The Practice of the Presence of God
Recently, a few friends and I realized that though we all possessed this book, none of us had read it. We’d felt that we should read it, and perhaps had tried, but none of us had succeeded. Then both Dallas Willard and A.W. Tozer made passing references to it. I decided my time had come.
Regarded as a devotional classic, Brother Lawrence’s reflections on learning to pray without ceasing contain their share of wisdom and exhortation. What he describes — the art of doing all that his hand finds to do to the glory of God, the discipline of keeping his mind trained on God at all times — is a worthy subject. For anyone who has felt the inadequacy of prayer as exclusively the use of words to “talk to God,” these letters provide gentle confirmation that prayer includes thinking and doing and listening as well as talking. Dallas Willard describes prayer as “talking to God about what we are doing together,” and Brother Lawrence offers an extended example of this.
My copy begins with notes of four conversations with brother Lawrence, followed by fifteen of his letters. The collection was compiled by M. Beaufort, Grand Vicar to M. de Chalons. I found the notes difficult to absorb; they’re simply lists of insights gleaned from brother Lawrence. The letters, because they represented whole units of thought, were easier to deal with.
It’s a highly regarded little book. Nevertheless it bothered me to be reading letters Brother Lawrence writes “only upon the terms that you show my letter to nobody. If I knew that you would let it be seen, all the desire I have for your advancement would not be able to determine me to do it.” Maybe I should have stopped reading at that point. I found it interesting, too, that the letters compiled in this book are written by a man who speaks of himself more than once as “not finding [his] manner of life in books.” I couldn’t help wondering how he would feel if he knew that the extreme quietness and humility of his inner life had been made “famous” in a book.
I’m still puzzling over Tozer’s comment in his chapter on divine omnipresence that to the “convinced Christian,”
‘the practice of the presence of God’ consists not of projecting an imaginary object from within his own mind and then seeking to realize its presence; it is rather to recognize the real presence of the One whom all sound theology declares to be already there, an objective entity, existing apart from any apprehension of Him on the part of His creatures. The resultant experience is not visionary but real.
Is Tozer saying that Brother Lawrence practices imaginative projection? This wasn’t my impression of Brother Lawrence’s style of meditation. Maybe I missed something. Or maybe Tozer is warning against a popular misconception of the ideas in this book. ? If anyone else has read both books, please feel free to share your thoughts on this question.
