There was a sign once on a motorway bridge over the weighbridge over the A1 which said:

Prepare to meet thy God … evening dress optional’!

There is, as we finish our Advent series on prayer, there is a tendency to put prayer into a bracket that might be called “Radio 3” or “Sunday Best”; to leave it as an esoteric subject best left to the specialists … though one look at the specialists should make you realise that’s not a very good idea.

But, for those not stuck at what you might call base camp, God, as we all know, is more than a Sunday morning thing. God is to be met in the midst of life, rather than to be encountered at the edges. God is not left hovering at the edge of life where we might possibly bump into him when we’re dressed right or when we’re in church on a Sunday morning. He is, as was said

God on Wednesday morning in the rain when the car won’t start, as well as Sunday morning in church when the worship has wings.

If we keep God in our Victorian morning rooms, with people dressed in their best clothes, no wonder our faith looks, from the outside, and possibly feels from the inside, rather dull, rather stale and rather old fashioned.

Our faith life and our lived life needs to be seamlessly interwoven. There needs to be a warp and a weft of the sacred and the secular. Our earthly and homely life needs to be lived out within the heavenly and eternal kingdom, which we already inhabit. We need to accept and celebrate God at the heart of the warp and weft of the fabric of life.

The ancient Celtics used to talk about the ebb and flow of the sea and the turning of the seasons in their conversational prayer life. Maybe we should be looking at the ebb and flow of the traffic and the turning of the markets to see God’s action in our lives.

You may know that we are very fond of the Island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland, and that there is a Christian community based there. The Iona community was founded by George McCloud, who said of the island that it is a very “thin” place, where

the separation between heaven and earth is gossamer thin.

We need to try and capture that reality in our own prayer lives. That should be our desire in prayer. To live within that “thin place” where the separation between the sacred and the secular, between the earthly and the eternal, between the heavenly and the homely is gossamer thin.

When this happens, according to the words of Michel Quoist, who published the book of prayers in 1963 that sent shock waves through the established church … when this happens, “all of life would become prayer”. That is the aim of prayer: that all of life would become prayer. Not our religious piety, where we recite ancient texts together, but that all of our life should be gently lived before God, in the knowledge of the love of God, within an understanding of God’s love for us.

Not unlike bird watching, you might think!

Margaret Self in her book Taste and See uses this analogy. Bird watchers go into their hides to do their thing. They tramp across boggy marshes to climb into their hides to sit in the freezing cold with their binoculars and cameras to watch the lesser spotted bird and the greater crested bird. They get very excited when they hear the longer necked bird warble away in the distance. They show you the photographs saying “Look there – you can see it between the trees – it’s that grey smudge”! They get very excited about their bird watching.

But actually when bird watching becomes a part of your life, you learn to see and appreciate the birds in the present surrounding; you learn to tune in to the birds that are here and to appreciate how they are singing now … rather than having to go off into a hide to discern the wonders of ornithology. Noticing the different patterns of behaviour, the change in song modulation and the pitch of the singing tells those who understand the vocabulary an awful lot about the life of the bird.

People who get that sense of awareness of ornithology have a whole panorama of sound which the rest of us usually screen out. Instead of going away into a hide to look and learn and listen and watch, that knowledge imbues the whole of life.

That is what we want to be trying to do in our prayer life. There are times when we need to go into our hide, when we need to go into our prayer corner, to help us tune into the fullness of God’s voice. But that voice is with us constantly, usually unheard against the background hiss of modern life. And the voice is saying constantly, clearly heard or just sometimes caught within the hiss of life:

I created you, I fashioned you, I love you.

In the fourteenth century there was a woman called Julian who became known as ‘Julian of Norwich’. She became very ill and within her illness she had some mystical experiences, which she called ‘showings’ . She then mediated upon these showings for fifteen years before writing, what is commonly accepted to be, the first printed book by a woman in English, called the The Revelations of Divine Love. In that book she writes

and from the time it (the mystical epxeriences) was shown, I often asked to know what was our Lord’s meaning.
And fifteen years after, I was answered in inward understanding saying this:
would you know what your Lord’s meaning is in this
learn it well
love was his meaning
who showed it you – love
what did he show you – love
why did he show you – for love.
Hold fast to this and you shall learn and know more about love
and you shall never know or learn about anything except love’.

To understand ourselves as loved is the encapsulation of the Christian Gospel. And we can only do that when we know ourselves within the loving relationship that God would have with us, with each one of us, and when we know ourselves as loved … well, Bishop John Prichard, whom I quoted last week, says this:

When a human life is entirely pervaded by the presence and love of another person, he or she experiences life as a limitless possibility, life is breathtakingly beautiful and obstacles are there to be leapt over.
So if a human life is entirely pervaded by the presence and love of God, who knows what might happen? It will certainly be good, very good. All of life will become wrapped up in the light and tenderness of God. All of life will become prayer.