Brother Lawrence

Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection was born Nicolas Herman in about 1614 at Hériménil, in the duchy of Lorraine, into a poor family. As a young man he served as a soldier in the Thirty Years' War and was wounded, remaining lame for the rest of his life. He traced his conversion to a moment in his eighteenth year when, looking at a bare tree in midwinter and realizing that God would in due season clothe it again in leaf and fruit, he was so struck by the providence of God that he never recovered from the impression. After a period as a footman, in which by his own account he was a clumsy servant who broke everything, he entered the Discalced Carmelite priory in Paris around 1640 as a lay brother and took the name Lawrence of the Resurrection. He spent nearly all of the next fifty years in the monastery kitchen, and in his later years repairing his brethren's sandals, and he died in Paris on 12 February 1691.

He wrote no book. What survives is a handful of letters, a set of brief spiritual maxims, and the record of four conversations set down by Joseph de Beaufort, a priest of the archdiocese of Paris who visited him in his last years and published the material shortly after his death; gathered together, these few pages form the small classic known as The Practice of the Presence of God. Its teaching is disarmingly simple: that a soul may live in continual loving awareness of God in the midst of the most menial work, so that, as he said, he possessed God as peacefully amid the clatter of his kitchen as when kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament. Brother Lawrence has never been canonized or beatified and the Church accords him no liturgical honors; he is remembered simply as a Carmelite lay brother whose few pages have been read and loved for more than three centuries, by Catholics and Protestants alike.