Quotes to be remember from Brother Lawrence (1611 -1691):- To that end I know the heart must be empty of all else, for God wishes to be its only processor without emptying it of all that is not Himself.
- It is not needful always to be in church to be with God. We can make a chapel of our heart, to which we can from time to time withdraw to have gentle, humble, loving communion with Him.
- I work before God simply in faith, with humility and with love, and I apply myself to do nothing, say nothing and think nothing, which can displease Him.
- Our sole business in this life is to please God.
- God seems to choose those who had been the greatest sinners to bestow upon them His greatest favours.
- I looked on Him in my heart as my Father and my God. I worshipped Him there as often as I could, holding my spirit in His holy presence, and recalling Him to mind as often as I found myself turned aside from Him.
- God very well knows what is our need, and all He does is for our benefit. If we knew how much He loves us, we should be every ready to receive equally at His hand the sweet and the bitter. Even the most painful things and the most hard would be sweet and pleasing to us.
Spiritual Principles:
To look always to God and His glory in all that we do, say and undertake; that the end we seek should be to become faultless worshippers of God in this life as we hope to be throughout eternity.
Practices Essential to Acquire the Spiritual Life
The most holy practice, the nearest to daily life, and the most essential for the spiritual life, is the practice of the presence of God.
To worship Him in Spirit And in Truth:
God is spirit and he must indeed be worshipped in truth – that is to say by a humble and genuine worship of the spirit in the depth and centre of our soul.
It is God alone who can see this worship, a worship we can so often repeat that the end it becomes as it were natural, as if God were one with our soul and our soul one with God. Practice makes this clear.
To worship God in truth is to recognise Him for what He is and to recognise ourselves for what we are.
Concerning the Presence of God
The presence of God is a directing of our spirit to God or a present remembrance of God which can come about either through the imagination or the understanding.
Means of Attaining the Presence of God: a great purity of life & a great faithfulness in the practice of this presence.
Bibliography:
"The Practice of the Presence of God", Brother Lawrence, translated by E.M. Blaiklock, foreword by Jennifer Rees Larcombe, Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, London 1981.
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