Jim Finley:

Greetings. I’m Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics. Greetings everyone, and welcome to our time together, turning for trustworthy guidance to the teachings in Brother Lawrence’s practicing the presence. And in this session, I want to explore something with you in the light of all the mystics that we’re studying collectively. What I think is helpful to realize that when we listen to these mystics, that their lives are woven into our lives, that as the patterns of their lives are the patterns of our life. And our lives are woven into their lives because the patterns of our life are the patterns of their life, the ordinariness in which the awakenings occur. And that our lives woven into each other are woven into God’s life, woven into our lives.

In this talk, I would like to explore that. I’d like to turn to fundamental aspects of Brother Lawrence’s life and teachings. And because he entered Discalced Carmelite monastery, he was certainly very aware of the spirit of St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila who founded that reform in Spain. And so I would like to look at fundamental mentions of his life and how they resonate and are expressed in the fundamental expressions of their lives, of Teresa and John. And I would like to do this in a way, so that by seeing how these modalities of transformation in his life and their life, to help us see how they’re occurring in our life. That’s what I’m attempting to do here intuitively.

I’d like to begin first with Brother Lawrence’s life, and his life in which his awakening occurred with the presence of God in the presence of the tree. I would like to get at this then, and taking a look at John of the Cross’s life and Teresa’s life in which their awakenings occurred, it also then allows them to look at our life because our awakenings are occurring in our life because that’s where they occur. And I would like to look at that awakening, Brother Lawrence’s awakening, how he expresses it, at Teresa and John, to help us look at the various ways we get in touch with our awakening because it’s always intimate and personal, but what’s the qualitative nature of being initiated into these unitive states?

Next, I’d like to look at how this awakening can lead to a desire to abide in an ever more habitual state of the presence of God in life itself. So what is the path? There is the presence of God, but what does it mean to practice the presence of God? So likewise with Teresa and with John, when you really look at all these mystics, this is what they’re really trying to help us do because they know this path we’re on is very delicate and subtle and they’re always trying to help us navigate and find our way along this path, ever more habitual.

And then lastly, I’d like to look at where does all this end up? Is it if you live this way, how do these mystics… how did Brother Lawrence live up, like in the 12th letter as he was dying? And I would like to look at Teresa and John, how they ended up to give us a sense of where we’re headed, how we hope we’re going to end up, like the grand finale, what’s all this lead to? So that’s my intention here. And also I want to say, therefore, I’m not going to be quoting passages and so on because this isn’t like that. I’m trying to lightly touch on the arc where we can see their lives with each other, with our life and God, and so on so we get this kind of feeling because I have personally found this consoling for me and reassuring how we’re all woven together into this big picture.

I’d like to begin then with Brother Lawrence. We know and what was shared with us when Father Joseph Beaufort would go to him for spiritual direction and he’d write out what Lawrence told him. We know Brother Lawrence’s life, and also we owned it by the times because at this time in Paris among the poorest of the poor, it was very arduous, even the risk of famine. That’s the life that Brother Lawrence was born into, a life of poverty and struggle. A time in the war, then he gets wounded in the war and life, his life and it’s in the midst of his day by day life illumined by I think the sincerity of his faith.

If there’s a devotional sincerity of living out his day by day life and struggling to find food and lodging and where’s he going to go, that’s his life. And it’s in the context of that life, which is his life, in which the awakening occurs. And the awakening for him, it doesn’t occur in prayer. It’s interesting enough is a young man and he’s looking at a tree and he’s blindsided by the awakening. As you’ll see, I think we often are blindsided by it. We don’t see it coming because it emerges out of the ordinariness itself. And in the presence of this tree, he becomes more interiorly present to himself in communal oneness with the presence of the tree.

And in that communal oneness, realizes God’s communal oneness with him and his oneness with the tree accessing his heart and accessing his whole being with this taste of all pervasive oneness, of the presence of God presencing itself and itself away in the presence of the ordinariness of life itself. That was his awakening. And he says for him, not as necessarily rapture or ecstasy, but it was the depth of how all pervasive the oneness was. That happens sometimes. Other times I think it’s not like that. Little by little is a collective effect of awakenings, but sometimes it does happen. There’s this awakening in the aftermath of which you’re never quite the same.

