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.

C: For this episode, I'm really delighted to be joined by Laura Beres.

L: Hi Catherine, thank you for inviting me.

C: So would you like to just let people know who you are and where you are in the world?

L: Yes, I now live as a first generation settler in Canada and I live on the beautiful lands in London, Ontario, in southwestern Ontario in Canada. And these are actually the traditional territories of the Anishinaabek, the Haudenosaunee, the Lenapehawak and Chonaton peoples, all of whom have long-standing relationships to the land of southwestern Ontario.

But I was actually born in Salisbury in the south of England and then moved to Canada with my parents when I was 17. I became a social worker and then later pursued my PhD in Toronto but took up a position teaching social work in the School of Social Work at King's University College, which is affiliated with Western Ontario University. So this is why we live here now.

And social work in Canada is perhaps a little bit different than social work in England in that it is much broader. So not only does it teach students to be engaged in like child welfare and child protection, which I think is called child care in England, but also teaches social workers to become what's really called clinical social workers or psychotherapists. And so my form of social work was always much more therapy. And after I finished my Masters of Social Work, I worked as a therapist in Catholic Family Services of Toronto. And then it was during that time that I decided to pursue my PhD. Then as I've been teaching social work, I ended up in a Catholic university, which was not necessarily intentional, but what's been lovely about that is that a Catholic University has been much more open to supporting my interests in faith and spirituality. And sometimes the secular universities get a bit worried about that.

So I began really focusing on teaching my social work students to do more than just a bio-psycho-social assessment when working with people, but to do a bio-psycho-social spiritual assessment. And that's been taken up in the literature and in teaching. Social workers here tend to talk now about bio-psycho-social spiritual cultural assessments because recognising that the spirituality is often linked to culture, especially when we're working with immigrants and refugees. So that's probably more than you needed to know in terms of where I am and who I am.

C: Now that's really brilliant. That's really good.

So what do you feel that the spiritual element of that assessment adds that would be missed otherwise?

L: I pursued a lot of training in narrative therapy approaches to working with people. And what I realized in working narratively with people is that it opened up this space to help people consider what their personal values and their preferences were and help them move from perhaps what had become like a dominant problem storyline in their lives, looking for events in their lives. It could be storied into their preferred storyline. And these storylines were made up of these kinds of two landscapes, a landscape of action, just sort of the facts of what's been happening, what, when, where. That often would be covered with the bio-psycho-social aspects of an assessment.

But the landscape of identity has to do with people's hopes and dreams and preferences and values. And that struck me as resonating with spirituality, whether that's linked to person's religion or not, whether it's linked to divine or God, but, you know, it can just be personal values and preferences. And so it felt really important to add that spirituality piece because it opened up possibilities there.

C: Yeah. But it sounds like in your assessments, you're talking about those kind of two levels at which things are happening and the traditional bio-psycho-social assessment kind of does one of those pieces really well. But that kind of storied meaning, that deeper stuff you were feeling you weren't getting to.

L: Yeah. I wouldn't necessarily say deeper. And I think that, you know, people using a bio-psycho-social assessment framework would think they're getting to deep things. You know, they can be deep psychological things, deep emotional things, but it was more that spirituality gave a structure that really reminded people, the social workers, to be curious about. And the fact that that hurts, what does that speak to you would prefer? What does that story you're telling me suggest you really value in your life? And sometimes it's linking to your values and your hopes that helps you move forward.

Michael White used to talk about problem dissolving rather than problem solving. And I think when you step into and hold your values and hopes closer to yourself, those possibilities sometimes open up. That can be very, very helpful for many people just to sort of label that, put that into language, identify it and help that be kind of a beacon for themselves.

C: Yes, yes. As we're talking, I'm wondering whether you found that that gives social workers permission to talk about things, having it as part of the assessment that perhaps otherwise they wouldn't have done?

L: Yes, I think so. And it's just a reminder, like socially in the past, you know, you mustn't talk about money or politics or sex, right? And those are all things you would ask and talk about in a therapeutic setting. But the one thing that remained a taboo in a therapeutic setting seemed to be spirituality and faith and religion. And I think the social work students were sort of anxious about, well, if I'm not religious or spiritual, I'm too scared, I don't know how to ask about it.

