The Presence of God

There is a certain kind of tiredness that settles into the shoulders after a long day. The dishes are stacked in the sink, the emails remain unanswered, and somewhere between the second cup of coffee and the third meeting, we realized we had forgotten to pray. Perhaps we whispered a hurried word in the car, or offered a distracted thought before bed, but the day itself, that long stretch of ordinary hours, passed without any sense that God was near.

What if He was there the whole time?

More than three hundred years ago, a lay brother named Nicholas Herman, better known to us as Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, spent nearly the entirety of his religious life washing pots in the kitchen of a Carmelite monastery in Paris. He had been a soldier, then a footman, and by his own account, “a great awkward fellow who broke everything.” Yet this humble, limping man discovered something that theologians spend lifetimes trying to articulate:

God is not somewhere we go. God is Someone with whom we live. 

And the kitchen, it turns out, can be as holy as the sanctuary.

The practice of the presence of God is not a technique. It is not a spiritual accomplishment we achieve after years of striving toward it, perfecting our focus, learning all the right methods. It is, quite simply, the gentle turning of the heart toward the One who has never left us.

 

The God Who Is Always Here

Before we speak of practicing His presence, we must remember that the presence is already a fact. God’s nearness is not something we conjure. It is something we consent to notice.

The Psalmist put it this wayl:

"Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast" (Psalm 139:7-10).

Saint Paul, standing on the Areopagus in Athens, put it in terms that almost sound intimate if you really meditate on them:

"In him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28).

Notice the prepositions. Not near Him. Not beside Him.

In Him. 

We are like fish who ask where the ocean is, or birds who wonder where they might find the sky.

This is the great truth beneath every practice of the presence of God: we do not go to find Him. We wake up to the fact that He has been holding us all along. As Saint Augustine confessed to the Lord, “You were within me, but I was outside” (Confessions X.27).

 

Brother Lawrence and the Sanctuary of Pots and Pans

Brother Lawrence’s little book, The Practice of the Presence of God, is a collection of his letters and conversations. It was never meant to be published. Perhaps that is part of its power. There is no artifice in it, only the plainspoken wisdom of a man who had learned to love God among the onions and the eggs.

“Our sanctification does not depend on us switching from one work to another. Instead, it requires us to do for God's sake what we ordinarily do for our own... I hold that there is no more excellent means for me to draw close to God than to perform the ordinary tasks prescribed to me... My task is to purify them, as much as I can, from all human motivations, so that I might perform them for the pure love of God. It is a great mistake to believe that the time of prayer should be different from other times. Our obligation is strictly the same in all cases: to be united to God through our action, when we are called to be active, and to be united to him through prayer, during the time of prayer." (The Practice of the Presence of God, Fourth Conversation).

What was his secret? He had made a simple resolution: he would do everything, however small, for the love of God. He would pick up a piece of straw from the floor for love of God. He would flip an omelet for love of God. And in doing so, he began to sense God’s presence not as a visitor, but as a constant companion at his side.

This is the essence of the practice. It is not the emptying of the mind, nor the achievement of some rarified mystical state. It is a loving attentiveness, a gentle habit of the heart that keeps turning back, again and again, to the God who is nearer to us than we are to ourselves.

Jesus Himself invites us into this kind of continual communion:

"Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me" (John 15:4).

The Greek verb menō, translated “abide,” means to remain, to dwell, to make one’s home. This is not a suggestion for a spiritual elite. It is the invitation extended to every branch on the Vine.

 

The Carmelite Way: Elijah’s Fire and Teresa’s Interior Castle

Brother Lawrence stood in a long lineage of Carmelite spirituality that traces its roots, symbolically, back to the prophet Elijah on Mount Carmel. Elijah’s cry, ”As the LORD the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand” (1 Kings 17:1), became a kind of motto for the Order. To stand before the living God, always, in every moment.

Saint Teresa of Ávila described prayer as “nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us” (The Book of Her Life, Chapter 8). Notice that she does not describe it as a duty or a ritual. It is friendship. And what do friends do? They spend time together. They think of one another. They speak often, even about small things.

Teresa taught her sisters to find God within themselves. In The Interior Castle, she describes the soul as a magnificent dwelling with many rooms, and at the very center, the King Himself waits for us. To practice His presence is to learn the path back to that innermost room, no matter where our day takes us.

