Welcome to the Loved Called Gifted podcast. This is your place to come for musings about spirituality, identity and purpose. I'm your host, Catherine Cowell.

When I was trying to think about what to talk about on this podcast, my eyes were drawn to a plaque that I have in my house. On it, it has these words, "Bidden or unbidden, God is present." The first time I saw a plaque like this, and the one that I've got is one that I bought to look like the one that I saw, was in the gift shop of Southern Cathedral in London in 2005. I'd been in London on a work trip and was spending a little bit of time by myself. I'd gone round Borough Market and then thought, "Oh, there's a cathedral." I didn't know there was a cathedral here. So I had a wander round Southwalk Cathedral and I thought it was quite nice. But I hadn't particularly had any spiritual moments. And then I walked into the gift shop. Not the place which is usually where the spiritual encounter happens. Usually that's the bit that you wander past quite quickly, thinking, "Oh no, they've commercialised it all." But there I was in the gift shop and there was this plaque and carved into the slate were the words, "Bidden or unbidden, God is present." And for some reason that really touched me. I even thought, "Oh, I think maybe I could buy it." And then I looked at the price tag and I thought that's quite a lot of money.

And no, I won't. And then over the following weeks, those words became really, really important to me. So a number of things had all kind of happened at the same time. One was that my first husband and I had opened our home for 24/7 prayer. And I don't know if you remember the 24/7 prayer movement, it's still around now. But the idea was that you would open a space and that space would be available for people to come and spend time with God, 24 hours a day for a period of weeks. Or maybe just for one day, it really depended what people felt they wanted to do. And the encouragement was to try and make sure that there was somebody in the space praying 24 hours a day. We weren't quite as firm about trying to make sure that we covered all 24 hours, but we really felt that it would be right to open our home. And over a number of weeks, people came and spent some time in our house just chilling out with God really. What had been quite remarkable to us was that in the process of setting up this space for prayer, suddenly something about the space where we were had changed.

So what went from feeling like a fairly ordinary house in some mysterious way suddenly became a place of encounter. And I remember we'd had a friend around to help us change one of our bedrooms into sort of a prayer space. You know the kind of thing with sort of pebbles and arty stuff and things that might encourage you to pray. She was quite artistic and there were bits of cloth everywhere. And then once she'd finished setting up the space, there was this profound sense that God was there.

And then a couple of weeks in, I went on this trip to London and during my time away, I'd had a phone call from Andy, my husband at the time, to say that he thought he was seeing double. And he wondered if it was just that he was tired and he had a headache. And I thought, "Oh gosh, that sounds a bit serious."
So when I got home from my trip, having been to the work thing, having wandered around Southwark Cathedral and had an encounter with God in the gift shop, I came home and we decided that actually seeing double wasn't a normal thing and we should sort of do something about it.
The upshot of that was that Andy spent about five weeks in hospital having his brain investigated and it turned out that there was something growing in his brain. Never a good thing.
You don't want something growing in your brain. For a while, we thought that maybe it was cancerous and perhaps this was the end of things. It turned out that it wasn't cancerous but it was growing inconveniently and he was suffering from pain a lot and then there was a process of sorting all of those things out.

The other thing which had occurred was that in the process of opening our home for people to come and pray, we had managed to really upset the minister of the church that we were part of, which meant that it became impossible for us to stay there and that was really sudden and actually quite traumatic if you've ever been through that kind of situation.

I think one of the things is that when you're part of a church and you're really passionately part of a church, you end up giving an awful lot of yourself to those people and to that place and when suddenly you find yourself unwelcome, that comes as quite a shock.

So one of the things I think that shifted for me spiritually in that time is that in the process of setting up our prayer room, you can imagine we were thinking about having a space in our house where people were praying 24 hours a day. We were going to do quite a bit of that praying. We knew that we wouldn't necessarily be able to cover all of those hours but there was a sense of intention and a sense of needing to work, I guess, to be with God.
And then I found myself in a situation where actually life was requiring quite a lot of emotional energy and suddenly instead of feeling that I had got the energy to give to my relationship with God, that I had got the energy to seek God and to do the things which were kind of spiritually good if you like, I was in a space where that was really quite difficult to do. It wasn't feasible to do the kind of searching for God and begging God to be with me that I had sometimes done in my kind of charismatic youth, I guess, and in the days and weeks running up to this moment.

So there we were with a prayer space. There I was with an ill husband who was now in hospital and exhausted and fielding lots and lots of phone calls from people who wanted to know how he was, all of which have made me a little bit more reticent to bombard people with messages and phone calls when difficult things are going on because I learnt both the preciousness of people's care and concern and desire to contact and also the enormous burden that there is sometimes when lots and lots of people are wanting to know what's going on.

So that phrase, 'bidden or unbidden, God is present' became really, really important to me. And I ended up making, I sat in our prayer room and I made just out of a piece of paper with a felt tip pen something a little bit similar to what I had seen which said, 'Bidden or unbidden, God is here'. That to me at the time was a huge comfort because I knew that it didn't matter if I was making lots and lots of effort. It was just a real assurance from God that God was there. God is here. And there were quite a lot of times when my prayer simply consisted of one word, 'bidden'. In other words I was saying, 'I know that you're going to be here anyway and I am glad of it and I welcome it'.

