Apathetic Apophatics Washing Dishes

Brother Lawrence said of his dishwashing duties in the monastery kitchen,

The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer. In the noise and clutter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the Blessed Supper. [1]

We have drunk from this quote as we have held the door open for the entire contemplative stream to flow freely into our churches. This stream, in cooperation with the holiness, evangelical, social justice, charismatic, and incarnational streams, has revealed God to us in ways that enabled discipleship to mature. [2]

But has practicing the presence of God become a little too familiar?

A few women at a spiritual retreat recently told me that they fully embraced Lawrence’s practice of praying through the ordinary as a means to “pray without ceasing.” In the early days of their spiritual awareness they—like good contemplatives—did dishes while talking to God. They woke their children with prayers to welcome the day and offered up prayers of intercession as they passed students in the hallway. These were times when an abundance of clothes in the closet evoked a spontaneous prayer for God to reveal ways to share abundance, or mowing the lawn moved them to converse with God about the mysteries of creation. They talked to God like a friend, and walked with him hand in hand through the business of life.

But time passed.

Praying without ceasing through the business of life faded into a subtle awareness of God’s presence. This regression should not be romanticized as a new spiritual discipline, an apophatic season replacing a kataphatic one. No, it bore no intentionality. It was unceremonious, taking Someone for granted, and eventually, this mere awareness that God was in the vicinity of the kitchen devolved into the current season—the inability to remember the last time they addressed God directly, let alone initiated a sit-down, old fashioned, “Dear God” prayer.

How sneaky the enemy is: a clandestine force that takes what we mean for good, mixes it with the worst of ourselves, and uses it to separate us from divine love.

The same practices the church welcomed to mature it from legalism and impersonal transcendence, without upkeep against apathy, can disintegrate into a habit where God becomes nothing more than a dishtowel. We wash the dish, rinse the dish, and grab for the towel to dry it without thought. We no longer remember our grandmother who embroidered it. Memories of drying dishes with it in our childhood are forgotten. We don’t even acknowledge it’s a towel; we simply reach for it reflexively and set it aside when we’re done. If one were to ask about it we’d say, “I don’t remember using the towel, but surely I did. The dishes are dry after all…”

When was the last time you prayed for 20 minutes?

When was the last time you addressed God directly 20 times in a day?

I fear we’ve used our friend Brother Lawrence to excuse our apathetic prayer lives, assigning him words he never said. The progenitor of the dishwashing prayer movement never said that sudsy theophanies in ordinary time replaced times of formal prayer. He did not imply that assuming God’s presence was the same as acknowledging it. However, there are signs this is the habit that has crept in to the church as we’ve become more incarnational in our faith. Or worse, in our pursuit to practice the presence of God in our casual American sea, the current has lulled us to a place where God and the Christian are two ships that pass in the night.

Practicing the presence of God has transformative potential to erase the line between sacred and secular. But this is not the same as taking God’s presence for granted. A wise person said, “Pray as you can, not as you can’t.” All people are invited into prayer, the dishwashers and map-makers, the poets and the plumbers; we are all are invited into communication with God. As Brother Lawrence says,

He does not ask much of us, merely a thought of Him from time to time, a little act of adoration, sometimes to ask for His grace, sometimes to offer Him your sufferings, at other times to thank Him for the graces, past and present, He has bestowed on you, in the midst of your troubles to take solace in Him as often as you can. Lift up your heart to Him during your meals and in company; the least little remembrance will always be the most pleasing to Him. One need not cry out very loudly; He is nearer to us than we think.

Let’s address the One who is near. Keep the conversation going with intentionality and care. Let’s not get out of the habit of sitting down alone with him for a few minutes each day, lest one day we look around and realize we’ve assumed his presence for so long we’ve forgotten to set his place at the table.

—

[1] Brother Lawrence. The Practice of the Presence of God. New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1895.

[2] James Bryand Smith and Richard Foster. A Spiritual Formation Workbook: A Renovaré Resource for Spiritual Renewal. San Francisco: Harper, 1999.