Margaret Holloway, she's done a lot of writing about spirituality and social work in England. And she was sort of reviewing research that showed that the practitioners, the social workers tend to be much less religious and spiritual than their clients or service users. And so they need to be encouraged and reminded that, you know, this is important for the people you're having conversations with. So you have to find a way to become comfortable asking about it. Just sort of encourage people to say, you know, you don't need to know it all, but just be curious about what gives them a sense of meaning and purpose, what keeps them going, what's helping them. Then you're getting into spirituality without having to get into religion and the shoulds and, you know, big theological questions.

C: That’s really interesting. So where did spirituality emerge for you in your life?

L: You know, I guess it was always just bubbling away there. My maternal grandmother was from Devon. And I think of Devon and Cornwall as being, you know, in the Celtic fringe. As a child sort of going to school and to a little local church in Salisbury, and then sort of drifting away from church and then back to church and then moving to Canada and going through the sort of adolescent young adult years of sort of, oh, I'm too busy doing all this, meeting people and dating and getting a job. And it just sort of slipped away to the side, but it was always there in the background. It wasn't something that I decided I wasn't going to be interested in that anymore. And I suppose in some ways it was serendipity that I ended up my first job as a graduated social worker, as sort of therapist, was at Catholic Family Services of Toronto.

And you didn't have to be Catholic to work there or to be a client there. But again, it opened up space for faith and spirituality. And one of my most influential supervisors there had a deep, deep faith and had been a Catholic priest in Ireland and then moved to Canada and had become a social worker and a therapist there. And we had wonderful conversations just about people's spirituality and that often it is shaped by their own personal experiences, for instance.

You know, sometimes your experience with your father will then shape what your image of a Father God is and all that kind of thing. So it made me realise that I didn't have to be scared to ask. It wasn't like there was this external notion of what God is and I didn't want to oppose that, but we each bring our notions of what God is to the conversation. So that sort of opened up space to just become more and more curious about what my own spirituality was.

When I finished my PhD, lo and behold, I ended up in a Catholic university, teaching. So again, there was space. And that year I went to Iona three times. I was so drawn to it. I went in the summer with the campus minister. I went again by myself the end of October. So a thin time of year and it was totally different then. And then the next summer my husband came with me and we rented a little house there and we spent some more time there and each experience was a little bit different. But at that point I thought I want to know more about Celtic spirituality and I found Sarum College in Salisbury and they offered an MA in Christian spirituality. And this was offered in modules and one of the modules was in Celtic spirituality. So I signed up and took the Celtic spirituality module and that sort of reinforced all my interest, but now I want the rigorous education.

And so I did my MA in Christian spirituality at Sarum College and then it sort of it has all come together. So for me, my spirituality is integrated through all those areas of my life in terms of just it's a spiritual personal interest. It has come out in my work, in my research. Yeah, and so it's kind of an academic, professional and personal interest.

So I had these kind of different areas of research. There was narrative therapy and then I also got really interested in critical reflection on practice, which is a particular model developed by Jan Fook. And Jan Fook and Fiona Gardner further developed that in a practicing critical reflection handbook. And so I was teaching critical reflection on practice and that also helps people identify their personal values when they're reflecting on incidents in their practice.

And it kind of helps them identify and put into words why they're responding, how they are. And it's often because of their personal values, which can then, when they sort of fly by the seat of their pants, which is often due to following their values, all came together in my most recent book, which is called The Language of the Soul and Narrative Therapy, Spirituality in Theory and Practice.

I think that answered the question. These all sort of come together.

C: Yeah, you know, it really, it really has. And that kind of theme of integrating spirituality and the whole of ourselves, that's kind of come through a lot of what we've talked about.

For people who don't know Iona, do you want to just briefly describe what it is and where it is?

