Ch. 2 Practice of the Presence of God
Theme Song: When Will I Ever Learn to Live in God - Van Morrison
"I continued, for some years, applying my mind carefully the rest of the day, and even in the midst of my work, to the presence of God, whom I considered always as with me, often as in my heart… I make it my priority to persevere in His holy presence, wherein I maintain a simple attention and a fond regard for God, which I may call an actual presence of God. Or, to put it another way, it is an habitual, silent, and private conversation of the soul with God. This gives me much joy and contentment… 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. Yet I do not advise you to do it from that motive. It is not pleasure which we ought to seek in this exercise. Let us do it from a principle of love, and because it is God's will for us." ~ Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
God loves me. God loved me and I rested all that I was on that love. I loved God. I was grateful to God. I wanted to please God. I turned to God time and time and time again. God was always there for me and I was surprisingly constant in my intentionally living each moment for God. When I first stumbled upon Brother Lawrence's book a few years ago, the title brought one of those moments of recognition when someone else finds the words you never could find: The Practice of the Presence of God. Yes, that was it. That was how I lived fourteen years of my life. Nearly every breath, every moment of every day, I lived thoughtfully inside God's love. My mantra was "What would God want me to do" predating by nearly two decades the more popular "What would Jesus do?" But discernment played only a small role because, in truth, I found it pretty easy to know what God would want me to do and to do it. The mantra was just my way of keeping focused. The bigger portion of this love affair was expressed in my constant internal conversation with God.
For those of you who are wondering, bad things did continue to happen to me. It never dawned on me to ask God to stop it. I simply understood that God could not stop it. I may have had some notion of man's free will. Maybe not at four but sometime between four and eighteen I worked out the whole moral-evil-exists-because-of-man's-free-will thing. To this day, I have not worked out the problem of natural evil to my satisfaction but that is a topic for a later chapter. For now, bad things still happened but I was not hurt by them in the same way. I was still hurt by them, of course, but now I knew that God was on my side and I could always turn to Him.
For you to really get a picture of those fourteen years, you would need to read the first paragraph in this chapter over and over again for fourteen years. The practice of the presence of God was my life and I could always count on it. Since it is unlikely that you want to spend the next fourteen years reading the same paragraph, I will supplement this chapter with God-related anecdotes that took place during the same time period which I hope will give you a feel for whom I was in relationship to God.
Burned Alive
This first story occurred when I was seven and I think it highlights how my relationship with God was not synonymous with my religion and that my close relationship with God gave me the confidence to be a bit of a freethinker even at an early age. For reasons I have never understood, the nun teaching our parochial school's 2nd grade religion course told us that if a burglar broke into our home and threatened to either burn our crucifix or burn us alive we should choose to be burned alive. My first thought was one of alarm: "Why am I not hearing about this on the 6 o'clock news!? Little children are being burned alive and [local news anchor] Bill Walker hasn't said a word!" I did not understand the concept of a rhetorical dilemma. I thought this might very well happen or why else would the nun have brought it up. I was concerned. I knew that I loved God with all my heart as we had been in a tight relationship for nearly three years but, having placed my hand very briefly on a hot stove, I also knew that burning was extremely painful and I feared that I could not endure it.
I went home and removed the crucifix from my bedroom wall. I sat down on the floor holding the crucifix staring into Jesus' face and feeling my deep love and then closing my eyes and remembering the pain from the hot stove and then trying to imagine that pain spreading over my body. When the pain became too great, I opened my eyes again to see Jesus' face and recall again my deep love and then repeated the process. Each time I opened my eyes, I was able to imagine enduring a bit more of my body burning. Then one time when I opened my eyes, Jesus' face seemed to soften and stare at me and I understood that Jesus loved me and did not want me to be burned alive. At seven years old, I decided that the nun was wrong. I did not make that decision lightly but I was resolute.
