The Practice of the Presence of God

A lay brother in the kitchen

Brother Lawrence was born Nicholas Herman around 1614 in Lorraine, now in north-eastern France. The editor of the library's English calls him "a lowly and unlearned man" who had been a footman and a soldier Preface 1. He is said to have been wounded in the Thirty Years' War; he says himself that he was lame Conversation 2.8.

At about eighteen, seeing a bare tree in winter and thinking of the leaves and fruit to come, he "received a high view of the Providence and Power of God, which has never since been effaced from his soul" Conversation 1.2. Footman to the treasurer Fieubert, "a great awkward fellow who broke everything" Conversation 1.3, he sought a monastery expecting to suffer for his clumsiness; but God, as he put it, "had disappointed him" Conversation 1.4: he found only satisfaction.

The monastery was that of the Discalced, or barefooted, Carmelites in Paris, an order born of the sixteenth-century reform in which Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross sought to renew a life given to prayer and poverty. He entered as a lay brother, doing the community's manual work, and took the name Lawrence of the Resurrection. The preface dates his admission to 1666, the year of the first conversation, but he speaks of "about forty years in religion" Letter 9.2, and most accounts place his entry around 1640.

For fifteen years he worked in the kitchen, to which "he had naturally a great aversion" Conversation 2.9. Sent to Burgundy to buy wine, lame and with no head for business, he got about the boat "by rolling himself over the casks" Conversation 2.8 and told God it was His business. Later he speaks of a new post Conversation 2.10, which tradition says was mending the brothers' sandals. He died in his monastery in February 1691; a late letter calls him "almost eighty" Letter 7.2.

Conversations and letters

Lawrence wrote no book. "The first time I saw Brother Lawrence, was upon the 3d of August, 1666" Conversation 1.1, writes Joseph de Beaufort, who visited him four times in 1666 and 1667 and set down what he said. The notes are reported speech, nearly every sentence beginning with the word That.

By the time he published, Beaufort was grand vicar to Louis-Antoine de Noailles, bishop of Châlons and later archbishop of Paris and cardinal; the preface tangles these titles Preface 3. After Lawrence's death he brought out two small books, in 1692 and 1694, with the letters, the spiritual maxims, a short life and the conversations. English readers know them as The Practice of the Presence of God, a phrase of Lawrence's own: "Were I a preacher, I should, above all other things, preach the practice of the presence of God" Letter 5.4.

The library holds the whole of an anonymous English translation published by Fleming H. Revell of New York around 1895: the editor's preface, the four conversations (Conversation 1 to Conversation 4) and the fifteen letters (Letter 1 to Letter 15). Conversation 2.9 is the second conversation's ninth paragraph. The edition lacks Beaufort's life and the maxims, and of its editor's four notes the library keeps only the first, which names Scripture. The second said that the fourth conversation from Conversation 4.17 on was gathered from other accounts of Lawrence, so his famous saying about the kitchen is not from Beaufort's visits.

Most of the letters seem to come from his last years. The names are blanked out, but we meet a priest whose judgment Lawrence asks (Letter 2), men and women in religious communities, a young soldier, a man who has lost a friend, and someone long ill. Letter 4 speaks of another brother in the third person, but its details match Letter 2, and many readers take him to be Lawrence himself.

His book then travelled by an unexpected road. In the 1690s France quarrelled over Quietism, a teaching, condemned by the popes, that the soul should cease its own acts and rest passive in God; Lawrence himself was never condemned. Some had charged Lawrence's state "with inactivity, delusion and self-love" Letter 2.18, and many scholars think the quarrel left him little read among French Catholics, while Protestants reprinted him. John Wesley is said to have commended him to his Methodists (Wesley and the Methodist movement), and by the 1890s the book had "gone through repeated English and American editions" Preface 4. Revell, a brother-in-law of the evangelist D. L. Moody, named his firm on its title page a publisher of evangelical literature.

The time of business and the time of prayer

Everything in the book comes back to one counsel: "That we should establish ourselves in a sense of God's Presence, by continually conversing with Him" Conversation 1.5. Lawrence did not learn it as a technique. Methods in books only puzzled him, so "I renounced, for the love of Him, everything that was not He; and I began to live as if there was none but He and I in the world" Letter 1.2. Going to God, he said, needs neither art nor science, "but only a heart resolutely determined to apply itself to nothing but Him" Conversation 3.10.

To "set Him always before us" Letter 1.3, he says, keeps us from wilful sin and gives a holy freedom with God. The words are a psalm's:

I have set the LORD always before me. Because He is at my right hand, I will not be shaken.

Psalm 16:8

The kitchen was as much his place of prayer as the chapel. "Our sanctification did not depend upon changing our works, but in doing that for God's sake, which we commonly do for our own" Conversation 4.6. God "regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed" Conversation 4.11, so Lawrence was glad to pick up a straw for the love of God Conversation 2.1. On working "without any view of pleasing men" Conversation 4.7 the editor cites Galatians 1:10 and Ephesians 6:5–6; Paul says it more widely still:

So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all to the glory of God.

