Brother Lawrence

Nicolas Herman was born around 1614 at Hériménil, in Lorraine, into a poor family. As a young man he served as a soldier in the Thirty Years’ War and was wounded. According to his own account, at eighteen he saw a tree stripped of its leaves in winter, and the thought that it would leaf and flower again gave him a sense of God’s providence that never left him.

After some years as a footman and a time as a hermit, he entered the monastery of the Discalced Carmelites in Paris in 1640 as a lay brother, taking the name Lawrence of the Resurrection. He worked for many years in the kitchen, a task he disliked by nature, and later repaired sandals. He died in 1691.

He wrote little: a few maxims and letters. After his death Joseph de Beaufort, vicar general of Paris, published them, with an account of conversations he had held with Lawrence, in 1692 and 1694. These pages, later known as The Practice of the Presence of God, were admired by Fénelon and became one of the most widely read books of Christian devotion, among Catholics and Protestants alike.