Nicholas Herman, who took the religious name Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, lived an outwardly small life. He was a French peasant, served briefly as a soldier in the Thirty Years’ War, was wounded and discharged, worked for a time as a footman, and at around forty entered the Discalced Carmelite priory in Paris as a lay brother. He spent the rest of his life there, mostly in the kitchen and later as a sandal maker, doing the unglamorous manual work of the community.
What survived him is a slim volume composed by his prior Joseph de Beaufort after his death: a few pages of recollected conversations, a handful of letters, a couple of short maxims. Together they are titled The Practice of the Presence of God. The book has remained in continuous print for more than three centuries because of the simplicity and depth of what it teaches.
Brother Lawrence reduced the contemplative life to one practice. Whatever he was doing, he tried to keep his attention turned simply and lovingly toward God. 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. The kitchen and the chapel had become one continuous practice.
The teaching
The recorded Conversations describe the practice exactly. Lawrence had tried the set forms of meditation the manuals prescribed and found he could not hold them; his mind wandered no matter what he did. What he could do was turn his attention toward God directly, and do it again every time it lapsed. So that became the whole of his method. In the kitchen, among the pots, with several people calling for different things at once, he kept up what he called a continual conversation, a silent returning of the heart to the presence already there.
Two details from the Conversations keep the practice honest. First, he was gentle with failure. When his attention wandered, which it did for years, he did not punish himself or grow anxious; he came back quietly, and reported that the difficulty of returning faded with time until the presence became habitual. Second, he made no ranking of acts. Picking up a straw from the ground, done for the love of God, counted as much as any formal devotion. The practice asks for no special times, postures, training, or abilities, which is why readers four centuries later still find it within reach on an ordinary working day.
Where to start
- The Practice of the Presence of God: hosted here; the whole book takes under an hour to read.
- The CCEL edition: the same text with the spiritual maxims, at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
- The Project Gutenberg edition: a free ebook version for offline reading.
