Last Sunday actually felt as summer holidays should - carefree and easy going under a sunny blue sky.
We spent the afternoon with family at a holiday cottage outside Dundrum and it was rather glorious. Sounds of kids playing in the garden and the men's tennis final in the living room, we ate barbecued burgers and messy marshmallows. A couple of us wandered up a lane next to the house leading into the fields overlooking the Murlough area. The Mourne mountains were visible through the trees and it was all pretty blissful in fact.
And then we took the kids, big and small, to the park, followed by Brennans ice cream in the village where we all decided to take a look up another lane, this time one signposted to the castle. I've lived my whole life in NI and I don't think I have once visited Dundrum Castle!
We swung the cars into the carpark, everyone spilling out with their drippy ice creams and every single one of us, right down to the six year old, exclaimed, 'wow!' when we saw the view.
The whole bay lies before you, the estuarine bends of the water, the curve of the land leading out to sea and the heavy, dark foot of the Mourne mountains over to the right, it is a sight to stun.
Climbing up into the castle ruins, the kids ran like wild rabbits about the grass, disappearing here and there, popping up in overgrown nooks and crannies. The views were even better if you had the courage to clamber up the narrow stone steps to the top of the wall. It made you glad to be alive.
All it takes is a change of perspective to open up a landscape, a movement from here to there. It's movement that starts with curiosity, a desire to see something you haven’t seen before. You notice a lane or a signpost, it leads you in an upwards direction and so you decide to follow it.
From a height, our perspective changes, it broadens out to take in a vista that we couldn't see before. We are suddenly afforded the opportunity to enjoy beauty that was already there but we were unable to appreciate the extent of it.
And it made me wonder about what steps could help us see the beauty of God in new expansive ways. Scripture talks often about God drawing people to his mountain. It's an important theme. God draws us upwards so that we can see the beauty of holiness, to a place where the intake of our breath is itself worship.
What stirring of spiritual curiosity might make us aware of signposts that point us to new revelations of God. Where are the hidden lanes, the narrow paths, the burning bushes even? Will we join with the people of Isaiah 2:3 and say,
'Come, lets climb God's mountain.'
If we are climbing the heights of God, our perspective will change. We will be no less aware of the world's atrocities, injustices and inequalities but we will be more aware of how beauty still exists in all its being-redeemed and still-to-be-fully-redeemed glory, for
'Zion is the source of revelation.'
It is the place where we will be taught and transformed.
'He'll show us the way he works so we can live the way we're made.'
It is the place where God reveals himself, the essence of beauty.