1 Corinthians 10:31

Many Protestant readers hear in this the Reformers' teaching on vocation, that ordinary work done for God is holy (Vocation: every sphere of life).

He kept the set hours of prayer his superior appointed Conversation 2.11, "only a continuation of the same exercise" Letter 2.16. But "it was a great delusion to think that the times of prayer ought to differ from other times" Conversation 4.8. So he lived "Pray without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:17), and one of the other accounts keeps his best-known words:

The time of business … does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter 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 sacrament.

Conversation 4.23

Nor is this for the cloister only. For a young soldier, he wrote, "A little lifting up of the heart suffices" Letter 3.2, even on the march with sword in hand. To a busy correspondent of nearly sixty-four: "It is not necessary for being with God to be always at church: we may make an oratory of our heart" Letter 7.2. See also How should I pray?

Falling, rising, suffering

When he failed, he "only confessed his fault, saying to God, I shall never do otherwise, if You leave me to myself; it is You who must hinder my falling, and mend what is amiss" Conversation 2.6, and troubled himself no further. To one plagued by wandering thoughts he wrote, "Hold yourself in prayer before God, like a dumb or paralytic beggar at a rich man's gate" Letter 8.4. Of an eager sister: "she would go faster than grace. One does not become holy all at once" Letter 9.1.

His confidence rested on Christ, not on his own steadiness: "We ought, without anxiety, to expect the pardon of our sins from the Blood of JESUS CHRIST, only endeavoring to love Him with all our hearts" Conversation 2.18. We are to pray "with a perfect confidence, as relying upon the infinite merits of our Lord JESUS CHRIST" Conversation 4.4.

He had known darkness: four years sure of his damnation, until he saw that "this trouble arose from want of faith" Conversation 2.2; and, in Letter 2, ten years in which "all creatures, reason, and God Himself were against me; and faith alone for me" Letter 2.7. Then he pictures himself as a criminal before his King, who, "very far from chastising me, embraces me with love, makes me eat at His table, serves me with His own hands, gives me the key of His treasures" Letter 2.13. It is the welcome of the father who "ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him" (Luke 15:20).

His joys were such that he had to hide them, yet he writes, "It is not pleasure which we ought to seek in this exercise" Letter 5.3; felt favours "cannot bring us so near to Him as faith does in one simple act" Letter 15.4.

The last letters go to someone long ill. "I do not pray that you may be delivered from your pains, but I pray God earnestly that He would give you strength and patience to bear them" Letter 11.1. Often near death himself, he had asked not for relief but for strength: "Ah, how sweet it is to suffer with God!" Letter 14.2 Paul received a like answer:

But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness.”

2 Corinthians 12:9

In the last letter Lawrence hopes for "the favor to see Him within a few days" Letter 15.5. A note the library does not hold adds that he took to his bed two days later and died within the week. See also Does suffering have meaning?

Reading it well

Protestants have loved this book because a lay brother with neither office nor learning shows how to live with God among pots and wine casks, looking for pardon to the blood of Christ, setting faith above feeling, and turning daily work into worship. Yet he remained a Carmelite: he needed no director but needed much "a Confessor to absolve him" Conversation 2.12, and knelt before the blessed sacrament, the consecrated Host that Catholics reserve in church as Christ's body. Protestants differ from him there, and can still recognise the grace at work in him.

Evangelicals read him with care at a few points. The practice is no technique for making God present. Christ has promised, "surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20), and Lawrence ascribes all he gained "to the mere mercy and goodness of God" Letter 1.3; his method, acts and habit are best read as a response to grace, not its price. He seldom quotes Scripture outright, though it runs through his words ("our heart will be with our treasure" Letter 9.4, from Matthew 6:21), so read him beside the Bible. And the counsel in Letter 13 to "leave off human remedies" Letter 13.2 was given for one person's case; most Christians receive doctors and medicine among God's gifts.

The conversations are Beaufort's summaries, not Lawrence's words as spoken: look for the man they draw rather than leaning on one sentence. The letters were private, the first sent on condition "that you show my letter to nobody" Letter 1.1. Read slowly, a few paragraphs at a time, and try in the day's work what he asks: "a little remembrance of Him from time to time" Letter 7.1.

Some words have shifted: religion is the monastic life, as the English explains once; society is his community; sensible means felt; succors are helps; physic is medicine; the fund of the soul is its depth; commerce is converse; an oratory is a small chapel; want is lack. His simplest line may be this: "You need not cry very loud; He is nearer to us than we are aware of" Letter 7.1. Paul said as much at Athens:

God intended that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us. ‘For in Him we live and move and have our being.’

Acts 17:27-28