Hemmed in by beauty

I started to write this post a week ago, after returning from my retreat - but then I got waylaid by rainbows, and busyness. But a week later, here I am again, picking up where I left off...

I've made my retreat at Llannerchwen, our retreat centre near Brecon, almost every year. It is a place of beauty: a wild, uncultivated, almost casual beauty, which heedlessly scatters fallen tree trunks and grasses across each path, alongside brambles interspersed with wildflowers, and ivy creeping across the remains of trees. There's the hugeness of stunning mountain ranges and sunsets, and the tininess of a bee nuzzling into a flower. And there's brokenness and decay; gaping holes and jagged edges, and somehow there is beauty in all this, and so much which speaks to me of God. I bring my bible, and a couple of books, but time and again it is the landscape, the streams and stumps which become my texts and inspiration, leading to further prayer and reflection - leading me back, too, to scripture, and to poetry and song.

And so, although it's a couple of years since I was last there, there was an instant familiarity, not only in the journey, but also in the arriving; in the well-remembered views, and the surrounding beauty. A familiarity... and a newness. I have stayed in the cabin I occupied many times; know its view of those distant mountains, their changelessness and their changing lights and shadows, so well... But had I ever noticed the also changeless vista from the other side, from the kitchen window, which is of hills and lush greenery? And that little window to the side, looking directly onto trees, so that all one sees is green... Yes, I'd looked out of it before; but this time, I felt as if I'd noticed the trees beyond it for the first time.

On my first full day, I sat at my door, looking out at this view...

... And I thought of the loveliness all around, and Truly, I thought, I am hemmed in by beauty... and in a moment knew that this is really being hemmed in by God. The psalmist expressed it thus: You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me... (Psalm 139.5), but others have described it differently. I thought of Julian of Norwich being enfolded in love, and St Patrick surrounding himself with Christ's presence and protection; of hymns and prayers which speak of being encircled by God, or of being held... And I gazed across at those faraway Beacons, and the wide sky above, and knew myself to be hemmed in and held, enfolded and encircled, by a vaster, wider, fuller and infinitely lovelier Love than anything I could see. 

And thus, surrounded by God, and by that beauty, ever ancient and ever new, I began my retreat, in which the landscape did indeed become my daily text - and in which, in between daily walks, I spent a lot of time just sitting and gazing at this view. 

We're already a week into the Season of Creation. Wherever you may be, whether your landscape be urban or rural, coastal or midlands, how does it speak to you of the God who enfolds and hems you in with the beauty which is Love...?