I first came to St Beuno’s with a question. I had been ordained back in the 1980s and was well into my third decade of ministry - 14 years serving extreme inner-city parishes, one of which was demolished; 14 years serving medium-sized city centre churches; and 6 years serving a large ‘full programme’ suburban church with a large staff, lots of resources and hundreds of volunteers. And alongside that I'd had a range of senior diocesan roles and responsibilities. Maybe I was even beginning to believe that this was what ‘success’ looked like in Christian ministry.
But I didn't really admit how depleted I was. I didn't feel that I was running out of energy exactly, but in that first eight-day retreat at St Beuno’s I had to confront the fact that I was very low on oil. I spent a lot of that retreat, and the next, just sitting on the beach with Jesus in John 21.
Those first two retreats were deeply formative. They brought me face to face with some big questions. I began to see that it was OK – well, essential in fact– to start doing some work on myself. Dolly Parton's great line: ‘find out who you are and then do it on purpose.’ I’d lost the thread somewhere along the way.
The London based priest and spiritual director, Alison Christian, makes the important comment that too many Christians (lay and ordained) spend so much of their time doing what they think is their work for God that they lose their relationship with God. That sounded like me. I hadn't stopped praying; I hadn't stopped reading. But I knew I was on dangerously thin ice.
The big realisation - and the hardest to admit - was that in many ways I was becoming CEO of a medium-sized organisation rather than the pastor, priest, and herald of the kingdom I was still imagining myself to be. Something had to give. A great deal had to change.
And that was where my third visit to St Beuno’s became so significant. It was the last part of a four-month sabbatical. That was my first proper leave in thirty years. As part of it I made the full Spiritual Exercises at St Beuno’s. I'd already been away for three months, catching up on some reading and spending time at Taizé with my family. But mostly spending time alone and in silence. It was like breathing fresh air, drinking clean water. My wife commented that she was beginning to see a version of me she hadn't seen for decades, and that we needed to pay attention to that. It was gradually becoming clear to us that the Lord was leading us on a new stage of the journey.
I took all of that with me into the Spiritual Exercises. It was an extraordinarily luminous experience. If I look back at my notes, yes, of course they trace the ups and downs, but they also describe a sustained and life-changing encounter with the Lord.
I shouldn't have driven home from St Beuno’s afterwards. I was genuinely not safe to drive. I stopped off to have lunch with a friend who remembers it as both a very bizarre encounter but also deeply endearing. I was not myself, or rather I was becoming myself in a new way.
In the months that followed, my wife and I pondered and prayed. A profound sense of call to stillness, silence, and solitude became overwhelming. When I finally admitted what was happening, my spiritual director was completely unsurprised and simply said, ‘you've been heading this way for years.’
So today we find ourselves living in a small village of 1,200 people on the edge of a forest, serving a thriving village church that describes itself as ‘contemplative.’ A community that believes in miracles because they have experienced them; a village whose response to the news that Ofsted was coming was to gather in church for an hour and a half to pray. I work three and a half days a week. My best way of expressing it is that I am a full-time priest and a part-time vicar. I’m not sure that entirely makes sense, but it works for me. It is a very new pattern for me but feels like an extraordinary gift.
Whatever else, and even on the most demanding of days, there is a huge sense of spaciousness, silence, and stillness to the day to day. This place does not feel like retreat but a deeper engagement, and at the deepest level I don't feel so much that I have found myself than that -in the words of Metropolitan Antony - I have been found.
Yes – all of this feels like gift and I am deeply grateful to St Beuno’s for the crucial role its ministry has had in this journey.