down a sloping mile of the fields to the twinkling lights of the village of Ballydavid on Smerwick Harbor.

The sun had long set when I arrived, although at that latitude in summer the twilight never quite fades from the northern horizon. It was a moonless night, ablaze with stars, Jupiter brightest of all. Meteors occasionally streaked the sky, and satellites cruised more stately orbits. Inside, I snuggled into a back corner of the oratory, tucked my knees under my chin, and waited. I could see nothing but the starlit outline of the door, not even my hand in front of my face. The silence was broken only by the low swish of my own breath.

As the hours passed, I began to feel a presence, a powerful sensation of something or someone sharing that empty darkness. I am not a mystical person , but I knew that I was not alone, and I could imagine those hermit monks of the seventh century sharing the same intense conviction of “someone in the room”. At last, I was spooked to the point that I abandoned my interior corner and went outside.

A night of exceptional clarity! Stars spilling into the sea. And in the north, as if as reward for my lonely vigil, the aurora borealis danced toward the zenith. How can I describe what I saw ? Rays of silver light streaming up from the sea, as if from some enchanted Oz just over the horizon, shimmering columns of fairy radiance. As I watched  from the doorway of oratory, I remembered something the nineteenth-century explorer Charles Francis Hall wrote about watching the aurora from the Arctic: “ My first thought was, ‘Among the gods there is none like unto Thee, O Lord; neither are there any works like unto thy works!’....We looked, we SAW, we TREMBLED.”

Hall knew he was watching a natural physical phenomenon, not a miracle, but his reaction suggests the power of the aurora even on a mind trained in the methods of science. What then did the monks of Gallarus think of the aurora, 1300 years ago, at a time when the supernatural was the explanation of choice for exceptional phenomena?

The New Story is the product of thousands of years of human curiosity, observation, experimentation, and creativity. It is an evolving story, not yet finished. Perhaps it will never be finished. It is a story that begins with an explosion from a seed of infinite energy. The seed expands and cools. Particles form, then atoms of hydrogen and helium. Stars and galaxies coalesce from swirling gas. Stars burn and explode, forging heavy elements - carbon, nitrogen, oxygen - and hurl them into space. New stars are born, with planets made of heavy elements. On one planet near a typical star in a typical galaxy life appears in the form of microscopic self-replicating ensembles of atoms. Life evolves, over billions of years, resulting in ever more complex organisms. Continents move. Seas rise and fall. The atmosphere changes. Millions of species of life appear and become extinct. Others adapt, survive, and spill out progeny. At last, human consciousness appears. One species experiences the ineffable and wonders what it means, and makes up stories - of invisible spirits who harbor in darkness, of gods who light up the sky in answer to our prayers - eventually  making up the New Story.

The New Story has important advantages over all the stories that have gone before:

It works - It works so well that it has become the irreplaceable basis of technological civilization. We test the New Story in every way we can, in its particulars and in its totality. We build giant particle accelerating machines to see what happened in the first hot moments of the Big Bang. We put telescopes into space to look for the radiation of the primeval explosion. With spectroscopes and radiation detectors we analyze the composition of stars and galaxies and compare them to our theories to the origin of the world. Always and in every way we try to prove the story wrong. When the story fails, we change it.

It is a universal story - Although originally a product of Western culture, it has become the story of all educated peoples throughout the world; scientists of all cultures, religions and political persuasions exchange ideas freely and apply the same criteria of verification and falsification. Like most children, I was taught that my story - Adam and Eve, angels, miracles, incarnation, heaven, hell and all the rest - was the “ true story”, and that all others were false. Sometimes our so-called “true” stories gave us permission to hurt those who lived by other stories. The New Story, by its universality, helps put the old animosities behind us.

It is a story that emphasizes the connectedness of all people and all things - Some of the old stories, such as the one I was taught as a child, placed humankind outside of space and time, gifted us with unworldly spirit, and gave us dominion over the millions of Earth’s other creatures. The New Story places us squarely in a cosmic unfolding of space and time, and teaches our biological affinity to all humanity. We are ephemeral beings, inextricably related to all of life, to the planet itself, and even to the lives of stars.

It is a story that asserts our responsibility for our own lives and the future of the planet - In the New Story, no omniscient deity intervenes at will in the creation, answers prayers, or leads all things to a predetermined end. We are on our own, in the immensity of creation, with an awesome responsibility to use our talents wisely.

It is a story that reveals a universe of unanticipated complexity, beauty and dimension - The God revealed by the New Story is not the paltry personal projection of ourselves who attracted and bedeviled our ancestors. It is, in the words of Jesuit theologian David Toolan, “ the Unnamable One/Ancient of the Days of the mystics, of whom we can only speak negatively (not this, not that), a ‘wholly other’ hidden God of Glory,” or in the felicitous phrase of novelist Nikos Kazantzakis, “the dread essence beyond logic.”