Jim Finley: Greetings. I’m Jim Finley.
Kirsten Oates: And I’m Kirsten Oates.
Jim Finley: Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.
Kirsten Oates: Welcome everyone to season 12 of Turning to the Mystics where we’re turning to Brother Lawrence and practice of the presence. And I’m here with Jim for our coaching session. Welcome, Jim.
Jim Finley: Yes, yes. Glad we’re walking through this together, how to pray with Brother Lawrence.
Kirsten Oates: I’ve been looking forward to this session. And our approach today is I’m going to be coming to Jim for spiritual direction, this ancient art of spiritual direction, where you come to a teacher or someone ahead of you on the path for wisdom and insight. And so, in a way, I’m playing the role of Joseph of Beaufort, and Jim, you’re playing the role of Brother Lawrence.
Jim Finley: Also, the role that they played, we’re now playing that same role as us. And the listeners, they’re playing it as them. It’s being carried forward into our lives. Yes, exactly.
Kirsten Oates: Beautiful. Well, I’ll hand to you, Jim, just to set the context for our approach.
Jim Finley: One of our approaches from the standpoint of offering guidelines in reading Brother Lawrence, but also all the mystics is guidelines for Lectio Divina, which is spiritual reading. And in one of the earlier sessions in the podcast, we go the second on Lectio Divina as a ladder to heaven. And he said there’s a ladder that extends from the earth to heaven and it has four rungs. Each rung is a great state of consciousness. And the first state of consciousness is the Lectio as listening, as sustained attentiveness.
And the next rung is discursive meditation. It’s a prayerful dialogue about what was received in the listening. The third rung is prayer from the heart, help me with this, which then blossoms as contemplation. And so the guideline would be you sit with Brother Lawrence and you open up the Brother Lawrence. And you would begin your rendezvous with Brother Lawrence by knowing that with Brother Lawrence’s help, you’re going to deepen your realization that you’re sitting there in the presence of God, all about you and within you. St. Augustine says closer to you than you are to yourself.
And you’re going to read a phrase of Brother Lawrence, one, two or three sentences, but you’re going to read it in a sense of faith that you can hear God speaking to you through the voice of Brother Lawrence. So it’s God talking to you, you’re hearing it as God’s voice through the voice of this mystic teacher. So that stance of sustained attentiveness, so you might want to read it several times and pause in between. You want to let it settle, let it settle attentiveness.
The next rung of the ladder, in a sense, God says, “I spoke to you, now you speak to me. What do you think?” And so this is discursive meditation using thoughts and images. And this is where you have a dialogue with God in reflective consciousness illumined by faith. Where are you with this? A lot of people, they find it very helpful to journal when they just write it out, what about it strikes you or what about it bewilders you? What is it that reminds you of where you’ve been touched by God in ways you hadn’t thought of for a long time? You personalize it because it’s really about you, because God’s in love with you. Presence of God is there with you and for you.
And the prayer is help me with this to God because I can’t deepen your infinite presence, presencing itself as my very presence, unless you help me. And that rendezvous is a habit that develops over time because it’s subtle. It can unexpectedly blossom as contemplation. And contemplation, it’s moments where you’re wordlessly like resting in God resting in you. So we did a session on the two other Carmelites, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. So Teresa of Avila talks about the prayer of quiet. And the prayer of quiet is you’re stilled and you sit in the quiet.
She also talks about effective prayer where the sensitivities of love is the prayer. That’ll just dissipate by itself, you go back to the text again. And then when your time with Brother Lawrence, your time with God ends, you ask God for the grace not to break this thread as you go through your day. And you realize it breaks many times, but you deepen your awareness that it never breaks from God’s end. It’s a rendezvous with God and it requires a habit because it’s subtle, it’s subtle, but little by little over the arc of time, it can become ever more habituated, which is what Brother Lawrence is trying to help us do to live in this habitual state. So it’s in that spirit then that Kirsten is coming to me with her copy of Brother Lawrence with some questions.
And I would also suggest, too, that you sense in her question what would be your own variation where you yourself have asked the same question on the same lines because we’re all in this together.
Kirsten Oates: So Jim, just drawing on your invitation to engage in a Lectio practice. So with that in mind, I’ll read from the text and we’ll reflect on what Brother Lawrence said and then engage in the meditatio.
Jim Finley: That’s right. Because in real life, if you were coming to me for a direction, in real life, you would come in with your copy of Brother Lawrence.
Kirsten Oates: Yes.
Jim Finley: And you’d read me the text and then we will dialogue. So we’re into it.
Kirsten Oates: We do like a Lectio practice in dialogue with each other.
Jim Finley: That’s right, exactly.
Kirsten Oates: Yeah. Beautiful. Well, so the text I’m bringing in today is on page 53 of Carmen Acevedo Butcher’s book Practice of the Presence, and it’s one of the maxims, one of Brother Lawrence’s maxims, which are these short pithy phrases capturing the essence of his practice. And the maxim is called How to Practice and it has six different points. So I was hoping to go through those with you, Jim, in hopes that I might more deeply understand how to practice this. So I’ll start by reading the first point. The first way to develop presence is in living each day with great simplicity.