Buddha Nature
This next story is of my inner Buddha nature: "When a man has pity on all living creatures then only is he noble" though I had never heard of a Buddha nature at the time. I was raised at the end of a cul-de-sac in the suburbs in the South in the 1970s by parents who could have been hippies but definitely were not. I knew of three religions ~ Judaism, Protestantism, and Catholicism. In high school, I arm-wrestled, at the AP history teacher's request, a Greek Orthodox student to resolve the Great Schism winning one for the RC team but that was many years down the road.
Between the ages of seven and ten, when I began to get that girly fear of bugs, I had a strong compassion for insects because nobody loved them. I was a shy child yet I would scold other children for stepping on ants and I created an insect burial ground underneath the steps to our deck where I would place little grass crosses over the graves after burial and say a prayer for the insects' souls. At eleven, while the family was eating chicken at dinner, I realized that we were ripping the flesh off of a bird that used to be alive and consuming it. I told my mom that I did not want to eat meat. She told me that I would die but from that day forward I was not presented meat on the bone and the Thanksgiving turkey remained in the kitchen while we ate in the dining room. I find that amazing because we usually were not that kind of child-indulgent family.
Confession
Confession was my favorite sacrament. It pained me so much when I failed to please God in thought or deed. I mostly failed in thought because I could not always control those pesky, unloving notions that crossed my mind. When I first started going to confession, I was intimidated by the Act of Contrition because it contained difficult words that were hard to memorize and I was afraid that I would mess up when I recited it before the priest but I did love the prayer:
"O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of heaven, and the pains of hell; but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, Who are all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to sin no more, to do penance, and to amend my life."
I remember questioning a priest on the line about firmly resolving to sin no more because I knew I would sin again. The priest told me that God just wanted me to try really hard not to sin. I loved the line about not wanting to offend God because He is all good and deserving of all my love because that was the heart of the matter for me. I did not fear God's wrath or hell. I did not fear God's wrath because I knew from experience that God was loving, not wrathful. I did not fear hell because I assumed that 99.9% of us were going to purgatory. Eventually I discounted hell altogether because it made no sense for God to create an entity like hell just for Hitler. I did not know about Pol Pot and the rest but I figured that it took a Hitler level of evil to land you in hell. Irredeemable. While Hitler deserved to go to hell, I later decided that fire and brimstone were beneath God and that "hell" was the absence of God. Purgatory was, to me, a fantastic Roman Catholic invention, far better than limbo which only seemed to exist to maintain that foolish consistency which is the hobgoblin of little minds . I thought of purgatory as a big school house where we went to learn the lessons that we failed to learn during our lives. I liked school but I loved God so any time spent in purgatory was time not spent with God in heaven so I wanted to do my best to learn all my God lessons while on earth.
As I grew older, I became even more sincere about my confessions. As I grew to love God in greater and greater depths, anything I did or thought that was undeserving of Him really hurt me. I loved God so much and wanted to live in God so much and perform His will so much that I would cry while waiting in line for confession. At some point, my mother and brother refused to stand in confessional line with me because other parishioners would shoot my mom dirty looks thinking I must be a big-time sinner to be crying in line like that. During one of those new-fangled, at the time, face-to-face confessions, the priest announced that he had sinned more than I had during the previous six months, gave me a hug, and sent me off without a penance because I had beaten myself up over things too much already. I was a senior in high school.
God's House
Is it a sin if you lie to your parents about going to church and I mean really going to church? I did not want my parents to think I was even more of an oddball than they had already assessed so I would lie telling them I was going to a party or out with friends and instead I would go and sit in the dark church all by myself. Back in those days, the church did not lock its doors to the sanctuary. I loved those moments alone with God in God's house. I remember finding The Universal Prayer by Pope Clement XI in the missal and I wrote it down on the back of several of those cards you are supposed to fill out to express interest in joining the congregation. I wrote it in purple ink and I still have the cards. When I reflect, I can still experience the consolation and peace of those moments which were critically important to me during the maelstrom of my life. I needed God and God never failed me.
