Brother Lawrence: Session 3

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:09)

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 and 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, like collectively. What I think is important is helpful to realize that when we listen to these mystics, that their lives are woven into our lives. That is, 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 would like to turn to fundamental aspects of Brother Lawrence's life and teachings. And because he entered Discal's 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 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. And 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.

And I would like to get at this then in taking a look at John of the Cross's life and Teresa's life in which their awakenings occurred. I also then allow 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, 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? That is, 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? That if you live this way, out of 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, like 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, life in God and so on. So we get this kind of feeling, because I personally found this consoling for me and kind of reassuring how we're all woven together into this big picture. So I'd like to begin then with Brother Lawrence. We know in what was shared with us when Father Joseph Beaufort would go to him for spiritual direction, and he would write down what Lawrence told him. We know of Brother Lawrence's life. And also we own 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. The 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. That there's a kind of devotional sincerity of living out his day by day life and struggling to find food and lodging and where is 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. He's a young man, and he's looking at a tree, and he's blindsided by the awakening. As we'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 giving 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. Like little by little is the collective effect of awakenings. But sometimes it does happen. There's this awakening in the aftermath of which you're never quite the same. So 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. And 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. You know, she just grew up as a little girl in this little medieval village, town, walled city of Avila. As a young woman, she fell called to enter the 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 it 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, like seek me. One of the major turning points of her life, her awakening, it happened in prayer. And in 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. If 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 water, 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, 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 of God flowing into her without effort from 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 that 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. She said, 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 is, the love that was flowing into her 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, it goes 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. For John of the Cross, he was newly ordained in the Carmelite Order, and he helped turn the reform of the Carmelites, the Discogel's Carmelite. It was 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 priests. The priests did not appreciate the implications that they needed to be reformed. And these were the priests that taught him scripture in the seminary. These were his professors in scripture and prayer. And so they told him to stop. He said he can't stop. You know, 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 in 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 of the Church, praise the Lord. 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, oh night lovelier than the dawn, a great light started shining out of that darkness, which was the light of God's sustaining presence in his life. Oh 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 grasps 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.