Jim Finley: And so I want to ask you, which I would really do if you’re coming to me now, how does that strike you? What’s it mean to you? What about it would you like to understand better? What’s that mean to you?
Kirsten Oates: Yeah. As I reflect on this idea of to develop this presence, I need to live each day with great simplicity. The first thing that comes to mind is that Brother Lawrence was a monk and that his life had a very disciplined similar rhythm. So in that way, his life was simple. He took direction in how to live it. He lived in community. He knew what each hour required of him in his life. So in that way, he didn’t have to think about things, plan things. So in that way, it was simple. And my life’s a little different to that, so I can’t live that lifestyle. So then I wonder further if this simplicity might also refer to a simple focus on God, that the simplicity of having a focus on God as the most central thing to my life.
Jim Finley: The first point that you raised, it’s really true about his life in the monastery. When I was in the monastery, Thomas Merton was giving a talk to the novices and he said, “This life of cloistered silence, chanting the Psalms, was very carefully designed by St. Benedict to cultivate a contemplative way of life.” He said, “But there are people in the world who are being led by God to this union and they have no one to help them understand what’s happening to them.” So it’s really true that in the monastery, the pagers weren’t going off and the cellphone wasn’t ringing and the horns honking and all the rest of it. But here’s what strikes me about it. We have to grow where we’re planted.
He went to the monastery because when he was 18 years old, in the midst of the world, you look at a tree, and looking at that tree was struck by the presence of God, one with him presencing itself as the presence of the tree, as the presence of himself. And he says through all the years of his life, he’s never had such a profound experience of God, which overtook him in the midst of the world. And so I think the simplicity he’s speaking of is the simplicity for us to look at our own moments of awakening as subtle as they might be, little moments where we know we were touched with something in the presence of God and solitude or silence or intimacy or with a child or sitting at the deathbed of a dying loved one or quiet afternoon in an art museum, whatever moment where we know that we were touched.
And to know that touch, it wasn’t something more was given, but a curtain parted in the presence of God is infinitely giving itself as a presence of every moment. And, therefore, I’m cultivating that simplicity. And this is why with the pots and pans for him, he was in the kitchen. And so the presence of God was presencing itself as the pots and the pans themselves, like the divinity or the holiness of ordinariness and to just try to cultivate that attitude with that sensitivity. I think the interesting thing about pots and pans and the stars overhead and the smell of flowers and the song of birds and our own breathing lying at night in bed is what the all-sharing comet as they’re all being created. That is, the infinite presence of God is presencing itself as the sound of our breathing, as the smell of the flowers, as the pots and pans, as the view out the kitchen window, and have that constancy of all things. And I think, to me, it’s simplicity as that feeling for it.
Kirsten Oates: Yes. I love that. So the simple truth that everything’s … The presence of God in its nothingness without God as you would say. Yeah.
The second is in great faithfulness to the practice of this presence and to this inner awareness of God in faith always gently, humbly, and lovingly doing this without giving into hurry or anxiety. So a few things struck me in this one, Jim. One is this idea of an inner awareness of God in faith so that this presence, he’s expanding on the idea of it. I think here, this inner awareness of God in faith, I like that as a way of orienting to what it means to be practicing the presence.
Jim Finley: Exactly. I would say, too. Example that I’m thinking of is if we’re in a committed love relationship is that we’re not always constantly in a state of consciously focused on this loving union, but there’s always an underlying habitual atmospheric sensitivity of love and it has its interior, like it’s the interior stance of our heart and its essence that’s not necessarily consciously thinking this. It’s the cultivation of an interior sensitivity to the presence of God.
Kirsten Oates: Yes. And the same in faith, isn’t it? Because it’s not being necessarily manifest in every moment. It’s not in action in every moment, but in faith, it’s always there.
Jim Finley: Yes. And this will come up later, too, on the road away. See, the point is I don’t know about you, but I don’t know where I’m at in terms of great faithfulness. I’m trying to figure out what to have for breakfast. But here’s the point, I think, he’s going to be getting at this, is that the faithfulness is really the presence of God is God’s faithfulness to me and giving the very presence of God to me as my very presence in my nothingness without God. And then God meets me where I’m at and the fragility of me getting a glimmer of that.
And so I’m always faithful to where I’m presently at because this is where I am. God’s not waiting for me to get somewhere so we can get started. God’s present in the very midst of my unresolved matters of my heart. God’s utterly faithful to me and I’m trying to be in a kind of a trust that is so, because notice in our previous awakening, sometimes it’s little children. God comes to us where we are and God isn’t waiting for us to get somewhere, but God is always awakening. And so I think it has that feeling to it about great faithfulness.
Kirsten Oates: Oh, that’s lovely.
Jim Finley: Trusting that that’s true. Trusting that that is true.
Kirsten Oates: Yes. Yeah, that’s really lovely.
Jim Finley: And because if we don’t … See, it’s almost like saying to God, am I holy yet? Am I holy yet? Am I holy yet? I’m trying. And we hope we get awakened before the buzzer goes off and we die. So it’s not like that. The ego’s always imagining. It’s trying to get … But there’s nowhere to go because the infinite presence of God is presencing itself as us having this conversation right now and it’s presencing itself as everyone listening and the very moment they’re listening, that is the presence of God.