With Teresa, we look at Teresa, her life in Avila. Spain, 16th century. And I was fortunate enough to go to Avila and be there. You can go to her house where she lived as a little girl and you can look at the yard she played in as a little girl, that she was an ordinary person. She just grew up as a little girl in this little medieval village town, walled city of Avila. As a young woman, she felt called to it with a convent, the Carmelite convent, which she did.

It was in that convent that she began to experience her awakening. There are certain in her life where you can read her spiritual memoir in her life, there are little foreshadowings of it. For example, she says at one time this was a large convent and the nuns were caught up in some political debate amongst themselves. People were against each other and for each other. And she’s sitting in prayer and she hears God silently say to her, “Teresa, why are you concerned about such things? Seek me.” And you saw that in Brother Lawrence too. I’ve always thought to be nothing except one with God, communion with God. So God’s asking her, “Be one with me, seek me.”

One of the major turning points of her life, her awakening, it happened in prayer. And her book The Interior Castle, stages of prayer, this is the fourth mansion. And what she says happened to her and she tells us this so that we might catch what may be happening to us. As she’s sitting there in silent prayer, maybe with the scriptures or sitting in the chapel, just in the ordinariness of her devotional sincerity. And she says, as she sits there, she compares the presence of God to water. And she has this sense that this presence of God like water is being drawn from afar like our Father who art in heaven. And it’s also drawn up and drawn into her through effort, struggling with distraction and struggling with confusion and efficacious unto holiness.

And she says as she was sitting there that way, in her devotional sincerity, she said all of a sudden suddenly an unexpected shift in her awareness where she sensed the presence that God flowing into her without effort for some hidden place, deep within and beyond herself, like a flow into her presence. And she feels that this presence that was flowing into her without effort, she likens it, she’s looking for an image to help us put words to this experience. And she says, “Imagine water flowing into a basin and it keeps flowing, flowing and it overflows. But imagine what if instead the basin didn’t overflow, but the basin kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger to accommodate the water,” and she said it felt like that was happening to her heart. Her heart was being enlarged to divine proportions that as the love that was flowing into her, it was transforming her into itself in the boundarylessness of God.

And she talks about this as being very subtle, almost as if you turn to look directly at it, it goes away. If you try to figure it out even further, if you try to get ahold of it so you can capture it and own it like a mastered method, it goes even further away. But if you just quietly sit, unexplainably resting in God, resting in you in the simplicity of the moment, that was her awakening.

John of the Cross, he was newly ordained in the Carmelite order, and he helped turn the reform of the Carmelites, the Discalced Carmelite is reformed back to more poverty, simplicity, prayer and so on. And the priests, when they got word of the reform, she was doing it with the nuns and he was to do it with the priest. The priest did not appreciate the implications that they needed to be reformed. And these were the priests that taught him scripture and the seminary. These are his professors in scripture in prayer. And so they told him to stop.

He said he can’t stop and he had to do this. So they took and captured him and put him in a little prison cell in the monastery and kept him there for nine months. It was cold in the winter, hot in the summer, very little light coming through, one opening in a wall. He had very poor diet. For a long time, they wouldn’t give him anything to read, no candles, no nothing. And they would bring him out on a regular basis and strip him to the waist and whip him. Holy Mother, the church, praise the Lord I showed you. And what happened is he fell into despair.

And this is what happens when we put our faith in those who represent God rather than putting our faith in God. And so when those who represent God or their own frailties come shining through, we become disheartened and he lost refuge and it was there in that darkness. He says, “O night lovelier than the dawn, a great light started shining out of that darkness,” which is the light of God sustaining presence in his life. “O light lovelier than the dawn.” He escapes and goes on with his life, but he never forgot that moment and he lived with that. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness grasp it. Not the darkness can’t grasp it, but it can be unexplainably, illumined by it. So in the darkest hour, the light shines the brightest for him.

