“We do not want merely to see beauty, though God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

C.S. Lewis ‘The Weight of Glory’

I have just been on retreat. It was at the Benedictine Abbey of Glenstal in County Limerick. I stayed in one of the hermitages called a ‘God Pod’ about one kilometre from the abbey. It is always my hope that I will get something out of a retreat, that I will gain some sort of insight. I was getting much walking and sleeping done – but no insight. I had taken many books with me to read and my notepad for writing, but barely touched them.

The hermitage had a comfy armchair and a pouf which I positioned in a corner of the room. With the corner window blinds up, and the rest closed, it felt like a cosy place to drink my morning coffee and to ponder. One of the monks had told me that often on retreat, sleep needs to be caught up on and that this is a good thing in itself. Whilst I could accept this on one level, I still felt dissatisfied.

I can get trammelled into having things a certain way – not being open to change once I have set my mind on something. On the penultimate morning of my stay I stood by the kitchen sink waiting for the kettle to boil. The first light of day started to peak through the blinds. I had been missing something. Inspired I threw open all the blinds and repositioned the armchair to the centre of the room, so that I could take in the view from all the windows. The swirling clouds glowed differing shades of orange and yellow, hovering above the skyline of treetops from the distant forest. The darkness was fading and the scene became clearer and clearer. What a glorious hour spent in meditation and drinking coffee! I couldn’t remember the last time that I had spent so long just watching the sun rise. Words can never express fully the beauty of creation…how much more the beauty of the creator and his presence to me in that moment.

I think I needed to stay in a hermitage called a ‘God Pod’. I think I may have been trying to put God in a Pod with my expectations of revelations from books and the wisdom of sages. Was I not allowing God to be who he is in all his glory? The creator and impetus behind all that is? To encounter this I had to give up my agenda, my control.

And so I didn’t get the planned wisdom I had hoped for from reading books or writing reflective prose. But maybe I received so much more than I could have possibly imagined.

God came to us to share our human experience. It is in these human experiences that we encounter the living presence of God himself. ‘Whilst shepherds watched their flocks by night all seated on the ground. The angel of the Lord came down and glory shone around!’ …let the glory shine!

Keep watching and waiting and be amazed!