Namaste

"These our acts of worship are to be prompted and guided by faith. We must unfeignedly believe that God is in very fact within our souls, and that we must worship Him and love Him and serve Him in spirit and in truth; that He sees all, and that into Him all hearts are open, our own and those of all His creatures; that He is self-existent, while it is in Him that all His creatures live and move and have their being; that His perfection is infinite and sovereign, and demands the full surrender of ourselves, our souls, and bodies. In simple justice we owe Him all our thoughts and words and actions. Let us see to it that we pay our debt."
Brother Lawrence : The Spiritual Maxims : No 5

Here Brother Lawrence reminds me of a very Eastern notion. That the Lord has declared us His temple and that it is upon our hearts He has written His Word is well known, but the wording that Lawrence uses here interests me. Though Brother Lawrence means that we must worship God in spirit and in truth (as Christ says), by means of the Holy Spirit living in us, to me it rings of some Hindu or Buddhist influence that I know he didn't have.
The "Eastern" notion that the divine resides in all of us must surely be a twinkling of the truth which is given us in the Word, ie that we are made in the image of The Creator God. *
Any truth in the world must come from the Source of Truth, God.

The next point here is Brother Lawrence's choice of words concerning simple justice. Here looked at as a debt - the debt we really cannot pay - but that Lawrence tells us to see to it we do.
I agree. We should see to it that we pay as much of our "debt" as we can, but don't mistake thinking we can ever pay it off. Nothing we do can cover for it. Christ has done that for us and only by His grace and merciful Gift are we forgiven that debt. Instead, when we accept the Gift of God in His Son, Christ Jesus, we are given the spirit of freedom that we might do the good works that God has set aside for us from the beginning. It is really He that pays off the debt on both ends! But we must certainly make ourselves open to Him to do so.

This is where sin comes from, closing Him off and trying to set ourselves up as god, trying to do any work on our own (even good work - without God, who decides the "good?" We? Without Him, we are lost to prideful whim even in that regard; we have no basis for any moral judgments!)
God seeks a relationship with us, that we might commune with the Holy One and rely completely on Him - how else do you expect a relationship with the Creator unless you converse with, honor and trust Him? Honor the Holy Spirit within you at all times, in all ways - is this not why blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the unforgivable sin? It really is the denying of God and His Sovereignty within you.
In that sense, it truly is Eastern after all.

Hindu Indians have a greeting: Namaste; I honor the divine within you.

Namaste, my friend. Namaste.


*True, but the "divine" isn't a natural part of we, the fallen creatures any more; indeed, we must be "born again" as was told to Zacharias. That hole left due to Mankind's sin really is "God shaped," and perhaps even the unsaved feel it, called by God or not. However, I think too many simply look at the hole instead into it, mistaking the shape for the Thing. That perhaps we are god or at least part of Him, therefore thinking that is within our own power, indeed our purpose, to fill that void, so trying in vain (dying in vain.) So close yet so far... for we are as gods, but will die as mortals.