Kirsten Oates: Then this phrase always gently, humbly, and lovingly doing this without giving in to hurry or anxiety, that sounds pretty challenging. It did make me wonder about Brother Lawrence in the kitchen. Did he never burn the soup or did he … I think there’s times when you’re in the midst of doing things that you get anxious or there are times when you need to hurry to get something done.
Jim Finley: Yes, exactly. I would sense it this way. Without the gently, humbly, and lovingly, without giving in to hurry or anxiety, it’s like sometimes you have to hurry. As a cook, you had to hurry a lot. If you don’t cook the soup just right, then no soup. So sometimes it is like the presence of God presencing itself as the hurry, but it’s a hurry that itself is the presence of God because it’s God’s will. It’s God’s will you’re in the midst of. You’re always in the midst of something and you’re always trying to do it with integrity, with fidelity as God’s will. And then other times, it lightens up. So you trust the rhythms of it as the rhythms of the presence of God in your life.
And without anxiety is you don’t … He’s going to say this again later. Without anxiety, because this is no way dependent on how well you’re doing at it because God’s infinite presence to you is infinitely giving yourself, making how well you’re doing at it to be utterly irrelevant. God doesn’t care how well you’re doing at it. God’s in love with you just as you are. And if you can join God and seeing the preciousness of yourself just as you are, that itself is very deep part of the presence of God.
Kirsten Oates: Yeah. That’s really helpful. Because it’s oftentimes, like you say, as human beings, stress or anxiety can be a positive thing in helping us want to do something very well or we’re doing something very important and we want to keep someone safe or we want to do the task really well. So stress and anxiety can be helpful in everyday tasks, but he’s talking about a different kind of stress and anxiety, which is the stress that God is absent or that God is judging me or that God is not with me.
Jim Finley: That’s a very good distinction. So let’s say I was preparing this for this dialogue and I’m very motivated, I hope it’s going well. Grounded in an inner peace that all the ways it’s not doing well, God’s infinitely present, is it not going well? It isn’t as I have to do it well in order to be in the presence of God. It’s almost like the trustworthy nature of what is. God is the trustworthy nature of the unfolding of what actually is and not the way we think we’re supposed to be where we have to be. And that’s the constancy of it. That’s one way that helps me to see it.
Kirsten Oates: Yes. It reminds me of the point earlier in the podcast about we know that Brother Lawrence didn’t really enjoy cooking, spoke about disliking it, and so similar to anxiety or that you might dislike something but God’s perfectly in love with you in not liking it.
Jim Finley: That’s exactly right. Because God’s in love with you as you are. And so by not liking it, so you accept that you don’t like it because God accepts that you don’t like it. And so you engage in it because it’s God’s will. And don’t forget, too, he had that wound in his leg. There was always the pain that was there. There was always that. So it’s always woven into the ordinariness of ourselves as we are and learning to live there and trust it.
Kirsten Oates: So in a way, that infuses love into everything we do, whether we’re doing it with anxiety or with a lack of enjoyment, but if we know God’s meeting us where we are with love, there’s a love infused into it.
Jim Finley: Exactly. Or put it another way, it isn’t that we’re infusing love into it, but we’re being laid bare in the realization that the infinite love of a God is being infused into it as it. It’s already God’s presence is an infusion of the love itself that is the concreteness of what it actually is.
Kirsten Oates: Very good. Okay, number three. This is a longer one, so I’ll read the first part and reflect on it and then the second. So the first part is taking special care that this inner awareness, no matter how brief, precedes our activities, that it accompanies these activities from time to time and that we finish all tasks in the same way. We gradually grow the habit. Since this practice takes much time and effort to acquire, we must not get discouraged when we forget it for any good habit is only formed with difficulty, but when it is formed, we will find contentment in all we do.
I like this. It’s a little bit more instructive now, more of the how. So one of the ways we build the habit of this presence is to orient towards the presence before we begin a task, during a task when we can, and then always when we complete it, almost like a disciplined way of going about things.
Jim Finley: Yes. It’s almost like similar to grace before meals. It’s like an interior glance, like God, I already know that your very presence is presencing itself is what I’m about to do. And you would just acknowledge. You would begin and end it that way. And what I think is so helpful, he says, “For this inner awareness, no matter how brief precedes their activities, it’s just like a taste,” that it accompanies these activities from time to time. And what I think is this from time to time, we’re consciously aware of the presence of God in the midst of what we’re doing from time to time, but we’re often not.
Kirsten Oates: Yes.
Jim Finley: See. But sometimes even while we’re doing it, we’re aware of it. But God’s presence in the act that we’re doing it isn’t dependent on us being God’s presence sustaining us in the unawareness of it because we’re a human being doing God’s will. And that’s what’s holy is seeing the holiness of that.
Kirsten Oates: Yes. Because sometimes, Jim, a task is all-absorbing. It really requires full absorption to do it well.
Jim Finley: And that’s God’s will, it matter. There’s an integrity to the task. And so God is present in the integrity of the task and it matters because life matters. That’s why it matters. Everything has its … I call it the incomprehensible stature of simple things. Everything has a certain interior stature. So if you’re wiping down the kitchen counter, it matters. It just matters. And God’s infinite presence is the presence of the kitchen counters that you’re wiping down and you’re just quietly aware, sensitive to that.
