Brother Lawrence
Nicholas Herman was born around 1611 in Lorraine,
France. His parents being poor, Nicholas
joined the army and participated in the Thirty Years’ War. During his time as a soldier, in the dead of
winter, Nicholas received supernatural insight from an ordinary sight, setting
him on a spiritual journey that would last the rest of his life.
He looked at a simple tree, stripped clean of leaves and
fruit, waiting for the springtime to blossom again. This sight caused him to grasp for the first
time how wonderfully extravagant God’s grace was. Like the tree, he was dead, but God had life
waiting for him and, when the seasons changed, it would bring forth fruitfulness.
Later, a battle injury sidelined him from military
service, and left him in permanent pain from a damaged Sciatic nerve. He spent some time as a civil servant and
some time living a monastic life in the desert.
Eventually, he applied for and was allowed to join the Discalced (“without
shoes”) Carmelite monastery in Paris and assumed the name “Brother Lawrence.” In the monastery, he was assigned to work in
the kitchen, a task he did not like. Through
these chores, he learned the lesson of Colossians 3:17, “Whatever you do in
word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him
to God the Father.” Lawrence determined
that “It is not the greatness of the work which matters to God, but the love
with which it is done.” To him, his
personal love for God made every detail of his life to have great value.
Lawrence worked for the monastery for 15 years cooking,
then was moved to a position where he repaired the sandals of over 100 other
monks. He resolved to put himself in a position
where he made his love for God the end motivation for every one of his actions,
most specifically the “common business” tasks of living – whether they be turning
eggs in a frying pan, repairing sandals, or being tasked to go to the town and
fetch a shipment of wine for the community.
He once said, “It is enough for me to pick up but a straw from the ground
for the love of God.”
Most of what we know about Brother Lawrence comes from a
series of interviews from Abbe de Beaufort, the personal envoy of Cardinal de
Noaille of France. The Cardinal had
heard of the simple monk performing menial tasks with great devotion and
profound wisdom and in 1666 sent Beaufort to interview him and see if the
rumors were true. Lawrence had
trepidation about being interviewed in this way – both out of his reluctance to
be in any spotlight and in wanting to know for certain that Beaufort’s
intentions were genuine and not political in nature. When Lawrence was comfortable, he granted the
envoy four interviews, or “conversations,” where he described his way of life
and how he came to understand it.
Beaufort described Lawrence, then in his late 50’s, as “rough in
appearance but gentle in grace.” The
gently monk had a habit of continually conversing with God, throughout the
day. Lawrence told him he felt as close
to God in the business of the kitchen as when he knelt in prayer.
When Brother Lawrence died peacefully and in blissful
obscurity at age 80, his friends found copies of 16 letters he had written to
others about the spiritual life. They
published these, along with envoy Beaufort’s recollections of his four
interviews, form the sum total of Brother Lawrence’s writings, a small book
today entitled “The Practice of the Presence of God.” The entire book can be read in under an hour.
A great deal of wisdom about loving God can be found in
these short pages. In one of his
letters, Lawrence writes, “Men invent means and methods of coming at God’s love,
they learn rules and set up devices to remind them of that love, and it seems
like a world of trouble to bring oneself into the consciousness of God’s
presence. Yet it might be so
simple. It is not quicker and easier to
just do our common business wholly for the love of Him?”
“The most holy and necessary practice in our spiritual
life is the presence of God. That means
finding constant pleasure in His divine company, speaking humbly and lovingly
with Him in all seasons, at every moment, without limiting the conversation in
any way.”
“I have abandoned all particular forms of devotion, all
prayer techniques. My only prayer
practice is attention. I carry on a
habitual, silent, and secret conversation with God that fills me with overwhelming
joy.”
“There is no greater lifestyle and no greater happiness
than that of having a continual conversation with God.”
“Prayer is nothing else than a sense of God’s presence.”
“In order to know God, we must often think of Him; and
when we come to love Him, we shall then also think of Him often, for our heart
will be with our treasure.”
Packer, J.I., 131 Christians Everyone Should Know,
Holman Reference, 2000.
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