Before Scripture, There Was Sunrise

With a Guided Meditation For Summer Solstice

Thousands of people flocked to a remote area of the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England this morning to participate in an annual miracle.

At dawn on this longest day of the year, the first rays of the morning sun once again touched the Heel Stone (hele-stone), the solitary sighting stone standing outside the great circle of Stonehenge. Rising nearly sixteen feet above the ground, it may seem unremarkable compared to the towering trilithons at Stonehenge's center. Yet it is the stone upon which the entire monument depends.

On the morning of the Summer Solstice, as the sun rises on the northeastern horizon, its first rays appear directly above the Heel Stone and shine into the heart of Stonehenge. Thousands of years ago, the ancient builders of this holy site carefully positioned the monument so that the Heel Stone would mark one of the most significant moments in the solar year, the return of the light.

Built over thousands of years beginning around 3,100 BCE, Stonehenge was more than a monument, it was and still remains a reminder that the boundary between heaven and earth is porous, if it exists at all. The Ancient Britons gathered around the Heel Stone at Summer Solstice because they understood something we’ve long forgotten: Nature is our first and truest spiritual teacher. Every dawn is a kind of genesis, the world’s first morning is repeated with every new sunrise.

Across millennia the Britons, Beaker People, Iron Age Celts, Angles, and Saxons gathered here to hold space with the Sacred. Different names, different cultures, but a shared instinct: to watch the world closely enough to recognize divinity in all things. They learned this by paying attention, by walking humbly, and bowing often. They watched the rivers rise and recede, how life gives way to death and resurrection, how seeds disappear into the earth and return transformed, and how winter never has the last word. For them, the natural world was not a stage set for human existence, but the primary place of revelation. The wind, the sun, the stones, the rivers, the sky—these were not symbols pointing elsewhere, but expressions of the sacred itself. Creation was not merely evidence of God’s existence; it was the very place where Her presence was most encountered.

To live attentively in such a world was to know that there is no separation between the spiritual and the material—only different ways of naming the same reality, for Creation itself is God’s first word, the original revelation from which all later revelations of the sacred arises.

Think about it like this: regardless of whether you believe the universe is 6,000 or 14 billion years old, the Bible is a rather recent invention. Anthropologists tell us the earliest Homo sapien fossils date back approximately 300,000 years. Meaning? The human race has lived without the Bible for 99.4% of our existence. Thankfully, “Sacred writings are bound in two volumes—that of creation and that of Holy Scripture,” wrote 13th century theologian Thomas Aquinas.

Before the Bible was written, there was already the first “Word of God”: Creation itself. Maybe this is what the Apostle Paul meant when he wrote, “Ever since God created the world, God’s everlasting power and deity — however invisible — have been there for the mind to see in the things God has made.”

Our tragic disconnection with Creation has been one of the chief means by which we have not only domesticated spirituality, but sent ourselves into a self-imposed exile from the Divine. In our attempts to dominate and exploit creation instead of cultivate it, we’ve de-sacralized the dwelling place of God. The Church has mistakenly compounded our spiritual domestication by splitting the world into sacred and secular, spiritual and physical. In so doing, Christianity has sanctioned the sacred, controlling when, where, and how to experience God, conditioning us to look only in certain institutional places for the holy.

But, there is another way.