Pigsty ponder

Llannerchwen - where I was on retreat last month - used to be a smallholding, consisting of two stone buildings, which have since been adapted. The old cottage is now two self-contained units for retreatants and the former cowshed is a small, simple chapel. (As an aside - there's something wonderfully right and incarnational about the Eucharistic presence being in such a space!) I made my retreat in the adjoining hermitage, which I had stayed in a couple of times before, for two or three nights - but this was the first time I'd been there for a week-long retreat.

And on my first evening I remembered having heard or read somewhere that it used to be the pigsty. The thought returned to me from time to time during the retreat. Pigsty - we use that word, often with hyperbole and drama, to speak of a dirty, untidy room; a byword for mess, squalor and a lack of cleanliness. And I thought too of the Prodigal Son in today's Gospel - and of the parable's first audience - for whom a pigsty would have meant the absolute nadir, the rock-bottom lowest depths into which anyone could irredeemably fall.

But not so my pigsty for the week! Now it's Ty Capel - the house of the chapel: spacious and comfortable, with its own little patio, and unhindered views of sunsets and ponderous clouds, and swifts swirling and swooping in the wide-open sky.

And here I sat with God, who I know will never recoil from whatever mess or muckiness I end up in; God, who graces the shabby and disordered as much as the pristine and perfect. And a God who, unlike the father in today's parable, doesn't stay at home wistfully scanning the horizon. Instead - filled with desire and longing - he comes to find us in our pigsties, seeks us out in our messes, and tenderly raises us from whatever bogs we're mired in. St Augustine wrote that it is love that asks, that seeks, that knocks, that finds, and that is faithful to what it finds - and surely that is true of the One who is all Love! That, at least, has been my experience and conviction over many years... I hope it's yours too.