The Quietest Spiritual Discipline — Brother Lawrence on Hidden Prayer

⏱ 12 min read

You have probably already asked this question of two or three teachers and got two or three different answers — prayer, scripture, fasting, silence, communion. Each one defensible. Each one half the answer. You picked the one that suited the season and walked it for a while, and then the season changed and the answer no longer felt right, and you began to wonder whether the question itself was the wrong shape.

This is the contemplative version of the question — what is the most important spiritual discipline. It is a slow walk through the answer Brother Lawrence, the seventeenth-century kitchen monk who wrote The Practice of the Presence of God, gave to the visitors who kept coming to his monastery to ask him almost exactly the same thing. His answer, when you sit with it, is not one of the items on the usual list. It is something quieter — a continual hidden prayer that holds every other practice in its slow attention, and that the modern list-format almost never names. (Prayer Journal for Women is the 140-day companion this article sits inside — built for the woman who wants the hidden prayer walked at one short page per evening rather than read about for an afternoon and lost by Wednesday.)

Lawrence was a lay brother in a Carmelite monastery in Paris. He spent most of his adult life washing dishes in a noisy kitchen. He was not learned. He had been a footman and a soldier before his conversion. The visitors who came to see him were often well-educated priests and theologians who had heard, by reputation, that the kitchen brother knew something about prayer that the studied could not seem to find. He would tell them, plainly, the same thing — and they would write it down, and the small bundle of his letters became, after his death, one of the most-read devotional texts in the Christian world.

The thing he told them is what this essay is about.

The question, as Lawrence would have heard it

When a visitor asked Lawrence which of the disciplines was most important, he did not list the seven. He did not rank them. He answered with a sentence that, if you read it quickly, sounds like a generic piety, and only opens into its depth when you read it as he meant it — slowly, and as the literal account of a kitchen brother’s actual interior life.

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

That is the answer. The most important spiritual discipline, for Lawrence, is walking before God — continually, simply, in the middle of the ordinary day. He is not describing a morning quiet time. He is describing the way a man can wash dishes for thirty years while the soul remains, the whole time, in the company of God.

This is the discipline most lists do not name because it does not look like a discipline. It does not have a start time. It does not have a method. It does not produce a measurable outcome by the end of the month. It is the hidden, slow, continual practice of keeping the inward eye turned toward God while the outward hands do the work of the day.

The question which is the most important discipline is, in Lawrence’s hands, a slightly wrong question. The seven listed disciplines — prayer, scripture, communion, fasting, conferring, mercy, the rest — are scaffolding. Walking before God is what the scaffolding is for. You do not choose between them. You let the seven build the conditions under which the one becomes possible.

How Lawrence actually practised it

The visitors pressed him on this. How, brother, did you arrive at it? He gave them the second half of the answer in a longer passage that describes the slow years it took for the practice to become continuous:

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 phrasing. I continued some years. Not weeks. Not a forty-day push. Some years. The discipline was not seized; it was inhabited, slowly, with what he calls applying my mind carefully. It is the most patient verb in the contemplative literature — applying, gently and repeatedly, the attention of the mind back to the awareness that God is here.

The practice has three small movements, all of them visible in that sentence.

First, the considering — Lawrence considered God always as with him. The day was thought of, all the time, as a day God was inside. Not occasionally. Always. This is the part that takes the longest to become natural; for most modern readers it begins as a deliberate act and only becomes habitual after months.

Second, the carefully — the attention is brought back gently rather than dragged back forcefully. Lawrence is explicit elsewhere that the mind will wander hundreds of times a day, and that the wandering is not failure; the only failure is refusing to come back. The practice is the coming back, not the not-wandering.

Third, the often as in my heart — Lawrence had a strong sense that the presence of God was specifically located, in his experience, inwardly. Not somewhere out beyond the kitchen ceiling. Inwardly. The practice is not a craning outward; it is an interior settling.

Once you read those three movements together, the practice begins to take a shape you can recognise. It is the slow, repeated, gentle return of the inward attention to the fact that God is here. (The morning version of this same return — the small first-thing practice of orienting the day toward God before the noise starts — is in our how to start your day with God walk-through.)

Why this is the discipline the others rest on

If you have walked the seven listed disciplines for any length of time, you have probably noticed something the lists rarely admit: the practices, by themselves, do not always produce the soul they promise. You can pray daily and remain anxious. You can read scripture daily and remain unchanged. You can fast and feel only hungry. You can attend communion and walk out unmoved.

The reason, Lawrence would have said gently, is that the discipline underneath the discipline is missing. The seven practices are scaffolding for an interior life that is meant to be continually open to God — and if the interior is not being held open between the practices, the practices themselves cannot do their full work.

This is why his answer to the visitors was not prayer in the sense of a daily slot. It was a continual prayer — the praying without ceasing of 1 Thessalonians 5:17, read literally rather than aspirationally. The morning prayer slot, the evening prayer slot, the small group, the fast, the communion — all of these become the moments at which the continual interior practice is strengthened and renewed. Between them, the practice is the simple, ongoing keeping-of-company with God in the middle of whatever you are doing.

He gave this as advice to one of the visitors, in a passage written almost as a slow instruction:

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

Gradually. Even every moment if you can. The instruction is patient and unhurried. He is not asking the reader to maintain continuous mystical awareness from this Tuesday onward. He is asking for a small offering of the heart, from time to time, in the middle of ordinary tasks — and then, slowly, more often, until the offering becomes the climate rather than the event. (For the prayer-journal version of offering the heart from time to time, the practice is gathered in a daily prayer journal that holds the asks you’re embarrassed to pray — small, honest, continual.)