What Brother Lawrence Meant by Practicing the Presence of God
⏱ 11 min read
What if the thing you have been trying to make happen at five in the morning, in a chair, with a candle and a Bible and a journal — what if that thing was supposed to be happening at the sink?
This is the slow version of what Brother Lawrence meant. Not a hack, not a productivity reframe of prayer, not a pray while you commute tip from a podcast. The actual practice the seventeenth-century kitchen monk gave his life to, which has been quietly handed down for three hundred and fifty years and is still, for the modern woman whose chair time keeps collapsing under the weight of the morning, the most usable contemplative practice in the Christian tradition. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries this same practice into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take it after the article. For now — read slowly.
You have likely tried the standard answer to the question how do I pray more? — the early morning. The chair. The plan. The verse list. The journal page. And on the good week it works, and on most weeks it doesn’t, because the morning is the time of day with the least slack in a woman’s life. The baby cries. The work email arrives at six. The to-do list of the previous Tuesday has spilled into Wednesday. The chair time, when it survives, is rushed and guilty.
Brother Lawrence did not have a kitchen-table devotional life. He had a kitchen. He was a lay brother in a Carmelite monastery in Paris, assigned, against his preference, to the work of the kitchen — peeling vegetables, scouring pots, lighting fires, fetching wood. He spent forty years in that kitchen. And what he did in those forty years — the practice he was known for, the practice his abbot transcribed in conversations and letters and gave to the world after his death — was the slow building of a way of being with God in the middle of the work, rather than in a stolen hour outside of it.
The practice has a name now: practicing the presence of God. The phrase has gone slightly soft from overuse. Most modern usages of it have collapsed into a kind of pious mindfulness — try to remember God exists while you do the dishes. That is not what Lawrence meant. He meant something steadier, harder to acquire, and far more available to a busy woman than the chair-and-candle life she keeps failing at. Let us read what he actually said.
The first passage: I walk before God simply
“Ever since that time I walk before God simply, in faith, with humility, and with love.”
— Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
The line is short. Read it twice.
The whole practice is in this sentence. I walk before God. Not I sit with God in the chair from 5:30 to 6:00. Not I have my quiet time in the morning before the children wake. I walk before God. The verb is the ordinary verb for moving through your day. Lawrence’s claim is that the ordinary verb can be performed before God — that the kitchen, the corridor, the staircase, the laundry room can all become places where the soul is walking before Him as much as the chapel was.
This is not metaphor. Lawrence meant it literally. The thing that had changed in him, after years of struggle, was not the addition of more devotional content to his day. It was the relocation of the devotional posture into the day. He stopped trying to be a contemplative when the bell rang and a non-contemplative when the bell stopped. He became a contemplative inside the kitchen work. The kitchen did not stop. The peeling, the scouring, the carrying — none of that lessened. What changed was who he was while he was doing it.
For the modern woman, this is the move that breaks the chair-time monopoly on her relationship with God. Her relationship with God is not confined to the half-hour she fails to protect at the kitchen table. Her relationship with God is everywhere she is. The walk from the bedroom to the bathroom is potentially walking before God. The drive to school is potentially walking before God. The fifteen minutes at the sink after dinner is potentially walking before God. The practice is not adding a new contemplative slot to a calendar that has no slots. The practice is bringing the contemplative posture into the slots that already exist.
(If the early-morning version of the chair time is the part you have been failing at, a morning devotional for today (when you have six minutes before the day starts) walks a version of the practice for the six-minute window. And if the chair-time piety has been louder than your nervous system can hold, daily devotions for the woman who doesn’t want pep is the quieter sibling.)
The second passage: applying my mind carefully
“Thus I continued some years applying my mind carefully the rest of the day, and even in the midst of my work, to the presence of God, whom I considered always as with me, often as in my heart.”
— Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
Notice the verb: applying. Not feeling, not experiencing, not receiving. Applying. The practice is not waiting for God’s presence to arrive as a sensation. The practice is the deliberate, repeated turning of the mind, in the middle of the work, toward the One who is already there.
Read the next phrase carefully. Whom I considered always as with me, often as in my heart. Lawrence’s practice is not the conjuring of a feeling. It is the holding of a consideration — a steady, daily-renewed reckoning that He is here, that He has been here, that He will be here in the next minute too. The consideration does the work that the feeling, in a modern Christian woman’s vocabulary, has been over-asked to do. The feeling is unreliable. The consideration is available, because the consideration is a posture of the will, not the nervous system.
This is the part most modern usages of practicing the presence skip. They want it to be a feeling-state — a kind of warm awareness running underneath the day. Lawrence’s version was not warm. It was quiet, deliberate, often unfelt. He says, elsewhere in the conversations, that he frequently went hours and days without any felt consolation, and that his practice did not depend on the consolations because his practice was applying the mind and not receiving the feeling.
For you, the practical translation is this: the practice will not feel mystical most of the time. It will feel like a small, repeated turning of your attention — at the kitchen counter, at the desk, in the car, in the waiting room — toward the consideration that He is with you. Five seconds at a time. Twenty times a day. Whether the turning feels like anything is not the measurement. The measurement is whether you turned.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women holds this practice in a small evening form. One page a day. Not for the early-morning chair time that you may or may not protect, but for the night-time review of where you walked with Him during the day — the moment at the sink, the moment in the corridor, the moment at the school gate when you remembered He was there. The journaling is not a performance of devotion. It is the slow building of the noticing muscle, so that the applying the mind gets easier over weeks because you have the small daily record of where it worked.
