A Coaching Session on Brother Lawrence

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:11)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:13)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:23)

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.

James Finley (0:35)

Yes, yes, glad we're walking through this together, how to pray with Brother Lawrence.

Kirsten Oates (0:40)

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.

James Finley (1:05)

Also, the role that they played, we're now playing that same role as us. And the listeners are, they're playing it as them. You know, it's being carried forward into our lives. Yes, exactly.

Kirsten Oates (1:18)

Beautiful. Well, I'll hand to you, Jim, just to set the context for our approach.

James Finley (1:23)

One of the 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 did, we go to 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 is 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 are going to deepen your realization that you are 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 are going to read a phrase of Brother Lawrence, one, two, or three sentences.

But you are 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 is God talking to you. You are hearing it as God's voice, through the voice of this mystic teacher. So that is a 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. And where are you with this? A lot of people, they find it very helpful to journal when they just like write it out. Like what about it strikes you, or what about it kind of bewilders you? What is it that kind of reminds you of where you've been touched by God and what 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. The 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. In contemplation, it's moments where you're kind of 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 the thread as you go through your day. And you realize it breaks many times. But you're deep in 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, or you yourself have asked the same question on the same lines? Because, oops, so we're all in this together.