Kirsten Oates: So would this be the normal way to orient to this practice to think about, can I build in a discipline of this little touch before and after a task, and then from time to time, during the task if my awareness allows, I’m prompted to glance again at this presence versus trying to stay in the presence the whole way through a task start to finish.
Jim Finley: Yeah. And again, I think what’s very helpful is if we’re in a deep committed love relationship with a lover, spouse, child, grandmother, grandfather, anyone that we’re in an underlying presence of someone whose presence in our life enriches us, there’s a kind of an atmospheric sensitivity of gratitude that’s always there, and the incidental rhythms of the ordinariness of interacting, it’s like the qualitative underlying texture that we’re grateful for. And I think it has that feeling to it. So it’s not like we’re consciously thinking of it. It’s the underlying atmospheric sensitivity to the love that is the value that blesses us because it’s there and that we’re cultivating that, I think.
Kirsten Oates: And he says that it takes time and effort to acquire it and we must not get discouraged. So maybe when we’re starting off, it does feel more like a discipline, more like a trying to remind ourselves and forgetting and feeling like this is so difficult to do.
Jim Finley: I’d put it, say reading Brother Lawrence. It’s not like you take Brother Lawrence like mystical union or bust. I’m going to do this by Thursday.
Kirsten Oates: Yes.
Jim Finley: What you do, because it takes a long time, the arc is actually over years. So if you would just faithfully do this in the give and take of your fidelity, the wavering ways, and the constancy of this, just think what you’re going to be 10 years from now. Or put it another way, look where you are now. How have you become the person who’s even capable of being concerned about these matters? Or that it allows you to be nurtured by these reflections. And is it not so that if you look back in the past, it wasn’t always this way with you?
That you’re on a transformative path of an evolving sensitivity and this present moment is the crest of the wave of that and it goes on and on and on this way. I think that’s a good way to see it in the context of the big picture. But what’s holy is never other than where we are in the context of that big picture. It’s like the infinite generosity is God given at the edges of floundering around, trusting in God’s in love with us as we flounder around.
Kirsten Oates: Beautiful. So as beginners, Jim, we could use things like Post-it notes, put a Post-it note up to remind ourselves to take that brief glance.
Jim Finley: For any good habit is only formed with difficulty, but when it is formed, we’ll find contentment in all we do. And I do think as we … Probably everyone can see this in their own life. There is a certain underlying like the wisdom of the elders, it’s just over the years. There’s an underlying sensitivity to things that matter most that is more grounded in you than it used to be 10 years ago because you’re growing and you’re going to continue. So it has that quality to it.
Kirsten Oates: That’s helpful. So the second part of number three, isn’t it fitting that the heart first to pulse with life within us and the part that controls the rest of the body should be the first and the last to love and respect God, either by beginning or by finishing our spiritual and physical actions and generally in all life’s exercises? That is why the heart is where we must take care to produce this little inner look to God. We must do it simply and unselfconsciously, as I have said, to make it easier.
So now he brings in an additional sense of this awareness because he talked about it as great faithfulness and inner awareness of God in faith and now this idea of the heart. And he says, “This is why the heart is where we must take care to produce this inner look to God.” So I’m curious about the role of the heart.
Jim Finley: Yeah. And what do you make of it? How would you put words to how you relate to that?
Kirsten Oates: So it makes me think about the heart as this place where we experience connection to God and to others that the heart organ has this perception of connection. And sometimes I think I even feel a warmth in my heart or feel a sensation in my heart, a glow in my heart. So there’s that that’s coming to mind. The idea that the heart is what starts and ends our life, that the heart beats and keeps our life going, is significant, too, because I think that reflects, like you said, God creating us in every moment and the heart is the core of the way we’re being sustained in our lives. So there’s something about just the orientation of my mind to the heart is the place where God sustains my life most directly.
Jim Finley: Yes. So in one sense, yes, for example, ties into the intimacy of sincerity, we say something is very heartfelt. And also with regard to love, we say we feel it in our heart. And I think all that’s true is it’s within the heart. But I think there’s something else here, too, going on. And that is the heart, it isn’t like in the shocker, it isn’t like the heart center. Different traditions look at this differently. It’s not like the seed of the emotions. Rather, the heart is that place where the presence of God and the depths of our own presence that are nothing without God are one is the heart. So we’re trying to find our way to the heart.
Remember the way of a pilgrim, he’s trying to find his way, and he’s trying to find his way to that union, experiential union of the presence that is itself. So when Jesus said, “I came that you might have life and have it more abundantly,” the life he spoke of is the life that is that once God’s in our own. So the heart is the point there’s this communion, that is the very reality of ourselves and the very reality of God is one in a communal presence. And so the heart is that interior place. The Buddhists talk about the head to know, the heart to love, the ground of the body to understand. We understand in the depths of our body. And I think the depths of our body here is like the heart. We’re finding our way to this place experientially that already is the oneness that we’re looking for.
