I WAS taken by surprise the other day. I was sitting outside a café in Belfast, across the road from the Europa Hotel, taking in the sights and sounds of that vibrant city. I had before me a coffee, a lit pipe, and one of those “chocolate twists” that are so tempting, even though you know you shouldn’t.

I was just forming the thought that maybe this was an indulgence too far, and a temptation I should have resisted, when, out of nowhere, or at least from somewhere behind and above me, well out of my field of vision, an enormous seagull suddenly swooped down, neatly picked up my chocolate twist, as yet untouched, and flew away with it! I was speechless, as well as pastry-less.

But, as I took a consolatory draw on my pipe, I wondered whether that sudden seagull, which had disappeared as swiftly as it had arrived, was, in fact, my guardian angel made briefly visible. I have not, alas! always had temptations removed from me the moment that they presented themselves, but I am at least now open to that possibility.

Belfast is proving as attractive, as contradictory, and as lively as ever. I’d never stayed at the Europa before, but I knew its place in the story of the Troubles, and its dubious accolade as “the most bombed hotel in Western Europe”, having suffered — and recovered from — no fewer than 36 bomb attacks.

The place is certainly flourishing now, as is the city in which it is set, and that gives me a kind of hope. After each successive bombing, recovery must have seemed more and more impossible, and folk must have wondered why they swept up broken glass only to have it broken again. Yet sweep it up they did; perhaps some angel of persistence, some bright-winged bringer of dogged resistance was hovering in the wings, the thing with feathers that Emily Dickinson knew:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
And never stops — at all.

I am in Belfast for a week-long conference: “Returning Home: C. S. Lewis, Roots and Transformation”. Naturally, the conference is celebrating Belfast as Lewis’s birthplace, and there have been papers celebrating his Irish roots; but the conference also considers the big themes of longing, pilgrimage, homecoming, and transformation in his work.

And he offers us, of course, so many brilliant images of transformation, of the heart renewed, the body glorified, the hopeless filled with hope. Some of them are simply images of restoration: the boy who becomes a dragon is enabled to become a boy again; but some are more than mere restoration: they are a change from one glory to a greater one, not only for individuals, but for nature herself, glimpses of “that greater glory of which nature is only the first sketch”, as Lewis put it in his address “The Weight of Glory”.

One suggestive image of that is the London cab-horse who is invited to become Fledge, a winged horse, so that he might take the children on their quest. Belfast must have been full of tired old cab-horses in the days of Lewis’s childhood there, but the grown man would share his vision of “the thing with feathers”, the hidden hope in us, the insight that, from the standpoint of heaven, we are all fledglings.

Malcolm Guite is key speaker at the forthcoming one-day event Church Times: Finding Inspiration in the Psalms — 2 October 2025 in York. Full details here.