Going Back

Last weekend I was on retreat, one which, for a change, I was not leading. The four members of the Anglican Schools Office staff, of which I am one, were ensconced in a comfortable old house set in 5 hectares of grounds at Doctor's Point. I had used this house as a place of retreat some time before. During that first retreat, I had read Beginning to Pray by Anthony Bloom, in which he says that

To meet God means to enter into 'the cave of the tiger' -it is not a pussycat you meet - it's a tiger. The realm of God is dangerous. You must enter into it and not just seek information about it.

I had also taken a photograph I was pleased with. This one:

So early on Saturday morning I decided to try and reproduce the shot. I walked out of the house and up the hill but found it wasn't going to be as easy as I'd thought. I did some quick arithmetic and realised that it was fourteen (14!) years since I had taken that first photograph, and that in the meantime somebody had made the hill steeper and, that the trees and shrubs beside the road were fourteen years taller. I couldn't see over them to the view beyond.

I sweated and puffed my way to the top, and by standing on tiptoes on small clumps of turf beside gaps in the foliage and craning precariously I managed to get some images. Not the ones I wanted, but the ones that were there.

The tree is the same, and no one seems to have moved that barge thing in a decade and a half. The rest of the picture changed by the minute.

As I walked back down the hill, I thought about the last fourteen years: the most fraught, the hardest, the most challenging and the richest, fullest, most gobsmackingly beautiful years of my life. I thought of those elements which were constant, and all that had changed. The tiger had done his work well. I had known, between visits to this house, death and resurrection, and so walked back to sit with my colleagues in newness of life around a warming log fire.

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