The somatic that goes with the practice
Pause here. The practice has a body to it, and the body is where Lawrence’s vocabulary becomes most translatable to a modern week.
Put one hand on your chest, lightly. Not as a posture, just as a way of feeling the breath move. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, say silently He is with me here. Not in a dramatic voice. In the voice of someone saying a quiet, true thing to themselves. Do it once. Then take the hand away and continue reading.
That five-second movement — the hand on the chest, the slow exhale, the quiet line — is the somatic shape of Lawrence’s practice. You can do it at the sink. You can do it at the red light. You can do it in the supermarket queue. The body learns the practice through repetition. After three weeks of small five-second hand-on-chest moments through the day, the practice starts running on its own — the body remembers the line before the mind has decided to think it. The kitchen monk’s practice has become yours.
(For the variant of this practice the tired-mom version of the morning needs, a quick morning devotional for the tired mom — without skipping the hard part walks the smallest possible chair-time version. And for the broader self-care reframe that holds the whole practice — joy as the fruit of slow returns — find your joy self-care journal: 7 practices for the woman who has forgotten how is the long-form companion.)
The third passage: gradually become accustomed
“Gradually become accustomed to worship Him in this way; to beg His grace, to offer Him your heart from time to time; in the midst of your business, even every moment if you can.”
— Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
This is the most important passage of the three, because of one word. Gradually.
Modern Christian publishing has trained the woman who reads it to expect transformation in seven days. The book, the podcast series, the journal challenge, the small-group study — they all promise some version of seven days from now, your prayer life will be different. Lawrence will not let you have that. Gradually become accustomed. The verb is the slow verb of habit-building, of small repetitions, of years.
He uses the word accustomed because he is describing the formation of a custom — a default pattern of the soul. Customs are not formed in seven days. They are formed by the patient repetition of the small turning, the small offering, the small begging of grace, until the pattern is no longer something you have to choose each time. The soul has become accustomed — has formed the muscle memory — of turning toward God in the gap between two work-emails, in the pause between two tasks at the sink, in the five seconds before answering the child’s question.
From time to time. That is the rhythm. Not constantly. From time to time. Lawrence is not asking for a continuous mystical awareness running underneath every second of your day. He is asking for frequent small turnings — the offering of the heart, the begging of grace, the recognition of His company — at intervals through the ordinary day. Every hour. Every half-hour. Every time a task changes. Every time you cross a doorway. The intervals are yours to choose. The smallness of each one is the practice.
Even every moment if you can. The conditional matters. Lawrence is not commanding the continuous awareness — he is acknowledging that it is the ideal that some saints, after decades of accustoming, eventually arrive at. You are not at that point. Almost no one is at that point. What you can do, today, is the from time to time version. The five-second turning, three times an hour, on the days you remember, building over months and years into a custom of the soul that walks before God simply, in faith, with humility, and with love.
(If the underlying problem has been that your faith life feels self-care-shaped rather than scripture-shaped — that the joy you are looking for keeps getting marketed at you in candle form — the long-form letter on this same difficulty is find your joy self-care journal, and the sibling articles in this contemplative-fathers series sit at union with Christ — what Teresa of Ávila actually taught and my heart is restless until it rests in you — Augustine, slowly read.)
What the practice does to a year
If you walk this practice — gradually, badly, with many forgotten weeks — for twelve months, the shape of your spiritual life will not be the shape it is now.
It will not be that you have become a contemplative saint. It will be that the kitchen has stopped being the place you escape from in order to be with God, and has become one of the places you are most reliably with Him. The drive to school has become a slow walk before Him. The five minutes at the sink after dinner has become the most settled part of the day. The waking minutes between alarm and getting out of bed have become a small daily offering. The chair time, when it happens, has become not the only place you meet God, but the quieter version of a meeting that has been ongoing in the kitchen and the car and the corridor all week.
The change is not dramatic. The kitchen monk’s transformation was not dramatic from the outside either. He peeled vegetables. He scoured pots. He carried wood. The transformation was inside the practice, and it was visible only in the slow, patient, increasingly unflustered quality of the man inside the work. People came to see him not because he was performing holiness, but because the holiness had quietly settled into the ordinary, and the ordinary had been altered by holding it.
☕ Get Seven Days of Stillness — free
A free gift from Hayley Louisa Mark. A short devotional companion drawn from the 140-Day series — seven passages, seven contemplative practices, sent to your inbox over the coming week.
No noise. No spam. Unsubscribe whenever you wish.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. One small page each evening for the noticing — the moments in the day when you remembered He was there, the moments you did not, the small offering of the heart for tomorrow. Built for the woman who has been failing at the early-morning chair time and is ready to bring the practice into the rest of the day.
The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women carries Brother Lawrence’s slow vocabulary — applying the mind, offering the heart from time to time, gradually becoming accustomed — into a daily companion built for the woman whose week has no protected hour but plenty of small five-second openings.
