The Canon / Foundational / Christian Mysticism
Foundational · 1692
The Practice of the Presence of God
Christian Mysticism (Carmelite lay brother)The Practice of the Presence of God preserves, through letters and recorded conversations gathered after his death, the teaching of Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century French lay Carmelite who spent most of his life working in a monastery kitchen. Its central claim is that a continuous, loving attention to God, maintained in every moment and activity however menial, yields a steady interior peace independent of circumstance.
The method is strikingly simple and requires no special technique, posture, or withdrawal: the practitioner repeatedly turns attention back to a chosen spiritual orientation, so that washing dishes and formal prayer become equally occasions of communion. Transformation is located in ordinary activity, and the repeated redirection of attention is treated as the engine of inner change.
The book is a key ancestor of the "everyday presence" stream that runs from devotional Christianity into modern mindfulness and New Thought; Joel Goldsmith built an approach around the phrase "practicing the presence," drawn directly from it. Its emphasis on present-state attention over external circumstance anticipates the "state over conditions" theme of later presence teaching.
In its words
He said the trust we put in God honors Him much and draws down great graces.
When we are faithful to keep ourselves in His holy presence, and set Him always before us, this hinders our offending Him, and doing anything that may displease Him.
There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful than that of a continual conversation with God. Only those can comprehend it who practice and experience it.
We may make an oratory of our heart so we can, from time to time, retire to converse with Him in meekness, humility, and love.
He said that useless thoughts spoil all - that the mischief began there. We ought to reject them as soon as we perceived their impertinence and return to our communion with God.
We must know before we can love. In order to know God, we must often think of Him. And when we come to love Him, we shall then also think of Him often, for our heart will be with our treasure.
You need not cry very loud. He is nearer to us than we are aware. And we do not always have to be in church to be with God.
His own prayer was nothing else but a sense of the presence of God, his soul being at that time insensible to everything but Divine Love.
Practices it teaches
Practice of the Presence of God — continual loving turning to God in ordinary work
The Practice of the Presence of God is not a seated meditation but a continuous habit of attention: keeping a quiet, loving awareness that God is intimately present, in every moment and every task.
Short Interior Acts — brief darts of love and the oratory of the heart
Where Brother Lawrence's better-known "practice of the presence" describes the whole habit of living turned toward God, this is its smallest concrete unit: the short interior act — a brief, often one-line turning…
Confess the Fault, Then Let It Go — naming a failure to God without self-punishment
Brother Lawrence's most quietly radical instruction is about what to do the instant you fail. Most people meet a lapse — a flash of anger, a forgotten resolve, an unkind word, a relapse into an old habit — with a…
Offer Before, Examine and Give Thanks After — bookending every task with God
This is the small, repeatable ritual frame Brother Lawrence placed around each unit of work — distinct from the diffuse "presence in work" because it has a definite shape and two clear moments.
Lineage
The author
Brother Lawrence of the ResurrectionContinuous attention to God
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