Denise Levertov: Testimonies of the lived life

The Spiritual Exercises, in teaching how to bring all the powers of the soul and imagination to crucial passages of scripture, teach how to read all spiritual texts contemplatively. Certainly, The Practice of the Presence of God is one such text. In order to appreciate what it becomes, in Levertov's hands, we must remind ourselves of its form and content. Nicholas Herman of Lorraine, whose name in religion was Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, had been wounded and lamed for life while a soldier; at age forty he entered a Carmelite monastery as a lay brother and worked in the kitchen for most of the next forty years. The Practice of the Presence of God is an account of four conversations occurring in 1666-67, and fifteen undated letters to unknown correspondents, published after Brother Lawrence's death in 1691 by an M. Beaufort. A note to the Fifteenth Letter says he died within the week (Lawrence 79). The conversations and the Fourth Letter are mediated by another narrator; e.g., in the First Conversation, "That we should establish ourselves in a sense of God's Presence, by continually conversing with him" (Lawrence 4). The earliest conversations occur after Brother Lawrence has spent seventeen years in the monastery where he had desired to be received, "thinking that he would be made to smart for his awkwardness and the faults he should commit, and so he should sacrifice to God his life, with its pleasures: but that God had disappointed him, he having met with nothing but satisfaction in that state" (Lawrence 4). And though he reports having suffered much for the first ten years, and been especially troubled in mind for four of those years "from a certain belief that he should be damned," he concludes ". . . since that time he had passed his life in perfect liberty and continual joy" (Lawrence 8). Without unease he anticipates that "after the pleasant days God has given him, he should have his turn of pain and suffering. . ." (Lawrence 8). But "For about thirty years his soul has been filled with joys so continual, and sometimes so great, that he is forced to use means to moderate them, and to hinder their appearing outwardly" (Lawrence 45). In short, though Brother Lawrence undoubtedly had suffered desolations of spirit, "those drynesses, or insensibilities, and irksomenesses in prayer by which God tries our love to Him" (Lawrence 5), his conversations and letters express only consolations and serene trust in God. Viewed from within the light, the previous darknesses seem unimportant. "I am always happy" (Lawrence 71).

The seeker after methods of meditation or prayer will find Brother Lawrence virtually an Anti-Ignatius. ".... He could never regulate his devotion by certain methods as some do .... [and] all bodily mortifications and other exercises are useless. . ." (Lawrence 12). ". . . There needed neither art nor science for going to God, but only a heart resolutely determined to apply itself to nothing but Him . . and to love Him only" (Lawrence 17). The letters are equally devoid of concern for method: "Having found in many books different methods of going to God, and divers practices of the spiritual life, I thought this would serve rather to puzzle me than facilitate what I sought after..." (Lawrence 29-30). "I have quitted all forms of devotion and set prayers but those to which my state [as a brother] obliges me" (Lawrence 36). "It is not necessary for being with God to be always at church; we may make an oratory of our heart, wherein to retire from time to time, to converse with Him in meekness, humility, and love" (Lawrence 56). "I do not advise you to use multiplicity of words in prayer, many words and long discourses being often the occasions of wandering. Hold yourself in prayer before God like a dumb or paralytic beggar at a rich man's gate" (Lawrence 58-59).