Her friend and fellow reformer, Saint John of the Cross, understood that this presence is often hidden, veiled, dark to our senses. "Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior” (Isaiah 45:15). Yet John insists that the hiding is itself a grace.

God dwells “in the innermost being of the soul” (The Spiritual Canticle, Stanza 1), and even when we do not feel Him, He is there, sustaining us in existence. As such, it is (contrary to common intuition) precisely those moments when God feels the most distant that He is often doing His greatest work in our soul.

I've known many people through the years who seemed to have great "worship experiences," but the seemed to only know God's presence when the music was just right, when the emotions stirred, after hearing a powerful sermon. The rest of their lives were often indiscernible from the lives of anyone else. Often, if the music changed, the right songs that they liked weren't chosen for worship, they'd feel like worship was "off" that day, and if it happened too many times, they'd start shopping for different churches, all in pursuit of that "spiritual high," that feeling, that same "worship experience" that moved them emotionally.

St. John of the Cross is, perhaps, the greatest antidote for this kind of Christian life. It's not that he dismisses such experiences as trivial, necessarily. But he recognizes that the consolation is not the Christ. The gift is not the same thing as the Giver. That the love of God is not primarily a feeling, but an ever-present reality that persists even when (especially when) the feelings aren't there at all.

You could put it this way. It means that God moves as much among the pots and the pans as He does in music, or in our prayers, or in whatever experiences we've called our "God time," imagining that that was the time not merely set aside for Him, but the time we tried to contain Him within.

It is precisely when God feels the most distant that we have the greatest opportunity in faith to turn back to Him in the kind of love that really endures. The kind of love that doesn't wait to be "felt," but engages the beloved because it has determined to cling to Him, as much in the "dull" and "mundane" moments as life as in the spiritual highs.

This is the secret of practicing the presence of God. It's really at the very heart of spiritual maturity. It's how we move form feeding on the "milk" of feelings and experiences and consolations, from the "butterflies" of immature love, to the solid food of every moment, to the depth of a matured love that endures and thrives the most precisely when it seems to darkest, when life is the hardest, or even when life is just, plain, dull.

And something strange starts to happen. When we stop seeking the consolations and the experiences, the feelings of God's presence, we begin to experience God's presence in a way far more potent, far more intimate, far more transformative—and dare I say, from personal experience, more rapturous—than when our spiritual life was wedded to particular worship experiences, particular feelings elicited in prayer, a stirring of the heart on a retreat or at a conference, and the like.

It is as St. John of the Cross put it, like this. "Now that I least desire them, I have them all without desire." He says the same when it comes to worldly/earthly goods and also spiritual goods/experiences/consolations. It is precisely by letting go to the things we're attached to, even good and spiritual things, that we receive all we're grasping at in a deeper, more intimate, more profound and life-changing way.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who you know if you read me much, as much as the previous Carmelite saints mentioned above, has had a profound impact on my own spiritual life. I share her insights often, frankly, because for years as a Lutheran pastor, an academic, and the like, I'd never really understood prayer. These three saints, above all, were those who once I read their writings, really taught me how to pray like a real Christian. Or to put it better, how to live every moment of my life in the practice of the presence of God.

Thérèse's “Little Way” is often summarized as "doing small things with great love"—a beautiful sentiment later popularized by Mother Teresa of Calcutta, but one that misses the profound theological depth of Thérèse's actual vision.

Thérèse did not view her path as a self-reliant striving to do small tasks perfectly.

Instead, her "little way" was a way of spiritual childhood, absolute confidence, and radical surrender. Recognizing her own profound littleness and her inability to climb the rough stairway of perfection by her own strength, she threw herself entirely upon the mercy of God, comparing the arms of Jesus to an "elevator" that would lift her to sanctity. For Thérèse, practicing the presence of God meant remaining empty-handed and trusting completely that His grace is enough, it was an sure confidence in His Love that no matter what weaknesses she had, even if she fell into sin, she knew she could run back into those arms in an instant and would be lifted to heights that no amount of "climbing" could ever achieve. The little way is a way where our very weakness becomes the canvas for God's strength. It was an insight she gleaned, chiefly, from St. Paul who wrote, "when I am weak, He is strong" (2 Cor 12:9-10).