And I just happened to catch on the preceding page, page 52, number four, I have it underlined. Here, the soul speaks to God, heart to heart, and always in an absolute and profound peace that the soul enjoys in God, each unto each, because the sincerity of your love for God is an echo of God’s infinite sincerity and being in love with you each unto each. And so I think it has those connotations. Brother Lawrence would invite us to open ourselves more and more to that.
Kirsten Oates: And so when he talks about the heart as the first pulse with life within us and the part that controls the rest of the body, it’s like what you were saying, you can focus on the breath, the darkness of the night, the smell of the flower. There’s something about these primal places, if we turn our attention towards them, they take us towards the heart of our union with God. Is that …
Jim Finley: That’s right. And he’s also suggesting something else, too, is I think that when he says it’s the first and the last, he’s really talking about the presence of God bodying itself forth as our body, as the heart itself. So it’s only the presence of God is embodied in our body. So there’s that dimension to it also, I think.
Kirsten Oates: And then, Jim, is it true that some people experience the consolation as a heartfelt experience of God, so that might be something that helps to ground?
Jim Finley: Yes, that’s a good distinction to make. I think it’s really true that in the heart, there is the inner warmth or the consolation. And Brother Lawrence, I think, would invite us to be grateful for that when it happens and to be receptively open to that. And some people have more than that than others. God deals with each of us as God deals with us. But he’s also talking about the heart of a consolation that’s deeper than feelings can feel, and it overflows into the feelings. But he’s talking about a presence that’s present whether we’re feeling it or not. But when it does overflow into the feelings this way. So it’s almost as if another way that I would put it, so insofar as you and I or the listeners, insofar as we’re moved or graced by the beauty of these teachings, that in us, it’s graced is our heart.
Kirsten Oates: Yes. That’s so helpful. So the heart is the heart of this union, and sometimes it spills over into a heartfelt sensation, but it’s much, much deeper. And so when we turn to this presence, we might not feel a heartfelt sensation. That’s not what he’s saying here.
Jim Finley: That’s right. He would have us say this, if I’m not feeling, God’s the presence that’s present in itself as my not feeling it because the presence of God is the constancy. That’s the reality of everything.
Kirsten Oates: Yes.
Jim Finley: Turning to the Mystics will continue in a moment.
Kirsten Oates: Okay. So number four, for those beginning this practice, forming a few words interiorly is helpful. Like my God, I am all yours, or God of love, I love you with all my heart, or love creating me a new heart, or any other phrases love produces on the spot. Beginners must also, however, take care their minds do not wander, returning to the created universe and its creatures. If we keep the mind focused solely on God, it experiences being moved and led by the will and the mind learns to be with God. So, Jim, I’ll just look at both parts of this. So one is to find a phrase, and it reminds me a lot of the wave of pilgrim where he’s given a phrase.
Jim Finley: And the cloud of unknowing, too, with the word.
Kirsten Oates: Yes. The pilgrim, he’s asked to say the phrase 3,000 times a day, 6,000 times a day.
Jim Finley: Yeah, yeah, until one morning, it woke him up.
Kirsten Oates: Yeah. So this phrase that Brother Lawrence is saying, is there something on your heart right now that gives the sensation of that presence to you, or is reminiscent of your experience of God’s presence that might be a reminder to you? Is that what he’s suggesting?
Jim Finley: I think so. Another way of putting it this way is when we say to someone, I love you, when we love someone, our words, I love you, is our very presence presencing itself in the words that I love you. You’re somehow present in and as the words that I love you. So when we’re sincere in these sincere devotional things to God, the sincerity of those words is the very sincerity of our very presence, presencing itself to the presence of God that’s infinitely in love with us and is giving itself to us as the gift of our presence and the gift of our gratitude and the gift … So I think it has that flow back and forth flow, like a living logo … I was thinking, too, when I was in the monastery there and chanting the Psalms like the rhythm of chanting the Psalms, it’s like a rhythmic voice.
And I also think if we read Brother Lawrence, sometimes I like to read it out loud. In a way, everything he says is like mantra and everything he says is the cadences of the awakened teacher’s voice that touches our heart. And so he has a certain rhythmic thing, and then when we say it ourselves, it loops back and we realize we’re participants. He’s helping us realize we’re already one with it this way.
Kirsten Oates: There was something you said earlier about God’s faithfulness to us. The stance is to be faithful to God’s faithfulness to us. That phrase really resonated with me, so there might be something I’d pull from that to create my little phrase for this practice.
Jim Finley: Yeah, that’s very good. And then put it this way, too. See, God’s faithfulness to us is the fidelity that he exists at all. And God’s fidelity is that I’m created as the beloved. I’m created as the presence created by God capable of recognizing the presence. So all this is everything is given. This is God’s fidelity. I waver in my fidelity. And so I keep trying to grow in the constancy of fidelity in my wavering ways, but trusting that God’s infinitely present in the midst of the patterns of my wavering.
Kirsten Oates: Yes.
Jim Finley: God’s present in the midst of my foibles deeply accepted. It’s the gift of tears, it’s humility. I’m not trying to get anywhere because everything already is infinitely given to me exactly where I am in the endless round of my incompleteness and it shines bright with holiness.
