BROTHER LAWRENCE

BROTHER LAWRENCE LIVES for us in one slim little volume of fifty pages called The Practice of the Presence of God. Opening this book is like opening the window to a fresh spring morning. His simple prose reflects the purity and directness of his approach to God. “You need not cry very loud,” he says in words of unadorned beauty. “He is nearer to us than we are aware of.” Brother Lawrence wastes no words, yet the amount of information and inspiration in the fifty short pages of this book is almost past belief. It is the finest and most powerful distillation of a lifetime of spiritual practice.

The first eighteen pages of the book consist of four interviews he granted (in 1666) to M. Beaufort, Grand Vicar to M. Chalons, the Cardinal, at the monastery where Brother Lawrence worked as cook. The Vicar, having heard reports of this man, came to check for the Cardinal on, perhaps, subversion or insubordination or heresy. He found not a rebel – that was the last thing Brother Lawrence would be – but certainly not a conformist. He was impressed enough to go home and try to write down every word he had heard from this kitchen laborer, impressed enough to ask respectfully if he might come again to visit him. To this request the Vicar received a calm and authoritative answer that, if Monsieur’s interest was genuinely spiritual, he, Brother Lawrence, would be glad to talk to him. Otherwise, he was too busy in his kitchen.

The Vicar came at least four times, and from him we have the only description of this humble and glorious lay brother, whose “very countenance was edifying, such a sweet and calm devotion appearing in it as could not but affect the beholders. He spoke quite freely, and what he said was very simple, to the point and full of sense.” Two years after Brother Lawrence died, the Vicar wrote what he called The Character of Brother Lawrence, in which he said: “He had a frank and open manner, which, when you met him won your confidence at once, and made you feel that you had found a friend to whom you could unbosom yourself wholly. Behind his rather rough exterior, one found a singular sagacity, a spaciousness of mind quite beyond the range of the ordinary lay brother, a penetration that surpassed all expectation.”

The last thirty-two pages of Brother Lawrence’s little book are made up of letters written by him in his old age to people earnestly desiring to know the method by which he had arrived at the “habitual sense of God’s presence.” Now, after three hundred years, these letters are for us; this friend is ours. And what a never-ending comfort it is to hear him tell frankly of his spiritual struggles, to have him encourage us again and again in ours.

He was alerted to God, converted to the godly life at the age of eighteen by seeing in winter a tree stripped of its leaves, and reflecting upon the fact that it would be, by God’s grace, leafy and flowery in the spring. From this experience he received a “high view of the providence and power of God” which was never effaced from his soul, and from it he received the impetus to start his search.

He began by studying books for the way to God, but he was not an intellectual, or the books were not inspiring, and he found that he was simply being con­ fused. So he put aside books, and, gave, as he says, “the all for the all.” “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.” How simple! Yet he is careful not to mislead the hopeful aspirant, and he confesses, “I must tell you that for the first ten years I suffered much … I fell often and rose again presently. It seemed to me that all creatures, reason, and God Himself were against me.” Nevertheless, he did not make vain attempts to pierce the future, nor did he dwell on his pre­ sent anguish. He said firmly, “Let what may come of it, however many be the days remaining to me, I will do all things for the love of God.” Thus, in putting aside self, he in truth found God. “When I thought to end my days in these troubles, I found myself changed all at once; and my soul felt a profound inward peace, as if she were in her center and place of rest. Ever since that time, I walk before God simply, in faith, with humility and love.”

NICHOLAS HERMAN of Lorraine was his name. He started life, he tells us, as a footman, but he was a “great awkward fellow who broke things.” He decided then to join the Carmelite monastery at Paris in the hope that God would punish him and make him suffer for his faults. But, he says with strange ruefulness, God disappointed him in this matter and gave him nothing but happiness and satisfaction in his life. This in spite of the fact that he was lame, that he worked for sixty years in the kitchen at a job he did not particularly relish, much of the time under great pressure and bustle, and that he was sometimes given assignments for which he felt he was inadequate. He was sent, for example, into Burgundy to buy wine for his society, an errand which made him apprehensive because of his lameness and his lack of knowledge of business. But he managed to go about the boat by rolling himself over the casks; and as for the business, he simply told God that it was His affair, and without his knowing how, it all turned out very well. We get a vivid picture of him in the monastery kitchen when he tells us, “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.”

His calm and continuing satisfaction resulted from the fact that he had discovered the true secret of work, always “pleasing myself by doing things to please God,” rejoicing, as he says in a famous line, “to pick up a straw from the ground for the love of God.”

But although Brother Lawrence is a lover of God, a true bhakta, it is as a karma yogin that he is best known, as a karma yogin that he teaches. “Make one hearty renunciation,” he says, and as we study him, it begins to be clear what he means by renunciation- namely, work for God- “that we ought not to be weary of doing little things for God, who regards not the greatness of the work but the love with which it is performed.” He says firmly that our progress does not depend in changing our position or work, but in doing our ordinary work purely for the love of God. He himself made a practice of offering all his actions to God. He thought of God at the beginning of his work. When he finished, if it had gone well, he gave thanks to God. If otherwise, he asked pardon, and without being discouraged, continued to exercise the presence of God within him. He says, “By rising after my falls, and by frequently renewed acts of faith and love, I am come to a state wherein it would be as difficult for me not to think of God as it was at first to accustom myself to it.”

No one speaks with more authority than the man of experience. No teaching carries such conviction as that from a man of illumination. With all his humility, the authority and conviction of Brother Lawrence is clear. He is an illumined soul. He says, “I see Him in such a manner as might make me say sometimes, I believe no more, but I see.” As if by divine appointment, he fear­lessly accepts responsibility: “Knock, persevere in knocking, and I will answer for it that He will open to you.”

As a teacher, Brother Lawrence is neither a philosopher nor a theologian. He is a practical mystic. What interests him are the everyday problems of spiritual practice. “Think often on God, by day, by night, in your business, and even in your diversions. Lift up your heart to Him, sometimes even at your meals, and when you are in company . . . It is not necessary for being with God to be always at church. We may make an oratory of our heart.”

He is conscientious about his correspondents. “You tell me nothing new,” he writes to one struggling aspirant. “You are not the only one that is troubled with wandering thoughts.” And he goes on to advise that if the mind wanders, do not worry; bring it back in tranquility. “One way to recollect the mind easily in time of prayer is not to let it wander too far at other times.”

Like a good teacher, Brother Lawrence is constantly urging and encouraging. “Let us set about it seriously.” “I say again, we must work at it. Time presses, there is no room for delay; our souls are at stake.” “Set heartily about this work. I will assist you with my prayers.” “Resolve to persevere to death!” Such pleading cannot be resisted. We not only feel that he is convinced about God, but that he cares deeply about us.

AT the end of his life, in his eightieth year, God answered Brother Lawrence’s long-cherished prayer and sent him some suffering to bear. He received it with joy because, as he said in a letter written shortly before he died, “When we know that it is our loving Father who distresses us, our sufferings will lose their bitterness and become even a matter of consolation.” At the end of the letter he says, “I hope from his mercy the favor to see Him in a few days.”

Two days later, when he had received the last sacraments, a brother asked him if he was easy and what his mind was busied with. This was his reply: “I am doing what I shall do through all Eternity – blessing God. praising God, adoring God, giving Him the love of my whole heart. It is our one business, my brethren.”

Nancy Pope Mayorga