Chapter Eleven: The Kitchen

Nicholas Herman was born in French Lorraine around 1614. He soldiered a little, served as a footman, and somewhere past midlife walked into the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Paris as a lay brother — the lowest rung, the working class of the cloister. They gave him the kitchen. For most of his remaining decades, he washed pots.

The monastery named him Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection. He died in 1691, and the slim gathering of his conversations and letters published afterward — The Practice of the Presence of God — has outlived empires. Catholics read it. Protestants read it. It has crossed every line the church has drawn, because it carries no argument to disagree with. It carries only a discovery.

The discovery was this: the presence of God was as real to him among his pots and pans as on his knees at the altar. Not because the kitchen was holy, but because the Companion was in the kitchen — had always been in the kitchen — and Lawrence had simply begun to act like it was true. He practiced, through the steam and the clatter and the aching feet, a continual quiet conversation: noticing God, speaking to God, offering the next small task to God, returning to God when his attention wandered, without drama and without self-reproach. He said the set hours of prayer eventually felt no different from the working hours, because the presence did not change when the bell rang. Only the posture of his body changed. The companionship was continuous.

Understand what this is not. It is not mysticism, if mysticism means visions and raptures; Lawrence reported almost nothing of the kind. It is not technique; there are no steps, and he gently laughed at methods. It is not attainment; he insisted to his death that he was clumsy at it and that God was simply kind. It is the most ordinary thing in the world, done continually: noticing the One who is there. The same practice available to a mother at a sink, a man in a truck, a patient in a bed, a clerk at a counter. The kitchen is everywhere. The presence is everywhere the kitchen is.

This is what the generation Leona Choy documented in Powerlines possessed and assumed — the conviction that conscious fellowship with the Spirit belongs to the ordinary day of the ordinary believer. Andrew Murray called the Spirit-filled life the birthright of every member of the body of Christ, not the attainment of the few. Oswald Chambers, the Scottish teacher whose words still steady believers a century later, said the Spirit's business is to make Jesus real — not more thoroughly defined; real, the way a person in the room is real. And the distance between you and what these voices describe is not a distance of attainment. It is a distance of attention. The presence is constant. The noticing is the practice.

So begin where Lawrence began, which is wherever you are standing. Not with a program. With a sentence, said inwardly, in the middle of the dishes or the email or the drive: You are here. And then again, an hour later, when you remember: You are here. He will not scold you for the forgetting in between. He never scolded Lawrence. Gentleness, you will recall, is His personality. The branch does not strain to be near the vine. It abides — and the sap rises on its own.