Looking back to when we set up our prayer room, I think one of the things that God was showing us in that moment of encounter that I had once we had set it up was that the welcome was already there from God. It was almost like the Holy Spirit was saying, 'I am celebrating that you have decided to set aside this time and I'm already here. You might not have noticed it but I'm already here'. There are particular Christian traditions which really emphasise the idea of seeking God's presence and asking God to be there.

There is a song, I had a conversation with Godfrey Birtill quite a long time ago now on the podcast, and one of his songs that we spoke about has these words in it, 'There is no need to press in, I am already here'. And there are some churches in which this language of pressing in, drawing close to God is quite prominent. The idea is that we should be seeking God's presence, asking God to be here, begging God to come. And what I have learnt more and more over the last few years I think is that actually God is already present. I don't think that means that there is no value to saying to God, 'Please come', but I think that it's a little bit like the language that we use around the sunrise and the sunset. We know that the way that things work is that the Earth rotates. So the Sun is kind of the still point and doesn't really move, whereas the Earth turns on its axis and as the Earth turns we get to see the Sun and then when we are in the shadow of the Earth we don't see the Sun and what we refer to that is sunrise and sunset. And what we experience is this sense that the Sun starts at one side of the sky and from our perspective it moves all the way across to the other side and then it sets. We know that that's not what's happening.

And I think similarly there are times when it is really helpful to invite God to be somewhere and it's a little bit like that language of sunrise and sunset. God isn't really turning up somewhere that God hasn't already been. But for us, perceptually, sometimes it feels like that and I think sometimes in the course of praying and asking God to come we become ready to become more aware of God's presence wherever we are. But, as I've said, over the years I have moved more from that sense that I need to ask God to be there and I need to make effort to much more of an awareness that, as Hilary of Poitiers puts it, there is no space where God is not. I'm going to read a quote from Hilary of Poitiers. It's this:

"There is no space where God is not. Space does not exist apart from God. God is beyond the seas, dwelling in all things and enveloping all. God embraces and is embraced by the universe, confined to no part of it, but pervading it all."

There is great encouragement to be had, I think, from leaning into that sense that God is already here. So wherever you are at this moment, whatever you are doing, whether you feel worthy or unworthy, God is here. God is with you. And God loves you with an enormous love. If God is everywhere, if the divine love is the ground of all of our being, the thing that holds the universe together, then we can expect to encounter God in all kinds of ways, in all things. Everything becomes a conduit through which we can meet with God, because everything is pervaded by the divine.

Everything has emerged from who God is and from that place of ultimate love. So it might be that you spend a bit of time thinking about yourself. It might be that you take a look at your hands and see how beautifully they are made. You might look at the lines on them.

You might look at the intricacies. You might think about how your body was put together, about the incredible connections that there are, about the incredible variety of processes and cells and all sorts of stuff that go into making you you. Or it might be that you look out the window and you look at the sun shining on the leaves and reflecting from the clouds.

And in that you just have a sense of God's presence and God being in all and through all. And I think in beginning to understand in a bit more depth that God is with us in all things, our perception of God broadens and widens. And instead of waiting for some very specific moments that you might get in a worship service or in a moment in some kind of Christian or religious or spiritual activity where you have that awakening moment in your soul, instead of only seeing it there, we can begin to recognise when our soul blossoms and flowers in the presence of love and beauty. And in that there is the divine. In that is a connection to God. God's love for us and our love for God can be found through all things. When we have a moment when our soul is awakened with the joy of love or the sense of compassion for somebody, we can know that that is part of the divine source of love that pervades all things. So that sense of love, that sense of being loved, that sense of feeling love is a connection with the divine. And so we can lean into that and recognise it. We can know that God is present. And I think that word present is really helpful because it speaks of God's nowness. In this moment God is present and God's nearness.

God is present. God is here. God is intimately with us. So that sort of awareness has changed my spiritual practice. It means that I don't necessarily feel the need to work particularly hard at praying. I don't feel the need to press in. I do feel the need to be still.

Sometimes. Sometimes I feel the need to be fast and to sense God in the midst of that.

So Stephen and I went canoeing last night and we've been training for a canoe race, and I spent a lot of time working very, very hard to canoe very fast. And in that activity using my body to its fullest and working really, really hard, there was a sense of coming alive and a sense of who God is. But as I say, this knowing that God is present, that I don't have to encourage God to be here, that God is already here, that God's divine love can be found in all things, that I can love God and be loved by God in all things is beautiful and is helpful, takes away quite a lot of the pressure. It means that I don't only expect to see God, to sense God when I'm doing something obviously religious, but in all things. And that has been really, really beautiful. So I would encourage you, if you're wondering whether there is something relevant for you in this, I would encourage you just to notice the good things. You know, people talk about having a gratitude list, but I think just notice the good things over the next few days. Notice when your heart is warmed and let that warming of your heart simply be a reminder that it is in God, in the divine one, in the one who loves us, that we live and move and have our being.

Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Loved Called Gifted podcast. If you'd like to get in touch, you can email lovedcalledgifted@gmail.com. You can find a transcript of this podcast at lovedcalledgifted.com. And that's also the place to go if you're interested in the Loved Called Gifted course, or if you'd like to find out about spiritual direction or coaching.

Thank you for listening.

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