Thich Nhat Hanh, a contemporary Buddhist monk, writes with great elegance of the joy to be found in bringing our awareness to the present moment.  He encourages us to be so completely immersed in the task at hand that it becomes to us the most important thing in our life.

He writes, “While washing the dishes, you might be thinking about the tea afterwards, and so try to get them out of the way as quickly as possible in order to sit and drink tea.  But that means that you are incapable of living during the time you are washing the dishes.  When you are washing the dishes, washing the dishes must be the most important thing in your life.  Just as when you’re drinking tea, drinking tea must be the most important thing in your life.” (Miracle of Mindfulness, p. 24)

With such great beings as Brother Lawrence, and our own contemporaries, such as Thich Nhat Hanh, we are in good company in our search for the Truth.  It is through the glimpses of the Divine that philosophers, poets and saints have experienced and shared that we find assurance that such a search is not in vain.

From their yearning to know Truth, they seem to have attained great understanding and found their way Home.  It is our good fortune that they left many clues on the path.  The reverence with which they approached the moments of their lives, continue to inspire seekers today.

Such seekers seem (for who among us truly knows the experience of another)  to deliberately approach life with an appreciation of the uniqueness of each moment, each circumstance, each person.

We, too, can let each moment become a moment of deliberate, conscious living.  We, too, can learn, with practice, patience, and perseverance, to greet the Presence in the present and welcome that formless Presence regardless of the form.  We, too, can let each moment’s experience become a way of seeking out Presence and open to that experience whole-heartedly.  Even the joys and the sorrows, opening to what is present.

Not one of us escapes heart-ache and truly not one of us lives every single moment in that kind of pain.  It seems that in opening to be with what is as it is, ‘what is’ seems to change.  All this to say, say ‘hello’ to this moment with your whole heart.

It’s probably a little sacrilegious that I put myself (and you too) in the same realm as saints & sages.  Oh well.  Along with saints and sages, I think that we, too, can know and live in the Truth of the joyous declaration from the Koran, “God is the East and the West, and wherever ye turn, there is God’s face.”  Such a declaration demands that we expand our ideas of who or what God is.

In challenging my limiting beliefs about God, I find a Magnificence that cannot be captured in words…at least my words.  I understand the Truth of the Tao Te Ching teaching, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao.”  Yet, still I wander through this garden of words to play hide and seek with God.

In one moment, the devotional seeker in me listens for and attempts to follow the quiet impulses of  my heart that encourage me to see  the face of the Lord, where ever I turn, in what ever circumstance I find myself.  I seek and sometimes find the true contentment of the Presence of God in myself, in the person I’m with or even the clickety clacking of my fingers on the keyboard.  With or without devotion, it’s THAT that I seek, THAT single Consciousness that playfully hides in some infinite number of creative manifestations.

In this Game, I find the humble wisdom of Brother Lawrence to be a signpost guiding my Way.

In the early sixteen hundreds, a humble footman gazed at a simple tree, its outline stark against the winter sky.  The tree stood barren of leaves with only the promise of its summer bounty hidden within.  As Nicholas Herman of Lorraine lost himself in the contemplation of this simple tree, he found himself overcome and forever changed by Grace.  He was given a “high view of the providence and power of God.”

The sight of a dry, barren tree and the vision of its full beauty bursting forth in Spring was the catalyst of his conversion.  At the age of eighteen, he began his walk to God, throughout the rest of his life seeking only the Presence of God.  Soon following this vision, Nicholas Herman became a Carmelite monk and took the name Brother Lawrence.

Brother Lawrence was not a prolific writer, nor was he a scholar.  His was a simple Way.  His gift to us was his compassionate and concise wisdom collected in a slender book entitled, “The Practice of the Presence of God.”

Throughout the centuries his simple Way has attracted and consoled seekers from many traditions who aspire to know God.  Even today he continues to be an inspiring model for living in the awareness of the Presence of God.  He wrote, “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.”

How completely simple, yet how completely profound was his unassuming wisdom.  Such is the way that he approached his life, from his humble work of fifty years in the monastery kitchen to his relationships with his contemporaries.  He walked through his days making room for the Presence of God in each unfolding moment.

He performed all the ordinary tasks of his daily life in the continual remembrance of the Presence of God, always “pleasing myself by doing things to please God.”  As he cooked, he cooked with an awareness that he was cooking for the Lord.  As he washed dishes, he washed dishes with the awareness that he was washing dishes for God.  As he ate, he ate with the awareness that it was God that he was feeding.

Although he lived a seemingly uncomplicated life in a remote monastery, he wrote with clarity and honesty of his sufferings and failings.  With his own body being “lame” and the difficulties accompanying such a handicap, not to mention the trials of daily life, he encouraged aspirants to persevere in the discipline of seeking out the Presence of God.

He wrote, “Think often on God, by day, by night, in your business, and even in your diversions.  Lift up your heart to Him, sometimes even at your meals, and when you are in company . . . It is not necessary for being with God to be always at church.  We may make an oratory of our heart.”

What an inspired understanding, in continually making room for the Presence of God in the present moment, I can make a temple, a house of worship, in my own heart!   The power of such simple practices; continually making room for the Presence of God in all things, all activities, all people, all circumstances, and doing all things for the love of God filled Brother Lawrence with perfect faith and unwavering devotion to God.

Free from the distractions of the world that might lead him astray in his love of the Presence of God, he revealed a clear and simple path through the maze of daily life.  Although I live the life of a householder, rather than a monk, I can still learn from his sublime example and perhaps gradually free myself from the distractions that lead me away from recognizing and welcoming the all-pervasive Presence in ordinary circumstances.

In welcoming this Presence in each moment, in making room for this Presence in each moment, I experience a stream of Love flowing steadily from my heart.  It is that same Love that is the Presence.  What a mysterious paradox is this play!  Looking into the lives of great beings such as Brother Lawrence, I stumble across practices and wisdom that lead me to the experience of the all-pervasive Presence of God.