Next. Then lead us to think, I wonder for myself, well then what was, what’s my life like in which my awakenings occurred? I put this in my memoir. It was a life of trauma, and it started for me as early as age three or four years old really, I think the first intimations of it. It got deeper and deeper and led me to the monastery really, because this is really all about you. How about your awakenings? Because if you look back at your own life and the situations that you were born into that you grew up in and so on, see how has it come to pass that you’ve become the person who’s capable of being touched by such things? And is it not so that in the midst of your ordinariness you were unexpectedly quickened with the touch?

The touch, it’s very personal. What that touch was might be something that was quite overwhelming really. Very, very often, most likely. It was very subtle. And I think in hindsight, if we look back, they often started in childhood like moments of quiet amazement or a state of intimate wonderment. And he gave us a qualitative sense, like a realization of a presence that somehow transcends and is shining through the ordinariness of yourself. And so what have been your awakenings, whatever they may be.

Next, these awakening moments, these grace moments, and I think everyone has them from time to time in different realms of life and nature and intimacy and solitude and prayer. And sometimes it happens in long-suffering, like a sustaining light that’s sustaining you in the suffering. It comes as it comes. There are these moments of awakening, but they fade. And so the insight is that in these grace moments that we’re talking about now, the intuition isn’t as something more was given, but a curtain parted and the infinite presence of God is infinitely present in itself was experientially realized. And to know that presence of God is presenting itself in every moment of our life. So what happens? And this is where we start path talk.

What is the path along which I might be healed from what hinders me from living in an habitual state of the presence of God that’s presencing myself into my own life, breath by breath, moment by moment? And what’s that path? And when you really think about it, Lawrence and Teresa and John and all this is what they’re writing about. They’re trying to help us with this because they know how confusing it can be that you know that such unit of language actually applies to you. It comes unawares, it comes like a whisper. It wells up unexplainably in the midst of unresolved things. And sometimes we realize it’s been there for a long time, we didn’t recognize it. And they’re trying to help us recognize it by sharing with us how they recognize it. And then to recognize a certain longing like a desire, and to know that that desire is an echo of God’s desire for you like each unto each. So then the question is, and that desire by the way is like a flame. The flickers in the wind, it’s very subtle.

I think that’s even so in Trappist monasteries or it’s even subtle in monasteries. Out here in the world with rush hour traffic and cell phones, we need to calibrate our heart because sometimes this subtle desire seems to be completely gone. Then all of a sudden, there it is again. The least little thing can reawaken it, a slant of light across the floor, lying in the dark, listening to road and breathing, smelling of flower like there it is again. And so how then can I get past these occasional grace glimpses? What is the path along which it becomes habitual? For Brother Lawrence, I think one way of saying it as you listen to him, notice his emphasis isn’t so much prayer, but how when he’s one with God in prayer, how the oneness with God in prayer is oneness with God in the ordinariness of every moment of his life in the pots and pans of the kitchen.

And what he seems to be seeing in the beginning is intentionality. He tries to always remember when he walks into a room, for example, that God’s already unexplainably present, presencing the infinity of itself as that room as him walking into it. He says little glimpses to keep going back over and over. It seems to be his method and the accumulative effect of that sincerity, it stabilizes in him as an habitual state so that the ordinariness of the pots and pans in the kitchen is the presence of God presencing itself as the holiness of the pots and the pans in the kitchen.

And so how can this be true of us? How can I say it isn’t just moments of devotional sincerity, but how can I in quietly sitting in my own living room, we’re wiping down the kitchen counter, we’re looking out the kitchen window, hear a child run by, just running by the street. I learned to tune into incidentals of things as incarnations of this presence. How can I develop the habit? And I have to choose to develop it and faithfulness to a rendezvous with God in a quiet hour that he has to be carried throughout the day. I say, how do we do that?