L: Yes, Iona is a tiny little island in the Inner Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. And it's described as the sort of cradle of Christianity in Britain. So it was Columba who had come from Ireland and then settled in Iona. And then I think it was McLeod from Glasgow who went to Iona in perhaps after the war in the 50s and helped start rebuilding the Abbey there. And after that, it sort of developed the Iona community. This is sort of an intentional community. It's a global phenomenon now. People from around the world are really interested and can become sort of friends of the Iona community, but it is a kind of a built upon and structured around Celtic spirituality. A sort of appreciation of the spirituality be being interwoven in everything in in the landscapes, the spark of the Divine in everything. So I think there's something lovely about Celtic spirituality. And to me, when I became more and more interested and aware of the need to be respectful of the indigenous communities around me in Canada, and indigenous spiritualities, I wanted to be careful not to appropriate any of their ways of being or thinking. And I love their love of Mother Earth, and the sacredness of the earth. And I sort of realized that Celtic spirituality almost kind of offered me my indigenous spirituality, a way of thinking about that that is also rooted in earth and these thin spaces and places, which being described often as being where two elements meet. So where land and sea meet, or where the earth and sky meets up the top of the mountain or by the ocean, at holy wells and springs where the water bubbles up. So those were things I sort of pursued during that first year.

So it's a tiny island, it's something like a mile and a half wide by three miles long. I think there's something only about 150 people maybe live there year round, but something like 400,000 people visit a year, you know, and they, in the summer, oftentimes people come by boatloads and just sort of do a quick little daytime visit around and walk and scurry off. But I found it really special to be able to stay there. And so I stayed there a week each time, each of my three visits.

The Celts had this notion of pilgrimage was kind of this wandering kind of pilgrimage. It wasn't to a particular site, but you would just stop when you found your place of resurrection, the place where you would stop and you spend the rest of your life. You know, my first time in Iona, I met a couple of wonderful people, Sister Patty and Father Paddy from Ireland who said, "If you really want to understand Celtic spirituality, you're going to have to visit Ireland." So my second trip, I actually went to Ireland as well and went to Inishmore off the coast of Ireland, off Galway and wandered around there and met people and talked about Celtic spirituality there. Didn't sort of think so much in terms of original sin, but more of the goodness of people, the spark of the Divine and celebrating and honouring that.

And of course, creativity and art and animals and all those sorts of things.

C: Brilliant. When we met, it was at the International Network for Studies in Spirituality conference, and you spoke there about the spirituality of the everyday and the ordinary. And I can kind of hear sort of where that has emerged from for you, which… I like the idea of spirituality in the everyday and the ordinary. I know that for many of us, the kind of taking yourself away to do spirituality, particularly when life is difficult and is challenging and is busy, is often that's kind of a bar too far, really. And so finding our spirituality in the midst of what we're doing, I think can often be really helpful. So do you want to talk a bit about that, about what you mean by that and what that sort of means to you on an everyday basis?

L: Yeah. So you're right that I think the foundation of my interests came from Celtic spirituality. Maybe I wouldn't have been as interested in it if that hadn't been there. Actually, maybe we'll just also add, early on, I was at a retreat at a convent in Toronto with the Sisters of St. John the Divine. And they live based on a Benedictine rule and in silence, but every Sunday evening, their dinner is a talking dinner. And if you happen to be there on a Sunday evening for dinner, my, they get chatty after a week of silence!

And in one of these dinners, I was mentioning to one of the nuns my interest in Celtic spirituality and she was also very interested. And she said for her, it was this notion of it being intertwined within the everyday. And she said she had this sort of image of looking out at the waves in the ocean and seeing the dolphins sort of jumping. And you couldn't really tell the difference between the dolphins and the waves. And it's just all interwoven or the image of praying as you sweep the hearth and that it's not a matter of being totally separate, but it's integrated into everything you do.

And then COVID-19. And so during the period of the lockdowns, I became interested in whether spirituality was helping people through COVID and thinking of perhaps the spirituality of the everyday and how that builds resilience. And so did find some literature about how that has been shown to be true in relation to the hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. And so there had been some literature showing that spirituality could be linked to people's resilience. And I was just wondering if that was true with COVID.