"When pondering how much she desired to emulate the saints in history who evangelized the world, the great martyrs, the teachers of the church, but found herself instead a cloistered nun invisible to the rest of the world, "Greatness," Thérèse wrote,"is not available to me... I must become still less."

What would the beauty of a field be if it were filled with roses only, she observed in her opening image of her autobiography, but not also the little flowers? Thus, it is these little flowers, as much as the roses, that God delights in, and holds to his heart.

Her practice was less about the greatness of our actions and entirely about the greatness of the trust with which we abandon ourselves to Him in the midst of the mundane.

The practice of the presence of God is not the private property of Carmel. Saint Benedict, centuries earlier, exhorted his monks to “prefer nothing whatever to Christ” (Rule of Saint Benedict, Chapter 72). Saint Francis de Sales, writing for laypeople immersed in the world, taught in his Introduction to the Devout Life that “an hour’s meditation” in the morning could sanctify an entire day, if only we remembered to keep “recollecting” ourselves in God’s presence throughout our work.

The desert fathers spoke of this ceaseless mindfulness of God as nepsis, watchfulness. Saint Paul commanded it plainly: "Pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). How can such a command be possible? Only if prayer is more than words. Only if prayer becomes, at last, a way of being.

 

Practicing the Presence in the Ordinary Day

So how do we begin? Not with grand resolutions or elaborate methods. Brother Lawrence would be the first to tell us that the practice is simple, though not always easy.

First, make a morning offering. Before your feet hit the floor, before you check your phone, whisper something like: “Lord, I offer You this day, all its work and rest, its joys and its trials, for love of You.” This one small act reframes everything that follows.

Second, cultivate short, frequent turnings of the heart. Brother Lawrence called these little conversations with God “acts of the presence.” A glance toward Heaven while at the sink. A silent “I love You” while waiting at a red light. A whispered “Jesus, help me” before a difficult conversation. These need not be long. They need only be sincere. As Brother Lawrence put it, “He does not ask much of us: a little remembrance from time to time, a small act of adoration, at times asking Him for His grace, sometimes offering Him your sufferings, at other times asking Him for the graces He has grated you and grants you in the midst of your labors...There is no need to cry out loudly for this. He is nearer to us than we imagine. To be with God, we do not need to always be in church. We can make our heart an oratory and there withdraw from time to time to converse with Him genly, humbly, and lovingly.” (The Practice of the Presence of God, Fourth Letter).

Third, do your work for love. Whatever your work may be, offer it. Saint Paul writes, "Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him" (Colossians 3:17). Even the most tedious task becomes prayer when done in this spirit.

Fourth, expect distraction, and return gently. Do not scold yourself when you forget. The very moment you notice that you have forgotten Him is itself a moment of remembering Him. Give thanks that your distraction has afforded you an opportunity to turn to Him, willfully, in love! Return quietly, without drama. Saint Francis de Sales advised his directees to bring back their wandering hearts “quietly and tranquilly, a thousand times a day if need be” (Introduction to the Devout Life, Part II, Chapter 9).

Fifth, end the day with gratitude. Before sleep, look back over the day. Where did you sense His presence? Where did you miss Him? Thank Him for both. The missing itself becomes an invitation to a deeper practice tomorrow.

 

The Fruit of the Practice

Something quiet begins to happen when we live this way. The dividing wall between “sacred” and “secular” time begins to crumble. The kitchen becomes a chapel. The commute becomes a cloister. The difficult coworker becomes a face through which Christ waits to be loved. "The kingdom of God is among you" (Luke 17:21), Jesus said, and we begin, at last, to believe Him.

Brother Lawrence lived this way for decades. Toward the end of his life, he wrote, "I do not know what God has in store for me, but I have such great peace of heart that I fear nothing. What could I fear when I am with him? I keep myself in his presence as much as I can. May He be blessed in all things. Amen." (The Practice of the Presence of God, Sixth Letter).

He had discovered what all the saints discover in the end. God is not a subject to be studied or a destination to be reached. He is a Presence to be loved. And He has been in the kitchen the whole time, waiting for us to notice.

Tonight, when the dishes are stacked in the sink again, perhaps we might pause for just a moment. Perhaps we might whisper, “Lord, You are here. I love you.” And in that whisper, discover that He has been answering us, that He has been with us, all along.