Brother Lawrence - how to awaken
Despite the teachingsof a church or religious tradition, despite the cruelties and
mindlessness, apparently by accident, once in a great while, someone fully awakens. Brother Lawrence, an uneducated, unlearn ed, illiterate foot-soldier amongst the Carmelites in 17
thCE Paris, was such a person. No one was more astonished at his awakening, than he himself
Here is an excerpt from an interview he gave to one of his superiors who had heard about him, and travelled to meet him. The interview was conducted decades after his awakening. The interview wrote down what Brother Lawrence had said, and sent it in great secrecy to one of his colleagues.
In the letter, Brother Lawrence speaks of course, in the language and vernacular of his own time. So when he speaks of ’the presence of God’ we might write instead, using the language of our own time, ’permanent samahdi’ or better yet, ’permanent absence of the sense of self’. I have selected this letter of many he wrote, because in it he talks about the very same thing that
Ramana Maharshi,
Adi Shankara ,
Morihei Ueshiba, and others have spoken of - that is to say, the necessity of absolute, constant, pure attention:
Since you desire so earnestly that I should communicate to you the method by which I arrived at that habitual sense of God’s presence, which our Lord, of His mercy, has been pleased to vouchsafe to me, I must tell you that it is with great difficulty that I am prevailed on by your importunities; and now I do it only upon the terms that you show my letter to nobody. […].
The account I can give you is: Having found in many books different methods of going to God, and divers practises of the spiritual life, I thought this would serve rather to puzzle me than facilitate what I sought after, which was nothing but how to become wholly God’s. This made me resolve to give the all for the all; so after having given myself wholly to God, that He might take away my sins, I renounced, for the love of Him, everything that was not He, and I began to live as if there was none but He and I in the world.
Sometimes I considered myself before Him as a poor criminal at the feet of this judge; at other times I beheld Him in my heart as the oftenest that I could, keeping my mind in His holy presence, and recalling it as often as I found it wandered from Him. I found no small pain in this exercise, and yet I continued it, notwithstanding all the difficulties that occurred, without troubling or disquieting myself when my mind had wandered involuntarily. I made this my business as much all the day long as at the appointed times of prayer; for alt all times, ever hour, every minute, even in the height of my business, I drove away from my mind everything that was capable of interrupting my thoughts of God.
Such has been my common practise ever since I entered in religion; and though I have done it very imperfectly, yet I have found grate advantages by it. These, I well know, are to be imputed to the mere mercy and goodness of God, because we can do nothing without Him, and I still less than any.
But when we are faithful to keep ourselves in His holy presence, and set Him always before us, this not only hinders our offending Him and doing anything that my displease Him, at least wilfully, but it also begets in us a holy freedom, and, if I may so speak, a familiarity with God, wherewith we ask and, that successfully, the graces we stand in need of. In fine, by often repeating these acts, they become habitual, and the presence of God rendered as it were natural to us.