So I spoke with some colleagues and then three of us decided to pursue a very tiny little research project. And we contacted therapists and social workers in a local agency here and wondered if they'd be willing to be interviewed about whether they were finding spirituality was assisting them in managing. And then also asked them about what they had experienced in terms of their clients and service users. And it was just really interesting to find some of the themes when we looked at the transcripts of those interviews about, and you may remember, I don't know if this was true in England as well, but you know, not only did the shops run out of toilet paper very early on, as people did panic buying toilet paper, there was then panic buying of flour. Like people started baking more and just as you were at home more, and then you couldn't go out and socialise, but people would walk more.

And I heard this sort of these themes of people engaging with their spirituality in a way that was really linked to these daily activities. And it was linked through their sort of linking to nature through walking in the neighbourhood or in nature or in their ability to nurture and care for themselves and their families through baking for them. And that kind of reinforced that sort of sense of spirituality in the everyday.

People couldn't go to church or synagogue or mosque. That was all sort of locked down. And they did connect via online services sometimes, but most of it went to their everyday practices and sort of grounding in their gardens and things like that. Then I kind of was thinking that really, for most people, the everyday and ordinary is work. And for most of us, we don't have sabbaticals. And although we were all locked down during COVID, we're not anymore. And so what would the spirituality of the everyday and ordinary look like in a busy life? And I tried to purposefully think during my really hectic year as director with a lot of stress going on in the university sector here about, okay, what does spirituality offer the notion of resilience, which was the focus of my little research project, or well-being in this context of busy, busy lives?

You know, as I think about all the wildfires that are out of control in Canada right now or in Europe, Australia is in winter right now, but in the summer, they always experience them too. And then there's the war in Ukraine and the war and the conflict in Gaza, everything that's going on in the Middle East, all the ongoing strife in the African countries. There is chaos everywhere. And I think, you know, how can we focus on well-being during this sort of process? I don't know how it was that I came to stumble across, again, Julian of Norwich. And so the English Anchoress from the 1300s and her saying that all shall be well and all shall be well and all matter of things shall be well.

And I was thinking, oh yeah, that's actually really annoying. It doesn't feel that way.

But then also recognising the more I read about Julian that she was also living through awful times, you know, the black plague and conflicts and her own personal illness. And that although she had first said “all shall be well and all should be well and all matter of things should be well” in relation to her own personal situation, when she sort of wrote again about that, it was more a matter of thinking of all of us and even through all this chaos, if we can link perhaps to the spirituality of the everyday and the ordinary. I was thinking that maybe that helps us get through it.

C: Yeah, I think that that point about finding the spirituality in the everyday, when things are not that easy, I think is really pertinent because I think it's much easier, isn't it, to find your spirituality when you're surrounded by things that are pretty. I can find God much more easily in a meadow than I can in the middle of chaos.

L: Yeah, yeah. And I've just returned from an eight day silent retreat at the Ignatian Centre in Guelph, just down the road here. What's lovely about that is just the silence and a real retreat and with a spiritual director for an hour a day and there's a service each day. So there's some talking going on in a homily later in the week. One of the Jesuits said, "What happens when you come down off the mountain?" And it's kind of like, "What happens when your eight day silent retreat is over?" It's all very well to go away, like you say, into a meadow, just to retreat and regroup and you can be peaceful then. And I think the Buddhists often talk about that, you know, in monkey brain. And if you can maintain a sense of mindfulness and peace when you're on a busy bus, where there's noise all around you, that's a sign of it all being helpful, contributing to resilience and wellbeing perhaps.

That it's not just about escape, it's bringing it back into the world and integrating it into the everyday and ordinary. Yeah.

C: So what are the ways of looking at things and the practices that practically help you to do that?

L: Yeah, I'm still developing them. I'm, you know, I am certainly not an expert on all of this, but what we can learn from the Rule of St. Benedict and the sort of monastic approaches, because some of the practices within a monastery are things that you can then integrate into your everyday, particularly focusing on hospitality and how do you welcome people and offer that. You know, the Rule of St. Benedict was about there was always a guest wing and how would you welcome others into the monastery and provide them shelter and provide them hospitality and care. And how we think of creating a hospitable place when we're doing clinical social work or therapy. How can we be a good host?