Let’s say for Brother Lawrence is his intentionality. And he also says, by the way, notice that he wasn’t very good at it, but God kept coming to him all the ways he wasn’t very good at it, which even deepened the experience. For Teresa, I think one way of putting it for her be this way, singling out something. Is it for her, she says that what you do is when you sit in prayer, it isn’t a method. Unlike the way of a pilgrim or the cloud of unknowing, it’s not the use of a word. What you do is every time you sit in prayer, just be sincerely devotionally open to the way you were when it first happened, because the way is not a method, is surrendering to you when you sit that way.

If you sit that way in unguarded, devotional, sincerity, what is it that starts to stir in transformative ways in your heart? And then with God’s grace to surrender to it that it might have its way with you, that’s her way. Sometimes it’s interesting as she talks about different modes of this like trying to help us look at different modes of this way. Sometimes she calls it effective prayer where the sense of the love for God is the prayer, where the love for God, even the unfelt love for God you know is there is the experiential sense of God’s love for you beyond what you can feel. It’s the effective prayer.

She also sometimes referred to it as the prayer of quiet. She says in the prayer of quiet, you’re not inclined to say anything. You’re not inclined to ask for anything. Like the prophet in the Old Testament about God’s saying to Israel, “I will lead her into the desert and I’ll speak to her heart.” So she talks about these different modes, the prayer of quiet, the prayer of effective prayer. Oh, notice they’re all modes of becoming ever and more supple, or ever more vulnerable to being ever more transformed into the depths of God transforming you into itself and your fidelity to this way. And she goes to these stages, gets deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper.

Next for St. John of the Cross, what it is for him. He takes his experience in the prison, in the utter darkness, and how he puts it as this way, he says, “What happens to some people, you realize that in your devotional sincerity, we might say that God realized you become overly attached to your finite ways of experiencing the presence of God.” That as you become detached to your insights into the things of God, where you become attached to your consolations of the felt sense of God’s presence, you’re moved by the ways, you’re inspired by prayer like aspirations to a certain ministry, to a certain word which is praise the Lord.

But these are finite ways of experiencing the infinite presence of God. And so what God does is God quietly removes the ability to experience God’s presence in these finite ways. And he calls, “We find our way to God in a passage through a dark night.” We go for our daily rendezvous with God in prayer and God doesn’t show up for the rendezvous. You open the scriptures and you find it uninteresting.

There’s no felt sense because all your familiar reference points in the finite ways are being taken away by God, so that if you don’t panic, if you don’t panic and just stay there, and this can go on for years, if you don’t panic, O light lovelier than the dawn, you can start to see a light shining unexplainably out of the darkness. And he says what you can begin to realize that this darkness is actually your finite eyes are being blinded by an infinite light. It isn’t as if it doesn’t overflow into intuitions, it does look, it is intuitions, but it’s not reducible to any intuition and isn’t as if it doesn’t overflow into emotions, it does. There’s the gift of tears. All these experiences can happen to you, but it’s not reducible to any of those.

And that somehow, the way is being ever more faithful to that unexplainable unraveling of yourself. The way I put it with John of the Cross, he’s saying, all these mystics is find that act, find that person, find that relationship, find that community, which when you give yourself over to it with your whole heart, it unravels your petty preoccupation with yourself and strangely brings you home to yourself near your origin. It starts going on through all of life like you keep losing your footing and your ability to live on your own terms and God sustained you in this mysterious, paradoxical, deeper way to find your footing.

Next. So for me, I think at home I was with all the trauma, I think it was just a devotional sincerity of God sustaining me in the trauma. But then when I went to the monastery, I was drawn to go there, and I lived there for six years in cloistered silence and it had a very deep effect on me, just really affected me. And I think a lot of it happened to me there in wordless silence. And also, I found it was Edward Merton led me to these mystics that I shared with you. And I began to realize that they were putting words to what my own heart was struggling to realize and helping me to realize that maybe it’s already closer than I imagine, and to walk with that and internalize it.

