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 found in the teachings of the Christian mystic Brother Lawrence. In his treasured book, Practicing the Presence of God. Carmen Acevedo Butcher translates this classic work and titles that Practice of the presence. And in these reflections, I’ll be using her translation and also being very much helped by her in-depth insights into the work. So with that then I want to begin at the very beginning of the book, which are the maxims, the sayings. These weren’t found until later. So in the older translation, the one I had at the monastery, it didn’t include the maxims. So this is more of a complete version of the work. And I want to start with the spiritual maxims, and I’m going to start with the very first one, which is everything is possible. 

And this is on page 46. I’ll read the passage and then comment on it, reflect upon it. “Everything is possible for those who believe, even more for those who hope, still more for those who love and most of all, for all those who practice and persevere in these three powerful paths.” I’d like to reflect on this and I’d like to observe something about Brother Lawrence and how he teaches as we look at the other mystics that we’ve been exploring together in this series. Say example, he Discalced Carmelite lay brother. And so Discalced Carmelite and St. John of the Cross, they’d give us spiritual teaching and then they would expand upon it with examples of how it expresses it in different ways, how to relate to that, challenges that. And so Brother Lawrence doesn’t do that. It’s almost like a very succinct, poetic voice in a single phrase, but he doesn’t comment on the phrase. 

And so what it means, in some way is poetic and dense with endless implications. And I also think that if we, I’m thinking when I was with Thomas Merton at the monastery, I think if we would be going to Brother Lawrence as our spiritual director, like Father Joseph, we’ll see later this priest, he wouldn’t talk like this. He wouldn’t talk in succinct aphorisms. I think you’d get the sense he’d be very present and he’d be very present to you. He’d be deeply attentive to you and he would listen to what it is you want help with and he would join you in your search. And so I’m going to take that role here and I’m going to share with you how it sits with me personally, because that’s what counts, not just my opinion. What I want to do is I want to share how it strikes me personally true to the lineage of the mystical traditions of the Christian faith that I was steeped in at the monastery and all these mystics. 

So we’re making explicit by practical examples where he leaves implicit. And hopefully as you’re listening to these talks, it will help you then to see how this sits with you because this is what he would want. It’s challenging not because it’s technical, but it’s disarmingly transparent, it’s our actual presence. With that said, then I’ll begin that everything is possible for those who believe. So I’d like to tease open what it means to believe. I think in the light of the mystical tradition, certainly in the light of Brother Lawrence, is to believe with our heart that God believes in us and to trust that God’s One with us and that we’re seeking with God’s help to foster the sincere desire to be ever more surrendered over and a trusting faith in God’s faith in us giving the infinity of God’s very presence to us as God’s Beloved and that’s to believe. 

So it isn’t then right at the very beginning, we’re trying to believe better where we’re trying to improve our believing skills, but rather what we’re doing with God’s help, it’s to be surrendered and open to God’s faith in us. And kind of a devotional sincerity. It’s the realization of the Presence of God, realizing devotional sincerity. And this is to believe, even more to hope. And so for us, we saw this too in previous mystics too. See, for us to hope in time is we hope for a hopeful outcome of a current process we’re in the midst of that we hope it turns out the way we want it to, the way we hope that it will. But with God, we don’t hope that God loves us and we don’t hope that God’s present in our life because God is already present in our life. 

So the hope is to know that since God is already in love with us and is already One with us and this so in this sense, this is also very key to Brother Lawrence, to all these mystics, God is One with us. I’ll say it poetically, God is One with us in that the infinite Presence of God is presencing the infinity of itself, self-donating act, creative act that the infinite Presence of God is presencing the infinity of itself and giving itself away whole and complete in and as the gift and the miracle of the immediacy of our very presence and the presence of others and of all things in our communal nothingness without God. So this is not to say that we are God, it’s quite the opposite. It’s to say we’re absolutely nothing without God. But this is the paradox. It’s our absolute nothingness without God that makes our presence to be the Presence of God. 

And so it is already here already upon us. So there is the Presence of God and God is God. There is the Presence of God presencing itself, pouring itself out and giving itself away in and as the immediacy of our very presence. But because of the mystery of the Fall, not as a blight on the soul, but rather the Fall, and that our capacity to be experientially grounded in God’s self-donating presence, presencing itself as our presence is traumatized, kind of exiled from God’s oneness with us that alone is ultimately real. And this is the importance of faith. See, for those who believe, because faith, it isn’t just in faith that when we hear that God loves us. To the power of the Spirit who dwells in our heart, we’re empowered to experientially know that God really does love us, not in a way that we could explain because it’s infinite, but we experientially understand that it’s true and that’s the gift of faith. 