But David Epstein also talked about how can we be a good guest, because he thought of those times when you're maybe doing home visits to, you know, meet people, especially those who are sort of mandated for social work, so that you're not imposing yourself but you're being a welcoming and respectful guest.

So then I was reading more of Joan Chittister and she does focus on hospitality, but her most recent book, The Monastic Heart, it's called, 50 Simple Practices for Contemplative and Fulfilling Life. The very first one in there is around the use of bells. And so in a monastery, especially a Benedictine monastery, and so the Sisters of St. John the Divine in Toronto also live their lives this way, they have sort of regular periods of prayer or worship and so in between them they would be working or studying and so there would be these bells that would mark, okay now it's time to move from this activity to another activity. The way that these markers remind us to move from one thing, to not get overly immersed in something, to not get, not sort of have all our focus in one place that we forget about rhythm and balance and that kind of thing.

So I was thinking about my Apple Watch will say, time to stand up, you know, or I'm thinking back to managing the busyness of professional life as a social worker. I found this easier as a social worker in practice than I did as an academic in a university setting, but you know the booking of appointments, you know the structure of that, you know limiting yourself to an hour appointment and then moving on to something else, making sure you structure into your day that you will have lunch, maybe a time for a walk and so the sort of balance and structure.

So that was one of the structure things like that. So I love that about the rule of Saint Benedict, this sort of sixth century rule and how it can be adjusted for people in the everyday and adjusted for people who have a religious faith or don't have a religious faith but it just seems so sensible and these Benedictines have been described as just really sensible, down to earth, joyful people who I believe probably in these writers were talking about just seemed more joyful and peaceful because they had this rhythm and so their rule of life, there was no kind of real vow they had to take but they committed to three things, just stability, conversatio which is a word they never bother translating because it can't be translated perfectly and obedience.

And so this conversatio really is a sort of turning back again, kind of like conversion. So you sort of decide that okay this is the stability, this is what my life would be structured as, as a way that would give me some stability and balance and rhythm, maybe it is making sure I walk each day, making sure I sleep properly each day, that I eat properly, that I have time for some fun, that I have the structure, the stability and then know that I'm going to fall off the wagon and I'm going to get caught up and then you know three hours later I'm still at my laptop and I haven't got up and walked and stretched but this commitment to conversatio that you turn back, that you try again.

And obedience, I know that just seems so strict and horrible these days but you know if it's just something that you've decided is your personal value, that it's the structure that you want, it's kind of being obedient to that, that it's sort of more self-imposed. You choose what's going to be useful for you and you keep going that way. So Bells, should I keep going?

C: Yeah, go for it.

L: Okay so there were a couple other things, care of the environment and I think in our ecological crisis that's really really crucial and something that the Benedictines tried to do in terms of teaching, farming and agricultural skills to people after the crisis, the falling of the Roman Empire and just sort of helping nurture and provided that kind of education and the Ignatian Centre where I just spent my eight days, that's one of their commitments as Jesuits is the care of the land and they have these community gardens and they're teaching organic farming principles, I think that's all something that's really really important that we all engage with and support and whatever we can.

And this was another thing that Joan Chittester writes about in The Monastic Heart: Cloisters, and I loved cloisters and having grown up in Salisbury, I always loved Salisbury Cathedral and they have a wonderful cloisters at Salisbury Cathedral so that image was there. When I went to Iona, the Abbey there, they have cloisters and they're really beautiful and I've always liked them but never really thought too much more about them. But Joan Chittester writes about the fact that you know for the monks when they were first setting up their monasteries and after they had done all this work, supporting community, developing hospitals, teaching and you know agricultural approaches, that these little cities grew up around them and they started to feel sort of overwhelmed by the busyness and so in their monasteries they started building cloisters and there'd be a covered walkway around in this open space and she talked about this being a place where they could just get away from the busyness of life but also be kind of outdoors and it just gave them this sort of peaceful place. And she asks in her book, "So where are your cloisters in your everyday life?" and she asks things like, "Is your cloister actually just being by yourself in your car as you drive to and from work?" or "Is it that little greenhouse addition you've got built onto your house?" or you know, "Is it that little spare box room you've changed into your office? Is there somewhere that really feels like your cloister where you can just get away from the busyness?"