Kirsten Oates: What I love about Brother Lawrence’s phrases is that they have a sense of that help me to them, like you were talking about in the Lectio, like help me with this. And so I think that’s a nice way of orienting to this practice to start with help me with this.
Jim Finley: It is. Like knocking, it’ll be open seek and you shall fight. What’s interesting when we ask for help, we’re asking for help with a help that’s already there.
Kirsten Oates: Yes.
Jim Finley: And so what we’re asking for is the grace of being awakened that it’s already there.
Kirsten Oates: Yes.
Jim Finley: Kind of has that depth to it, I think.
Kirsten Oates: Then it says … I’m really curious with this, Jim. Beginners must also however take care their minds do not wander, returning to the created universe and its creatures. If we keep the mind focused solely on God, it experiences being moved and led by the will. Going back to what we talked about earlier, we said sometimes we need to be absorbed in a task. And so this mind he’s talking about seems something more like what we were talking about with the heart, that there’s something beyond just our thinking mind. That there’s a mind, this mindfulness or this faithfulness to God’s presence.
Jim Finley: Yes. And does that ring true to you? Does that speak to you that way?
Kirsten Oates: Yes. Yeah, that it would be this bigger idea of my faithfulness, my mindfulness, my trust.
Jim Finley: Yes. And here’s what strikes me about it also. Beginners must also take care that their minds do not wander, returning to the created universe and its creatures, if we keep our mind fixed solely on God. So it isn’t as if it’s the opposite. God is saying, “If you go into the kitchen, don’t think about the pots and the pans. Think about me. I’m God.” So what I have to be careful of is I have to not turn to creatures, meaning I have to never forget they’re being actively created. And the creation is a self-donating act of a presence that’s presencing itself as the creature.
And he says, “If we keep our mind focused on God, it experiences being moved and led by the will,” and the will is the desire. So your mind is being led by the intention of love is illuminating your mind to see that every created thing to see that it’s actually being created, meaning every created thing is the presence of God presencing itself, slant of light across the floor or this, whatever.
Kirsten Oates: And then he closes with and the mind learns to be with God. So it’s like that the mind is grounded in that understanding.
Jim Finley: That’s right. And I also think another … How I see that part, too, is what you learn and can say to God in a way, what’s so interesting is you’ve always been one with me, breath by breath, heartbeat by heartbeat. And little by little by little, I’m learning to join you in how one with me you are, but you’ve always been one with me. And I’m merging into that and walking, I suppose.
Kirsten Oates: Do you know what this section also reminded me of? And this is a different take on what you just offered, but when it says take care their minds do not wander, returning to the created universe and its creatures, how you always say, having the final say on who I am. I want my mind to know I’m loved through and through and through just as I am versus if someone’s unhappy with me or something’s going wrong, or I’m feeling insecure that that doesn’t have the final say.
Jim Finley: Yes. Another way I put it, too, where Jesus says, “My peace I give to you, not as the world gives do I give to you.” So the peace that the world gives is the peace that consists of living in conditions conducive to peace. If I’m living in conditions conducive to peace, I have peace. But the peace of God is the peace is not dependent on conditions conducive to peace. You’re grateful when the conditions conducive to peace are there. But you also notice when they’re not there, such as the pain in his leg, for example, and the struggle this way, God’s unexplainably intimately present in that. As a therapist working with long-term deep trauma work, this is also true of AA, where people are discovering the presence of God in the very midst of the unresolved suffering that they’re still walking through. But in it, they discover they’re being sustained in the midst of the unresolved suffering as really the depth of the wholeness that they’ve been searching for.
Kirsten Oates: Yes. You fall through, as you say. You can fall through the circumstance if you don’t grasp and hold tight to the circumstance.
Jim Finley: It isn’t as if you become silent, but you’re unexplainably silenced. And then when you do speak, you speak out of that. And I think that when Brother Lawrence speaks, he’s talking to us out of that. That’s why we’re touched so when we sit with it. And then as we listen, he’s luring us into it, which is what we’re doing right now, being lured into this. Yeah.
Kirsten Oates: I think it’s a really big thing also that you said, Jim, that if we keep the mind focused solely on God, it experiences being moved and led by the will. And you talked about our desire so that this path comes out of our desire, which is also given to us through this love connection to God.
Jim Finley: That’s right.
Kirsten Oates: It’s not a harsh forced discipline.
Jim Finley: Just the opposite. It’s like St. Augustine, you made our hearts for thee, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee. So it’s the intention in our will to be ever more faithfully receptive to this love of God that is giving itself to us as our very life and our nothingness without God, the blessedness of ourself. Merton says, “Those committed to social justice must be very careful not to be invested in the outcome of their efforts,” because it may go down in flames. That’s not the point.
So we do our best to resolve the suffering in ourself and the community, whatever. We’re grounded in a peace that’s not dependent on the outcome of the effort because it’s a peace of God on which everything depends. It’s unexplainably shining through the outcome regardless of the outcome even if you’re hanging on the cross.
Kirsten Oates: So this desire is very personal and comes in our relationship, the heart of our union with God and how that flows into desire in our own heart. But then this practice can be a way we concretize that desire or live in fidelity to that desire. Brother Lawrence is trying to give us something.