So at least the question, well, how about you? Because you’re on this path. How do we know you’re on this path? You’re listening to these talks. If you weren’t on the path, guess what? You wouldn’t listen. You’d be watching TV reruns, or I mean you’d be living your life, good for you. But the very fact you’re listening to this talk, this is the path. So the question is, what is it that these talks, the voices of these mystics, Lawrence and John and Teresa and so on, how are they helping you find words for your own, what your own heart is stirring with? And that’s what I mean that your life’s woven into theirs and their life is woven into yours. And notice also, it isn’t… And I think this is, as I said with people over the years in therapy and spiritual direction, it isn’t as if you’re somehow mastering it, but rather you’re learning to be surrendered over to an unexplainable presence that’s mastering you. I don’t know why, but I’ve always been touched by this poem, Barbara Lute’s poem.

A woman put this poem on my desk or a retreat that I was given. I think it was Barbara who put it there. I think she was on the retreat. I love this little poem, when she uses the word her, she’s referring to her soul, and she says, “It takes almost nothing to move her. A soft agitation in the rain, an ant going by that knows where it’s going. The subtlest of things awakens or quickens you with the wonderment of God pouring itself out and giving itself out to you.” I think this also helps us to see in these moments that we see this, it helps us to see all the ways we tend not to see it. But notice, God awakened us in the midst of our not seeing it, that’s an encouraging word. You didn’t see it coming.

And also, by leaning into not seeing it, you realize it’s this deeper way to see, like Merton says, “With God to understand is to know that you’re infinitely understood,” or to put it another way, to see is to know you’re infinitely seen as the beloved.

And a lot of spiritual directions like this can tell me, it’s very subtle, it’s trying to put words and how do I be faithful to that subtlety, to that delicacy? And so how about you? See, where are you at in the midst of all of this that illumines you and encourages you? What perplexes you? And the long for fulfillment, it’s a long time coming, it always helps me to say it. It’s learning how not to do violence at the fragility of our waiting. It’s somehow waiting for the consummation. In the midst of our unconsummated ways is where the unexpected consummation occurs. It comes welling up and overtakes us in our inability to find it in unexplainable ways. Subtle, subtle, subtle. And so this is our path. This is our ordinary life. Out of the ordinary life emerges these awakenings. Out of these awakenings emerges the desire to abide, which is then the path and the mystics are marking out that path. This is why they’re writing this for all of this, and we’re passing it on here hopefully. This has been passed like this.

So then the question is, well, where does all this lead? Because by your fruit you shall note them. And I’d like to give a few images from the saints and about us and ourselves. You get this feeling that Father Joseph of Beaufort as a newly ordained young priest going to the elderly Brother Lawrence, you get this feeling that if he describing his time with Brother Lawrence, and if we could sit with Brother, and in a way we are sitting with Brother Lawrence, we’re sitting with these mystics this way is you’d get the feeling when you were with him that you’re in the presence of a very present person. I think you’d also get the feeling that you’re in the presence of a very present person in whom the presence of God is embodied in their, I think you’d get that feeling.

I think you’d also get the feeling that this very present person in whom God’s presence is embodied, that this person is very attentive to you, and the person is very attentive to you because you get the sense that this person can sense the presence of God shining out of you, and sitting in the presence of this person and reflected in their awareness of you, it helps you to see the presence of God shining out of you. The person then guides you in your own fumbling ways, not being very good at it and not needing to be very good at it that we’re led along this path. I think it would be this way.

For Teresa of Avila, I think a striking moment for her, in The Interior Castle, she’s writing about the seventh mansion, which is this mystical marriage, this habitual state of the divinization of ourselves in a without God as an habitual state. What is the presence of God that shines out unexplainably from standing up and sitting down that she has lived in that state and she said for the person who’s come to this state, she says at the very end of The Interior Castle, there’s only one question left is how can I be helpful? That’s a lovely way to end. It’s so incarnate. She says in her writing, she says, “Sisters, we need to be very careful that we don’t talk about how God’s love for the world and how we love the world and praying. Well, we need to look at us how we’re treating each other.” And you can even look closer as how you treat yourself, a strange way we’re so strangely punitive and withholding and how God’s infinitely in love with us and helping us with all of that. That’s Teresa.

