Brother Lawrence

Nicolas Herman, known in religion as Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, was a former soldier and footman who became a humble lay brother in a Carmelite monastery in Paris, where he worked for decades in the kitchen.

There, amid noise and clutter, he discovered what he called “the practice of the presence of God” — a continual, loving attention to God in the middle of ordinary work. “The time of business,” he said, “does not with me differ from the time of prayer.”

After his death his conversations and letters were gathered into a little book that has never gone out of print: a school of finding God not in flight from daily life, but in its very midst.