Jim Finley: How I put it, too, for me helps me. It’s incarnate infinity intimately realized. See, it’s incarnate infinity intimately realized. And we realized it first in little flashes and glimmers, like when you saw the tree. So the practice of the presence of God is path talk. See, how can I be ever more stabilized in the presence? It is the infinite generosity of God being poured out as every moment of my life. And this is the path of Brother Lawrence.
Kirsten Oates: Yes. So his desire and his will was shaped by that. Yes. Okay, beautiful.
Okay. Number five, the practice of the presence of God, although a little difficult at first, secretly achieves marvelous effects in the soul, attracting an abundance of God’s graces. And when done faithfully, it imperceptibly leads the soul to this simple awareness, to this loving view of God present everywhere. This is the most sacred, the most robust, the easiest, and the most effective form of prayer.
Jim Finley: Geez.
Kirsten Oates: Jim, these concepts, the heart. Then we had the mind and now we’ve got the soul. How do they all fit together?
Jim Finley: I would say that the mind … See, Jesus said to love God with all your soul, with all your mind, and all your strength. These terms refer to the interiority of ourself. Or another way of saying it, these terms refer to who we are as persons being created by God in the image and likeness of God. So the dimensions of the God-given divinity of the interiority of ourselves. So we say to God, if Jesus says, to love God with all your mind. And so I say to God, I don’t know what all my mind is, but you do because you created it, and therefore, I’m receptively open to merge with this. So I think that’s what these terms mean. They’re languages of interiority.
Kirsten Oates: That’s so helpful because the mind isn’t the day-to-day thoughts. The heart organ and the soul is something.
Jim Finley: That’s exactly right. It’s not the day-by-day mind what’s for lunch kind of thing. But here’s a turn. God is the presence of the day-by-day mind. Stirring the soup is God. It’s funny, it’s not just the day-by-day mind, but God is infinitely being given to me by the intimate simplicity of my day-by-day mind. It’s not some other mind beyond my day by. It’s the infinite generosity God presents in himself as the ordinariness of my mind, incarnate infinity, like intimately realized.
Kirsten Oates: And then also giving us our heartbeat.
Jim Finley: Exactly.
Kirsten Oates: Yes. Sustaining the organ of our heart.
Jim Finley: That’s right. That’s why an image that I use is what if our heartbeat was a voluntary muscle like our arms and legs? So in order for our heart to keep beating, we had to say, “Beat, beat, beat, beat, beat.” And what if we were absent-minded? Think of the anxiety. So you don’t have to tend the store because the infinite presence of God is presencing itself. You inhale your next life-giving breath. From whence does it arise? So we’re really trying to experience the presence of God presencing itself as the concreteness of existence itself, as sacred and holy.
Kirsten Oates: Yeah. So God’s giving us our thoughts, our heart, our body. And yet there’s this interior place where we’re one with God, the heart of the union, the core of our presence with God that lives beyond the thinking mind, the beating heart, that is our origin and our destiny.
Jim Finley: That’s right. And here’s another way who sets us on this path. There’s this thing about … I’m trying to keep up with the demands of the day. We get this feeling that we’re skimming over the depths of our own life, that we’re suffering from death deprivation. And that’s the thing. And what’s sad about it is God’s unexplainable oneness with us is hidden in the depths over which we’re skimming. So we realize we’re caught up in something. And we’re caught up in something that has this experientially exiled from a depth that I know is real because, one, from time to time, I taste it. And when I open the scriptures, it’s revealed to me. And so that’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to head for the depths of the ordinariness of ourself and to be habitually stabilized in it.
Kirsten Oates: How do you think about the soul? How would you define it?
Jim Finley: I think of Teresa of Avila, the interior castle in the soul. And again, because it’s the Discalced Carmelite Teresa. But here’s what Teresa says. She says also she thinks that the soul is a huge diamond like a soul, like made of crystal or diamond. And she says, “And then there are mansions or dwelling places like concentric circles going out.” And each concentric circle is the extent to which we experientially realize the gift of our soul. She says, “Some people don’t even know they have a soul.” They’re so caught up in exteriority. But then there’s an event in their life they’re awakened and they discover the interior life. So the first mansion then is an experiential deepening of the soul, but your heart is still divided.
And so you go deeper into the second mansion, into the third mansion. So what we’re talking about are incremental realizations of experientially realizing. And in this innermost seventh mansion, God’s in there waiting for us. She says, “Because if we think of heaven as where God lives, and since the kingdom of heaven is within you, your soul is God’s heaven.” I think he understands the soul in this way, because in the moment he saw the tree … Quicker than a heartbeat, you can suddenly be given a flash of the seventh mansion. You’re a momentary mystic. Then once you got a taste for it, then it lures us onto, how do I abide? And that which I know is always there. And the soul then is ever deeper experiential realizations of the presence of God presencing itself as who we are. And then we share it with others day by day by accepting them and loving them and being with them and so on.
Kirsten Oates: So then Brother Lawrence’s experience of engaging in this practice, he says it imperceptibly leads the soul to this simple awareness, to the loving view of God present everywhere. So he’s saying his experience of doing this practice, it leads him deeper towards that seventh mansion. Is that what you see, Jim?
