The Practice of the Presence of God

This is one of the most widely read books on prayer in the Christian West, and the man behind it never set out to write it. The preface introduces him in five plain words: “a lowly and unlearned man”.

Most people who meet the title picture a mystic in a stone cell, or a scholar who spent decades mapping the stages of contemplation. Hold that picture up for a moment, then put it down. The man behind these pages cooked for a monastery, walked with a limp, and by his own account broke things.

That is not colour added to make a saint likeable. It is the book’s whole argument, made in advance: if this worked for him, in his kitchen, it was never a technique reserved for specialists.

He was born Nicholas Herman, in Lorraine, and he came to religious life by a roundabout road. Before the monastery he had been a soldier, and then a footman, a liveried household servant, to M. Fieubert, the treasurer.

He was not flattering about those years. Talking to a visitor decades later, he described his younger self as “a great awkward fellow who broke everything.” Picture a big man carrying trays through a rich household, and the trays not always arriving.

Keep that detail close, because he did. He never claimed a natural gift for stillness, grace or order. The clumsiness is part of the evidence: whatever he found later, he did not find it by being the kind of person who finds such things easily.

How did Brother Lawrence describe himself in his years as a footman?

• As a quiet servant who already prayed at work
• As a proud man who resented his humble post
• As a restless soldier who missed the battlefield
• As a great awkward fellow who broke everything✓Correct answer

The phrase is his own, recorded in the First Conversation. The pious servant already praying at work is the tempting picture, but nothing in the book says he started out that way; the calm came much later.

In the monastery he did not become a priest, a teacher or a guide of souls. He was received as a lay brother among the Discalced, literally “barefooted”, Carmelites in Paris, and took the name Brother Lawrence.

A lay brother was not ordained and did not spend his days in study. He did the physical work that kept the house running. For Lawrence that meant the kitchen, a job he admitted he had a natural aversion to, and he did it for some fifteen years.

He was lame, too; the conversations mention it almost in passing, as a practical nuisance. So the setting of this spiritual classic is not a hermitage. It is the noisiest, most interrupted room in the building, run by a man who would not have chosen it.

Here is the first surprise: Brother Lawrence did not write this book. What we have are two different kinds of document, gathered together by other people.

The first kind are the Conversations: notes taken by a visiting churchman, usually identified as M. de Beaufort, who served the Cardinal de Noailles. You can hear the note-taking in the grammar. Paragraph after paragraph begins “That he had…” or “That we ought…”, a listener setting down in reported speech what the old brother told him.

The second kind are letters Lawrence sent to people he knew: members of religious houses, a correspondent worried about a young soldier, someone in long illness. They were published on the Cardinal’s recommendation. None of it was polished for a public. It is table talk and private post.

Brother Lawrence did not write the Conversations that open the book.

True✓Correct answer

True. They are a visitor’s notes, most likely M. de Beaufort’s, set down in reported speech, which is why nearly every paragraph starts with “That he…”. The only pages from Lawrence’s own pen are the letters.