Brother Lawrence wrote almost nothing during his life. The book that has carried his name in continuous print for more than three centuries was assembled by his prior, Joseph de Beaufort, in the months after his death in 1691. It contains four recorded conversations between de Beaufort and Brother Lawrence, sixteen letters of spiritual counsel that Lawrence had written to friends and to a Carmelite nun, and a couple of short maxims.
The book’s enduring power is in its simplicity. Brother Lawrence reduced the contemplative life to one continuous practice: whatever he was doing, he tried to keep his attention turned, simply and lovingly, toward God. He learned this in the kitchen of the Discalced Carmelite priory in Paris, working as a cook for a community of one hundred. His task was repetitive and full of interruptions. The kitchen and the chapel had become one continuous practice.
The teaching is direct. Set aside elaborate methods. Set aside expectations of particular states of feeling. Set aside even the distinction between time spent in formal prayer and time spent in ordinary activity. Make of all the actions of your life one continual conversation with God. The work is moment-by-moment, and the only requirement is the willingness to begin again every time the attention has wandered.
First conversation
Recorded by Joseph de Beaufort
The first time I saw Brother Lawrence was upon the third of August, 1666. He told me that God had done him a singular favour in his conversion at the age of eighteen years. That in the winter, seeing a tree stripped of its leaves, and considering that within a little time, the leaves would be renewed, and after that the flowers and fruit appear, he received a high view of the providence and power of God, which has never since been effaced from his soul.
Continuation
He told me that he had been long troubled in mind from a certain belief that he should be damned; that all the men in the world could not have persuaded him to the contrary. But he had thus reasoned with himself about it: I engaged in a religious life only for the love of God, and I have endeavoured to act only for Him. Whatever becomes of me, whether I be lost or saved, I will always continue to act purely for the love of God. I shall have this good at least, that till death I shall have done all that is in me to love Him.
[ This is the first conversation. Three further conversations and sixteen letters complete the small book, each a variation on the same simple practice of doing every ordinary thing as an act of presence to God. The complete edition is at the source linked above. ]