And there’s another important thing for Brother Lawrence about faith and about hope because now the hope is that with God’s grace, we will be ever more experientially grounded in this love without which we are nothing absolutely. That’s what we’re hoping for. And there’s another important theme in this for all the mystics including Brother Lawrence. And that is it isn’t just that there’s faith, it’s a kind of an intimate atmospheric knowing that’s God’s oneness with us in life is so. But from time to time we’re graced with flashes of the experience of God’s oneness with us. And some of the mystics tell us what their awakening experience was and some they don’t, but Brother Lawrence does. 

Another section of this book are the conversations. So there was a young priest, Joseph of Beaufort, and at the time Brother Lawrence would’ve been in his fifties. So this young newly ordained priest would go to Brother Lawrence as his spiritual director. It reminds me at 18 years old having Merton as my director, it was kind of like that. And then what Father Joseph would do, he would go right afterwards and carefully write down everything Brother Lawrence said. So what we have in the conversations is another assesses to Brother Lawrence’s teachings as shared with us in Father Joseph’s understanding of this. In one of these meetings that they had, he tells us about an awakening experience he had at 18 years old. I’ll read the text. It’s in the conversations. It’s on page 123, this strange gift. The first conversation Brother Lawrence told him this, “One day in winter as he was looking at a barren tree stripped of its leaves and considering how in a little while these leaves would reappear green, followed by flowers and fruits, he received a profound awareness of God’s kindness and power that never left his soul since. With this awareness, he completely detached himself from the world and it gave him such a love for God that he could not say it had ever increased during more than 40 years since he received the gift.” I’d like to reflect on this. 

First of all, you don’t get the impression Brother Lawrence doesn’t give the impression that he went into ecstasy like Teresa of Avila, she would have raptures. It’s more like he’s looking at this tree and I think this is an experience we can all relate to in varied ways. He’s looking at the tree. As he pauses to ponder the tree, he becomes more present to himself in communal oneness with the presence of the tree. And in becoming more present to himself in the presence of the tree, he experiences God’s presence incarnate in and as his presence in communal oneness with the tree and it permeates his soul. It’s very subtle, but it’s sovereign like an all-encompassing delicacy this way. Subtle, subtle, and it stayed with him. And I think this is very important for us to Brother Lawrence because he would say this, “How has it come to pass that you have become the man or woman who’s capable of being sensitive to such things? Insofar as you’re touched by these reflections or you’re moved by it, your own awakening heart bears witness, you’re already on the path, brother Lawrence is speaking of. Otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense.” 

So how has it come to pass? And you can look back to see the first stirrings of your awakening? And I think sometimes when you look back, sometimes it’s as children that they come to us like a quickening, like a state of amazement or a state of wonder or a state of resting in a fullness like what a fool I am to worry so the way I do. It just kind of quietly washes over us. And so he’s inviting us, I think to pay attention to our own moments. Sometimes they’re very intense actually. Sometimes there are moments of awakening to God’s oneness with us, the presence and you’re never the same. Sometimes it comes as a call to be faithful, true, but very, very often it is like a whisper. So what we’re really doing is calibrating our heart to never finer caliber, a scale to merge into the subtlety of the sovereignty of God’s presence presencing itself as the mystery of our presence and not to break faith for what was given to us there. 

Now these moments, we can’t make them happen. They tend to be very fleeting. They happen in the midst of nature and intimacy with another person and being with children, lying awake in the dark, listening to your own breathing, smelling a flower, sitting at the deathbed of a dying loved one. It comes as it comes and it goes as it goes. So we can’t make it happen, but what we can do is this, and this is what it means to practice the Presence of God. How do you practice it? What we can do is this, we can assume the inner stance, and this is meditation practice. We can assume the inner stance that offers the least resistance to being overtaken by what we cannot make happen. And that’s brother, we’re doing it. Now, this isn’t a lecture, it’s not like a theory at all, but rather we’re being lured and listening to Brother Lawrence into the very stance in which we’re practicing the Presence of God in the presence of Brother Lawrence, sharing with us the Presence of God. 

That’s the surprising intimacy of his teachings. What’s already unexplainably there, even before you start to think about it, this intermingling of your own presence being in some way non-distinct from the Presence of God being given to as your own presence. And so what we have here so far, what do we have here so far in Brother Lawrence? There is the Presence of God and there is the Presence of God presencing itself, pouring itself out in and as the gift of our presence. Then in faith it’s where it shines through as experienced. See, faith is the experience of the transubjective communal oneness of the presence and to the presence this way in faith. And then we have moments where the faith is quickened with flashpoints, where it flashes forth and it accesses us and it moves on. But what Brother Lawrence is saying, what we can do is to practice the practice by cultivating. 