And for me, you know, our house is structured in such a way we don't have a huge backyard or anything but our kitchen and family room is set up with these big sliding doors so that what we do have we can just sort of see there and we've got bird feeders and flowers and so I can sit there with my morning coffee and I can kind of just focus on that. That feels like my little oasis or my cloisters and again it's just a regrouping. It's finding ways to think about what could be your cloisters and so that was another element and a practice that I think any of us can do.

Just finding ways to integrate that and think what provides that for me.

C: One of the things that really struck me about that conversation about cloisters was that I'd not spotted previously that the cloisters for the monks in this really busy sort of environment where they were teaching and they were serving people and they were offering hospitality that this space was right in the middle of all of the action which I thought was really interesting. And there's almost a sense that that was their space for their hospitality of themselves. So you know you've talked a lot about hospitality for other people and creating hospitable spaces but you can't really do that very effectively can you unless you've got a space where you're kind of giving yourself that hospitality.

L: Yeah it's like loving yourself first right you have to offer that hospitality and care to yourself as well.

C: Yes yeah yeah I think so. You can kind of set up little cloisters can't you when you get a moment. So anywhere anywhere where I can sit down for 10 minutes with a cup of tea or go outside. We’ve got a little tiny yard in the English sense in that it's sort of concrete entirely rather than big with trees. So that is almost like a little cloister.

We've got some bamboo and we've got some tubs with some plants in but I think that kind of what was really helpful to me was just having that awareness of even having that image of a cloister because they are very beautiful aren't they and they're sort of quite quiet sort of creating that on the fly almost I think is a really a really lovely idea.

Or coffee shops those are good cloisters because it's sort of it's out of your normal work and your normal level of responsibility so so you can be there and there might be other people around but they're not going to be demanding anything of you. I think they're quite good cloisters for people who can't cope very well with silence which not everybody can. I remember leading a retreat a few years ago and my my fellow retreat leader had wanted us to insist that people had time in silence and I kind of was sort of saying well that's a it's a tool really. The silence is a tool to connect with yourself with divine it's not it's not the thing itself. So we didn't insist on silence and then it turned out that one of our retreatants had tinnitus and so if we'd said well you need to find silence that would have been deeply intimidating to her because she couldn't.

So yes something about that kind of inner silence or that inner stillness is possibly a better word than silence for some people.

L: Yes certainly when I tell people I'm going on an eight days silent retreat you get a mix of reactions.

C: Did that take you a while to get into the silent?

L: I think I am naturally a bit more of an introvert and so the quiet was really lovely and I remember the sisters of Saint John the Divine at their convent they have this guest wing and they had this little pamphlet in the room that talked about various forms of prayer and they said that you know one form of prayer would just be you know lying down still on the bed and you know you don't have to sit and it's not just all about asking for things it's just sitting and quiet and so this notion of sort of contemplative presence, centring prayer and how that can be linked to forms of Buddhist mindfulness there's sort of a similarity there that just kind of just being, was something that opened up for me at that time and they said oftentimes you know you you know if you lay down to have a sort of contemplative time and you fall asleep then probably that means that what you really needed more than anything is is to sleep. And certainly many of my early retreats as a young mother busily trying to finish her dissertation I would sort of fall into a deep sleep that first evening.

So you know things change. And you know I remember telling my mum about going on silent retreats and she was a real extrovert and she thought oh it all sounds a bit weird right so we're all drawn to different kinds of practices and like you say different things help us.

C: yeah so was there anything else in terms of sort of practicing spirituality in the everyday in the ordinary that you wanted to talk about that we've not covered

L: I mean I was doing some library searches and looking for stuff I realized George Herbert a 16th century Anglican priest had written about the spirituality of the everyday. And his parish was in Salisbury in lower Bemberton and his little church was not very far away from where I lived as a child and so I just talked again about that serendipity serendipitousness of you know returning home and then finding just just down the road with someone else who had explored those sorts of notions. And he said for instance:

Teach me my God and king
In all things thee to see
And what I do and anything
To do in as for Thee

or

Making drudgery divine who sweeps the room as for thy laws makes that in the action fine.

