In 2012 I was searching the web for somewhere to go on retreat and St Beuno’s grabbed my attention. I had never heard of it but I applied anyway about two months in advance, only to be told that the retreat when I was available was full. I was surprised! Two weeks before the retreat was due to begin, I was offered a cancellation place, so I concluded that God had an appointment for me after all and plucked up all my courage and accepted it. I needn’t have worried. When I arrived I was warmly welcomed by Sister Anne, who made me feel very at ease. It wasn’t long before I began to experience what a thin place St Beuno’s is, with several days of quite unusual (for me at that time) joy, before I was challenged to give up something precious, which I had not seen coming. I was caring for ageing parents at the time and the retreat also gave me a framework of understanding that God was very aware of my circumstances, which enabled me to ‘hang in there’ through the ensuing few years. Within fifteen months of that retreat I had suffered four very significant bereavements in the space of six months.
Five years later I was ready to return for more. This time I booked a year in advance! I was given the passage about the crippled woman, through which I got in touch with a lot of anger towards God for not having healed one of the people I had lost, which I directed God’s way via a clay figure of Jesus and the labyrinth. Faced with how murderous my heart was, I was challenged to repent. The result was that God set me free from a spirit of rejection, which was nothing short of miraculous. A year later I was back and was given the same passage. I wasn’t too pleased! I figured I’d been there, done that already! Thankfully, my resistance was steadfastly countered, so I took myself into the chapel and this time it became about me, as I acted out the parable and went forward to ask Jesus to heal me. Nothing apparently happened. It was only after I arrived home that I realised that that prayer had been answered in a quite amazing way during the eight days that I was at St Beuno’s, as the Holy Spirit touched a very damaging memory dating back to when I was three years old. The glory goes to God, as it was Jesus who paid the price for any healing to be possible. I also owe a huge thank you to all three retreat guides, who helped me to stay focussed and refused to panic when I was struggling not to do so, faced with humanly speaking impossible situations. It felt as though the battles had been won in intercession on my behalf before I even arrived at St Beuno’s and God’s healing was available to be received off a plate. All three retreats were amazing, life-changing times.
Early in 2017 the thought ‘The Father Heart of God for Answering Prayer, seen through the lens of Jesus responding to those who approached him and reflecting to them the heart of God the Father, came to me one day out of the blue. I thought it was an inspiration for a talk, but a search for relevant passages in Matthew’s Gospel quickly revealed that it would have needed to be a very long talk! Instead it became a series of seminars focussed on Jesus’ relationships with different groups of people. The seminars never happened either, so having translated the passages, written comments and devised questions for discussion, to which the comments provided answers, I trialled the individual sessions with a Bible study group, once a week on zoom during Covid. They turned out to need many more questions than I had originally prepared. We also decided that we needed to actually pray as well as talk about prayer, so having discussed what we had read, we entered each passage week by week Ignatian style and shared the results. I was frequently surprised to find that I saw things about Jesus that I had missed up until that point, so I took to journaling my observations. The group persuaded me that I had a book on my hands, so I incorporated my observations at the end of each session in the hopes of encouraging others to keep a journal and to be ‘real’ with God. The book is now available on Amazon under the title God’s Heart for Answering Prayer, by J. H. Atkinson.