It’s like this too. I think in any ongoing committed love relationship, the two people in that relationship, they don’t live in perpetual state of ecstatic communion with one another. But what they can do is let the oneness with each other in love, they can practice love by practicing an attitude, no loving stance toward one another and everything they do and say, so the simplest gestures somehow incarnate the richness of the love that they don’t necessarily need to or don’t have to feel. They know it’s there all the while. And I think this is Brother Lawrence’s teaching, we’re kind of at the heart of it. And so it’s true for those who believe it’s even more than for those who hope. We hope that someday God will be One with us because God already is. But rather we hope that with God’s help we’ll be ever more habitually established in the love for God that’s already there, unexplainably there. 

That’s what we’re hoping for. And if we just stay on this path, it’s happening already. You look where you are right now with this, these intimate matters looking back. So where you are now, if you look back to where you were maybe five years ago, it’s different now and God’s not done with us yet. And so it’s an ongoing, evolving deepening of a realization of that which is already unexplainably always there this way and we hope, we just hope. Also, this is very big for Brother Lawrence. What we hope for is the realizing the Presence of God is presencing itself in and as the concrete immediacy of the presence of everything around us. So for him it was the pots and pans in the kitchen that somehow the pots and the pans in the kitchen, he recognized the Presence of God presencing itself as the pots and pans in the kitchen. 

What’s also interesting is he tells us that he didn’t like being a cook. He was a cook for years, but he also, it was God presencing the infinity of God’s presence presencing itself and him not liking it to do it. And that was the Presence of God. So it’s an all pervasive atmosphere and that’s the thing about the Presence of God. It’s an all inclusive because it includes all possible things. So we’re trying to calibrate to an ever finer scale. It gets expanded out into the concreteness of everything. So for example, right now I’m sitting in my living room. I don’t know where you are, out walking or whatever it is. So it’s almost, I would put it this way, that somehow the configuration of the furniture in the room, like the clock’s over there, the couch is over there and the bookshelves over here is God’s mandala. 

Somehow the configuration, everything are patterns of divinity, everything are patterns of these endlessly fluctuating patterns of the Presence of God itself. Certain moments we taste it, we’re kind of touched by it, but then we seek to practice the practice by cultivating it, which is what we’re doing right now. And we also trust that when this reflection ends today, we ask God for the grace that the thread won’t break. In other words, this will become ever more an underlying habitual sensitivity as we go about the chores of the day, as the Presence of God manifested as the chores of the day. “Still more,” he says, “still true for those who love, even more so for those who love.” This is big also. I mean everything he says is big, but he just says it like a phrase even more for love really. “How so,” following some of the philosophical theology of Scotus and Bonaventure, the primacy of love, “that we don’t exist because God is, we exist because God loves us. And in an ongoing self-donating act, because love is the fullness of presence, it overflows and so God then creates us, you creates me, creates us, creates us as the Beloved and he creates us as the Beloved because God so needs someone to completely give himself to unexplainably forever and that’s you.” 

And so even more for love is that you’re in the presence of this infinite love that in the infinity of its love is creating you as the Beloved, as the one that God seeks then to completely give God to for all eternity as your destiny and love. He then goes on, he then goes on to fine-tune this even more because he breaks it down into some points. And this is still the first maxim, the first subset, first maxim number one. The first refined point that he makes in his first maxim is Brother Lawrence tells us, “We always look to God in their kindness and all we do, say and begin. Since our purpose is to become the wisest lovers of God in this life as we hope to be for all eternity.” “We seek to be,” it’s a lovely phrase, “to be the wisest of lovers in this life as we hope for all eternity. We firmly resolve to overcome with their grace all the difficulties found in this spiritual life.” 

And I’d like to again go back to some fine distinctions that he makes just in passing. They were always looking at God in their kindness one and everything that we do standing up and sitting down going through the day, we’re always looking for this because everything that we’re doing is the incarnate Presence of God and everything that we do also in everything that we say somehow, everything that we say is somehow embodying hopefully this love and everything that we begin. And I would add, it isn’t just everything that we begin, because we’re always beginning in something, but I would add one more, he kind of implies it, it’s also in everything that we end. For anything that we begin, we’re beginning in the presence is already there and everything that we end, we’re ending a manifestation of the love that never ends. 

So you see this kind of constancy of a presence in these variations of the ways we express and experience our lives. There’s a kind of thing in the tradition that just generally speaking, we can’t love anyone or anything unless we know it, except when it comes to God, we can’t know it unless we love. It’s only in the love that we know it. If we don’t love, we don’t know it, because God is love. We’re reflecting more, “To be the wisest of lovers is to place our faith in the infinite love for us. And that’s to be the wisest of lovers.” It isn’t as if, “I feel kind of wise now in love and I keep trying, I’ll get even wiser.” It’s not incremental growth and love, but how can I become ever more surrendered to the intimate realization that God’s infinitely in love with me, that I’m the Beloved and I’m created solely for love is the one that God can give all that God is in love. 

