The Presence of God

As the title suggests, Lawrence offers his advice for achieving a type of spirituality that he calls the presence of God. When one approaches each event in one's whole life with the will of God in mind, and spends much time in prayer and meditation, the believer begins to sense a very real presence from God. The more a person strives to attain this presence, the more obvious the presence becomes. Lawrence humbly offers that his own habits are relatively simple. He spends time in genuine prayer, not simply repeating the rote prayers offered by the church. Such an idea at this time was quite unusual.

As time passes in Lawrence's letters, his own sense of God's presence deepens. Likewise, he admonishes others to have patience in developing their personal devotional life. Practice and time are the only things sighted to make one feel more...