Advent Meditation-Week 4: Practice the Presence with Brother Lawrence and Wendell Berry
The sayings and letters of Brother Lawrence, a 17th century monk, became a classic work on spiritual discipline called, The Practice of the Presence of God. Brother Lawrence wanted to live with a constant sense of God’s presence with him. He lived in a monastery where he prayed at established times throughout the day. But as he did the necessary mundane things like washing dishes, he found that his thoughts were scattered. He began a practice of drawing his thoughts back to God anytime he noticed that he wasn’t conscious of God’s presence.
When I read the book, I was inspired. I too want to live with a constant sense that God is with me. Jesus, after all, is Immanuel, God with us, and He told his disciples at the end of Matthew, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” He told them to go to Jerusalem and wait for the gift that He was sending them. That gift was the Holy Spirit, which is how the ascended Jesus could be present with them. And it is still true for us today, a couple of centuries later. The Bible says that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19). He is with us, always. Practicing the presence is about learning to live into the reality that God is never distant from his people.
However, despite being inspired to take up Brother Lawrence’s practice, I found it a bit flat in the end, not tactile and earthy enough. There is a tension in Lawrence’s approach. On the one hand he sought to continue prayerful attention to God’s abiding presence as he washed dishes or flipped omelets. But these activities are always seen as a potential distraction from God’s presence. There is never a sense that we might experience God’s presence as part of these mundane tasks. I propose a tweak to Brother Lawrence’s practice. What if we could live with a constant sense of God’s presence in and through our embodied and mundane lives? God is present even when we're slopping water and soap around a sink. What if practicing His presence doesn’t require relegating these kinds of embodied experiences to the background?
The goal isn’t to turn our thoughts away from the dishes or cooking or whatever; the goal is to increase our attentiveness to those things and our experience of them, always with an awareness of the “givenness of things” (to steal another phrase). If I could be so bold to push the idea a bit further, there are times in which we should allow ourselves to be fully immersed in an experience, to be caught up in the goodness of a moment—the laughter of a good conversation, the flavors of a delicious meal, the emotions of a beautiful song. You may feel a sense of gratitude in the moment. You may not. My working hypothesis is that we can honor God as the giver of every good and perfect gift by being so immediately alive to the pleasure of the gift, our attention so focused in the moment, that our awareness of God is secondary. The delight of things never terminates with the thing itself. This is idolatry. We must always remember that God alone is worthy of our affection and worship.
There are times when we should strive for a purer experience without trying to reflect in the moment. I must confess that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve struggled to find these kinds of experiences. I’m too concerned with how I ought to feel or how others think I feel or articulating the experience to others. I, for one, would like to reclaim a bit of childlike innocence when it comes to being alive in a moment and experiencing joy and surprise and excitement.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism teaches that “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” What I would like to explore is the extent to which we achieve this “end” by being more fully attuned to our embodied, relational experiences. Advent invites us to reflect on Jesus’s emobodied experience. God, incarnated in the man Jesus, knows what it is like to be born of a woman, to be hungry and to cry, to play and to be bored, to run and swim and hug a friend and to celebrate festivals with big feasts. And Jesus lived with a constant awareness of his union with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
If Brother Lawrence has an overly abstract and ethereal view of God, Kentucky writer Wendell Berry has the opposite emphasis. He is at times too focused on the mundane and misses the unique and transcendent otherness of God. I’m going to share his poem with you anyway. This is a wonderful Christmas poem that calls us to live with the kind of embodied awareness of the presence of God in and through mundane, even routine, experiences.
Enjoy the poem and let it activate your imagination about your own life. Where are the places that are pregnant with God’s presence and grace in your life? Where are the unexpected places you lean into this sense of the miracle of incarnation?
Remembering that it Happened Once by Wendell Berry
Remembering that it happened once,
We cannot turn away the thought,
As we go out, cold, to our barns
Toward the long night’s end, that we
Ourselves are living in the world
It happened in when it first happened,
That we ourselves, opening a stall
(A latch thrown open countless times
Before), might find them breathing there,
Foreknown: the Child bedded in straw,
The mother kneeling over Him,
The husband standing in belief
He scarcely can believe, in light
That lights them from no source we see,
An April morning’s light, the air
Around them joyful as a choir.
We stand with one hand on the door,
Looking into another world
That is this world, the pale daylight
Coming just as before, our chores
To do, the cattle all awake,
Our own white frozen breath hanging
In front of us; and we are here
As we have never been before,
Sighted as not before, our place
Holy, although we knew it not.