And how so? “So that we in being moved by God’s love for us might then in turn give ourselves in love to the love that gives itself to us, which moves God with the fullness of love each unto each. And for all of those who persevere in these three powers of belief, hope, and love.” And why did he use the word persevere? I think he uses the word persevere because this isn’t easy. And the reason is, is that we get overtaken by the complexities of the day and we get overtaken by feeling and believing that the outcome of a certain unresolved matter as the authority to name who we are and we get reactive. And so what it is really, we have to persevere in this, that what’s essential never imposes itself, which is this love which unessential is constantly imposing itself, which is the passing away of everything that keeps passing away and the self that gets invested in what’s passing away is itself passing away. 

But rather we’re trying in the midst of everything passing away to ground ourself in a love that never passes away and is completely present in everything that’s endlessly passing away. So we persevere in this and this is really then the kind of, I think the fragility of the path. He says that, “We look to God for God’s kindness to us that evokes a kindness toward God, towards others and towards all things.” If I can make an observation. This first session’s coming to a close and I only read one paragraph, but here’s the thing, if you can sit with the tonal quality of what’s being said, this is the only thing he says. That’s why I say he plays a violin with one string on it, but the string that he’s playing is a whole orchestra. And so what he does, he never backs away from this. He just stays with it. 

I think then what we’re doing then is we listen to this. This is why at any given point, this is why listening to it more than once is not redundant. This is why as you’re listening, you may want to stop recording and sit with it because what he is really talking about is he’s talking about you and the deepening of your presence in the Presence of God who’s infinitely in love with you in the ordinariness of yourself, in the midst of your situation, regardless of the nature of the situation. And this is the teachings of Brother Lawrence. And so as we go through the later sessions, we’ll be looking at other aspects, but in the same register we’re touching on. But once you get the flavor of what’s being said, it’s the flavor of everything and you can step into the stream and sit and read him. 

And I’ve been reading for years. It’s just endless actually, so we’ll end on that note. We’ll end with a meditation. Most of you’ve heard these in these other talks already. In case you’re new at this, I’m going to invite you to sit straight or if you’re already walking, stand a little straighter, then to fold your hands and bow. So Shunryu Suzuki, the Soto Zen master says that when we bow, we give ourselves up. He said, “If ever you get to a place in life where the only thing you can do is bow, you should do it.” That’s a good saying. And what Brother Lawrence is saying, every moment is that moment the least and the most we can do is bow in gratitude for the gift of the miracle of being touched by the truth and beauty of these teachings, of the Presence of God. 

So in this sit, we will sit for one minute, then I’ll ring the bell. But on your own, as you’re practicing, of course you can sit as long as your heart inclines you to sit. But for our purposes here, this sit will be for one minute, then I’ll ring the bell. And what you’re going to do in the sitting, what are you going the o do when you sit? Well, listening to Brother Lawrence, you already know when we sit, we’re going to be practicing the presence of sitting there, kind of quietly amazed that the infinite Presence of God is presencing itself as us sitting there just as we are. Exactly as we are. It’s already infinitely more than enough in the midst of all that’s unresolved in our heart is what we’re doing in this gratitude and asking God to be ever more open and ever more receptive to being continually transformed in this presence. 

So in glory for all of eternity, this will be in full glory, but it’s already completely here now, but it’s veiled. So what we’re sitting with is how let these veils become ever more transparent and it’s veiled by the concreteness of our lives that are also incarnations of the Presence of God. And so we’ll ring the bell at the end of the sit, we’ll bow and then to bear with us that we’re sitting here together and the mystical lineages of the Christian tradition and concert with the mystical lineages of all the world’s great religions, as well as in some poets and artists and musicians and those who serve the poor and all whose hearts have been quickened from within with this oneness and concert of this oneness. So then we’ll end by saying the Lord’s Prayer to bear witness that we’re on this contemplative path within the mystical traditions of the Christian faith, in concert with the Christian traditions of all the world’s great religions. And I’ll name two Christian mystics and pray for us. This will be our practice. So I invite you to sit straight or stand straight, hold your hand and bow. 

I will 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. Amen. Mary, mother of Contemplators, pray for us, Saint Teresa of Avila, pray for us, Saint John of the Cross, pray for us. Thank you. Blessings. Until next time. 

Kirsten Oates: 

Thank you for listening to this episode of Turning to the Mystics, a podcast created by the Centre 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 of this information can be found in the show notes. We’ll see you again soon.