Jim Finley: Yes. That’s very good. I think there are certain moments it flashes forth. But in another way of looking at it, the image I lose, like water filling the marshlands, the deepening presence is we imperceptibly got here. And we can’t look back and single out a moment where it happened. There’s no it to it. It’s like an imperceptibility intimately realized this way. And I think it means … So that’s a great word, imperceptibly. We can intimately realize what we cannot comprehend, and that’s the presence.
Kirsten Oates: And he’s sharing the path that he feels draws him imperceptibly closer.
Jim Finley: That’s why each of these mystics then are habitually stabilized in this. And the reason they’re writing is to help us be stabilized in it, too, this way. And this is how we’re being led on and on and on.
Kirsten Oates: So we see if it fits with our own experience and feels resonant with us. We don’t do it as a forced way of being. Yeah.
Jim Finley: No, you can’t push the river, because if you try to force it, it’s just your ego violating. I like this phrase, we’re learning not to do violence of the fragility of our waiting because God’s presence is the infinity of the waiting itself.
Kirsten Oates: Yeah. It’s funny that he imperceptibly leads the soul because we could be engaging in the practice through the ego with the force of will. And he’s going to tell us you can’t get gratification doing that because it’s imperceptible.
Jim Finley: And by the way, I think this happens a lot in therapy. You can be driving along with great force and you’re blindsided by taste of the grace in the midst of the force you’re given over to. That happens.
Kirsten Oates: Okay, last one. Please be aware that to arrive at this state requires our practice of self-control. Since it is impossible for a soul to still indulge in worldly things and completely enjoy this divine presence, to be with God, we must let go of everything created. This is, again, the paradox because we’re letting go of everything created as just things, objects in the world that we’re orienting to. And we’re trying to see the translucent divinity of everything created as the core essence of what everything is.
Jim Finley: That’s right. It shows how densely, paradoxically intuitive he is. Do you know what I mean? And he doesn’t … Like we said before, unlike Chris and John, he doesn’t tease it out for us. He lets us tease it out. My sense is this, please be aware to arrive at this state. What state? It’s the state where, in some subtle underlying way, your presence is non-distinguished from the presence of God, the presence of others and the presence of all things, the presence. To arrive at this state, we must practice self-control. But what kind of self-control? It’s a self-control. It’s like we’re afraid to lose the control that we think that we have over the life that we think that we’re living.
Self-control is giving up the need for control because there’s no control in joy, letting the unfoldings of your awakening happen and unfold. So it’s a paradoxical self-control since it is impossible for a soul to indulge in worldly things, where in worldly things, when to indulge in worldly things is pretending that they’re enough and their finiteness without God. That’s to indulge in them. Seeking God is okay that I just got a new big screen TV. I think it’ll do for now. It’s like that.
Kirsten Oates: Yeah.
Jim Finley: We do that. We buy into something. Since it is impossible for a soul to still indulge in worlds, you indulge in them as if they’re enough in their finiteness, which is to lose touch with the fact that the presence of God is presencing itself as those very things. And to completely enjoy the divine presence, and we completely enjoy the divine presence and being habitually surrendered over the divine presence surrendered over to us in the concreteness of our life. To be with God, we must let go of everything created. Namely, we have to let go of everything created, as in letting go of forgetting that it’s infinitely being created.
And if God wasn’t creating it into the present moment, it would vanish. So it’s very paradoxically dense series of insights. But you can see in the light of his whole teaching, that rings true. It’s giving a language to something unexplainable and very deep. It conveys itself and the integrity of his presence, I think.
Kirsten Oates: Yes, there’s so many layers to each point and you sift through the layers. I love the final sentence at the end of that whole maxim. This is how to practice the presence.
Jim Finley: Yeah. And say, “Oh, well, thanks for telling me, I’m off and running.” I’ll cut this page out and scotch tape it to the refrigerator and check in with it every day. And I just took care of that one.
Kirsten Oates: I’ve got it.
Jim Finley: Yeah. Well, I think he means it, but it’s an undoable how, but it’s okay because we’re not the ones doing it anyway.
Kirsten Oates: Yes.
Jim Finley: And by the way, insofar as we’ve been sincere in this dialogue, we’re doing it, as a fitting way to end. We spoke of the ladder to heaven of the Lectio, the discursive meditation and prayer, and it blossoms this contemplation, which is wordlessly resting in the presence of God. So in fidelity to that, let’s move collectively into silence together being silently present to the depth and beauty of God’s presence in our life. And so let’s sit together in silence for one minute. But if on your own, you’re inclined to sit longer to your own self be true. We’ll begin.
Amen.
Kirsten Oates: Amen. What a powerful way to end, really.
Jim Finley: That was good. Yeah.
Kirsten Oates: Wonderful. Yeah. So thank you, Jim.
Jim Finley: Thank you.
Kirsten Oates: Thank you so much.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Turning to the Mystics, a podcast created by the Center for Action and Contemplation. We’re planning to do episodes that answer your questions. So if you have a question, please email us at [email protected] or send us a voicemail. All this information can be found in the show notes. We’ll see you again soon.