The practice of the presence
Brother Lawrence in the kitchen
Brother Lawrence was a clumsy, unschooled lay brother in a Carmelite monastery in seventeenth-century Paris, assigned to the kitchen — work he openly disliked — and later to mending sandals. He held no office, wrote no famous books in his lifetime, and by every worldly measure was the least important man in the house. Yet monks and bishops alike sought him out, because he had stumbled onto something most of them had missed.
He had learned to do everything in conscious company with God. He did not flee the clatter of the kitchen to go and pray; he prayed in the clatter. Picking up a straw from the ground for the love of God, flipping an omelet in unbroken conversation with him, he found that the hour of work and the hour of prayer had quietly become the same hour. The presence of God was not a place he visited but an atmosphere he lived in.
He called it, simply, the practice of the presence of God — and the word practice matters. It did not come to him all at once or by feeling. He returned to the awareness of God's presence again and again, gently, ten thousand times, through every interruption and forgetting, until the returning wore a groove and the presence became his native air.
“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 tranquillity as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.”
— Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God (Fourth Conversation)
Practice the presence of God in the middle of ordinary work — returning your attention to him again and again until his presence becomes your native air.
“I have set the LORD always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.”
We wall prayer into a holy compartment and treat the rest of the day as secular, so the kitchen and the chapel stay separate. The interior work is to tear the wall down as Brother Lawrence did — to set the Lord before you in ordinary tasks and, above all, to make peace with the constant forgetting, since the gentle returning, ten thousand times, is the whole discipline.
Choose one routine task this week — washing dishes, walking, commuting — and do it deliberately in God's company, turning your attention to him as you work. Each time you notice you have drifted, return gently, without scolding yourself.
We are quick to quarantine prayer in a holy slot so the rest of the day runs on without a thought of God, and quicker still to read our forgetting as proof the practice is hopeless. But the whole discipline is the gentle returning — and a soul that keeps setting the Lord before it, through every lapse, cannot be pulled from his presence for long.
We tend to wall prayer off into a separate compartment — a holy slot in a day that is otherwise secular, the kitchen on one side and the chapel on the other. Brother Lawrence quietly tore the wall down. He proved that the most ordinary work, done in conscious company with God, becomes prayer, and that the kitchen can hold as much of God as the sanctuary.
The key is that one word, practice. He did not wait to feel God's presence; he kept setting the Lord before him, returning his wandering attention again and again, until the habit became second nature. You will forget a hundred times a day. That is not failure; the gentle returning is the whole discipline. Set the Lord before you in the next ordinary task, and then the next, and let the practice, over years, become your unshakable native air.
- Have I walled prayer off from my ordinary work?
- Do I treat my forgetting as failure rather than the place to practice returning?
- What routine task could become, this week, a place I keep God company?
Lord, let there be no wall between my work and my prayer. Teach me to set you always before me in the clatter of ordinary days, and when I forget you a hundred times, to return a hundred and one, until your presence becomes the air I breathe. Amen.