I was so fortunate to go, and I was in Avila. She was always on these trips founding new foundations. It was on foot traveling on was or horse-drawn. Her health was very fragile. She was on one of these trips and she was visiting at one of the convents that she had Discalced Carmelites, and she died on that trip. You can see the room she died in. The bed is still there just the way it was when she died in it like blessedness.

For John of the Cross, I think two telling stories by John of the Cross, one of the friars of the monastery. He kept a journal. And on Sunday, I forget what the exact routine was, they would gather in little groups and go on long walks. And he says in his journal, we’d always hoped that John of the Cross would join our group because he always made us laugh. I think that’s telling.

Another very telling thing is when John of the Cross was dying, he could go to a monastery where the superior of the monastery was one of his devotees. He was turned to John of the Cross with the presence of God. The superior, one of the other monasteries was one of the priests who abused him. And what’s interesting through the years, some of those priests, some of them tried to get him removed from the order, even after he was writing all this. And he chose to die with that person’s monastery. That’s where he went. And there’s a story, the person says that John the Cross was on his deathbed and he asked to see the superior. And John the Cross said to this person, “Whatever I’ve done to contribute to the difficulties between us, I apologize.”

And it’s said the person who left the room and wept. So in this very dying moment, like Father forgive them, they know not what they do passing on. And so what we’re looking for is I know I’m 82 years old, I’m at the cusp, but we’re on our way.

We’re on toward the ripening of all of this in our hearts being more and more unraveled as we move towards our death, as the breaking free of that in us that never dies, which is that in us that we were touched by the presence of God in our awakening, the deathless presence of ourself eternally in time. And then so when we die and cross over, we cross over into the fullness of this love that we’ve always been living in, and the obscurity of our hearts and time in the faith. How about you?

Sometimes my grandmother on my mother’s side, she was the matriarch of the family. And sometimes you’re so like the wisdom of the elders. You’re just so aware of a person who’s present to you and sees you. Where would we be without such people? I like what Richard Rohr says, “The trouble is not enough old people or elders. They’re just grumpy old people. The fact you become old doesn’t mean you automatically become an elder,” which is true by the way.

And are you on the path that’s leading toward that ripening? And I would also suggest one last thought that in our prayer through all of this, it constantly tends to move two different phases. One is a phase of Lectio Divina. Listening, hero Israel, listening. We listen to God’s word speaking to us in the misty, we hear God’s voice talking to us.

Next is discursive meditation. We then reflect upon it. For example, right now, this talk, this is Lectio, this is that voice. What would the meditation be? You might then, if you’re listening to it on a recording, turn the recording off and how are you sitting with it? I mean seriously, really. And you might turn it off over and over and over again where the voice quickens something, where then it’s how does it sit with you in the presence of God, which then moves towards this prayer, devotional longing. Help me with this Lord, because I cannot deepen your infinite oneness with me unless you deepen it. Help me with the heart center.

Next, what are the ways that that threefold deepening unexpectedly folding over into a wordless union? And it can be happening for a long time, but it’s so subtle, we tend not to recognize it. And how can we then turn to the mystics to help us understand that and to cooperate with that and to be faithful to that so that we might continue on. And this is how this lineage lives in us, lives on in our own hearts. And also that I think too last thought is that we might become someone then in whose presence others might find it easier to sense them in themselves and pass on the contagious energy of awakening and the sharing of ourselves with each other.

With that, let’s end with a sit. I want you to sit straight and fold your hands and bow.

Slowly say the Lord’s prayer together.

Our Father who art in heaven.

Hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come.

Thy will be done.

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses.

As we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation.

But deliver us from evil.

Mary, Mother of Contemplatives, pray for us. St. Teresa of Avila, pray for us. St. John of the Cross, pray for us. Brother Lawrence, pray for us. Blessings till next time.

Kirsten Oates:

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.