So it was just sort of really lovely to sort of come back to that and then Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus was something I had seen when I was at the National Gallery in London England and I had often thought about the difference between Paul's experience on the road to Damascus versus this notion of a kind of growing awareness of spirituality which the story of of walking to Emmaus offered and so that painting actually shows Jesus eating supper with the disciples after walking together on the road and I was just thinking about the ordinariness of walking and talking and eating together as again being kind of like a form of hospitality a way of connecting to people so pilgrimage and walking and walking in nature has been something that's also been really important to me and of interest and because I've gone to the Ignatian Centre here for retreats and I've taken some training from them in terms of offering spiritual direction I know this idea of the daily examine from their point of view and this sort of this religious notion but how it could be adjusted for people of different faith traditions or for people with no faith tradition and it's just a way of sort of slowing yourself down at the end of the day and thinking back about those moments of consolation or desolation or to change that into sort of more secular language and it links to narrative practices moments of feeling like that was a moment when I was living out of my values a little bit more closely and those were moments where oh I wasn't so much and so what can I do tomorrow to get back to that and so my two friends and I we we did that each day while we were away and I think that sort of made me think of that as being possibly another everyday practice that doesn't have to be religious but can be just about conversatio it can be about turning back and it sort of links on all these areas of my interest sort of narrative therapy spirituality critical reflection that you're turning back reflecting on your day how does this speak to your values and preferences how can what can I do tomorrow maybe to recommit to standing truer to my values engaging in activities that might be more in line with those

C: it strikes me as you're talking that there is something very beautiful isn't there about finding those moments of spiritual connection in the ordinary things and it also occurs to me that Jesus didn't do anything else really I know he went onto mountains to talk to people but if you were walking with Jesus if you were spending time with Jesus then it would have been in the ordinary it wouldn't have been doing anything particularly spiritual or religious.

L: exactly I really like the gospel of John just because it's that little bit more mystical and some of the ways that you know he's come back to the disciples and encouraging them to throw the net over the other side of the boat do some fishing over there and okay let's just have a fish breakfast together I think those sorts of ordinary you know it can be in your work it can be in your eating together it can be in your looking after one another

C: I was also reflecting as I was listening to you that this theme of spirituality within the ordinary is really where we started the conversation. You were talking about educating social workers and giving people tools to help people to connect with their own values or to connect with people's values and their spirituality in the very ordinary business of doing social work assessment.

L: yes yep so it's in our work and it's in just you know our home life too everywhere.

C: yes and in our cloister moments

L: exactly

C: And in our diaries! which is which is really interesting because that that sense that there is something inherently spiritual about the rhythm that our diary gives us had never had never occurred to me I've not seen it as that sort of regulating steadying force it so I will I will ponder that because I think I think for me it's tended to feel more something which makes demands than something which offers a gift so that will be really interesting to to ponder on a bit I think.

L: Yeah I guess it's you know how you structure it how you look at it you know and I'm thinking about just the stress during COVID of zoom and you know zoom fatigue and how it was so much more possible to book back-to-back meetings and I think it's kind of the opposite of that you know and if if in the past we had to travel to the next meeting or there was a sort of saying goodbye and walking someone out through the passage and out to the through the waiting room and then sort of tidying up your office before the next person come these sort of natural breaks and rhythm you know if there's some way to try and keep some rhythm and balance you know I think that's where my thinking is gone as you were speaking about that.

C: yes I'm just thinking about when I was working for the NHS doing sort of managementy stuff I'm now envisaging those walks between meetings as potentially being like mini pilgrimages. There's a little bit of journeying between this place and the next one so we can find it everywhere if we want.

L: If we want yes.
C: that's been really fascinating and and really really helpful thank you very much.

L: my pleasure.

C: I 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.