The book contains conversations had with, and letters written by Nicholas Herman, a lay Brother among the Carmelites at Paris, called Brother Lawrence. It also includes Spiritual Maxims and a brief biography (“Life”) by Joseph de Beaufort.



Brother Lawrence lived from 1611 to 1691.



This material is translated from the French and includes two translations of the Conversations and Letters, entitled Practice and Presence of God. When reading the book, my impression was that Brother Lawrence was saying the same things again and again; it turned out that this was because there were two translations of the Conversations and Letters, which I didn’t realize at first.



Brother Lawrence was a simple man who was converted at the age of eighteen owing to a spiritual experience.



He felt that we should “establish ourselves in a sense of God’s Presence” by continually conversing with Him. The love of God was the end of all his actions. Our only business was “to love and delight ourselves in God”.



The worst that could happen to him was to lose the sense of God. “Perfect resignation to God was a sure way to Heaven.”



We should do “our common business” with no view to pleasing men but purely for the love of God.



Brother Lawrence tells us in the Letters that he has given Himself wholly to God and has renounced everything that was not God.



He has “an habitual, silent and secret conversation of the soul with God”.



He considers himself as the most wretched of men “full of sores and corruption” and asks His forgiveness. We are told that he has many sins, but not what these were.



He recommends that others think of God the most they can.



“There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful than that of a continual conversation with God.



We must put our whole trust in God.



Our only business in life is to please God and everything else is folly and vanity.



In order to know God, we must often think of Him, and when we come to love Him, we need also think of Him often.



He tells us we should not pray to be delivered from our pains, on the contrary, but pray for the strength and patience to bear them as long as He pleases, “Happy those who suffer with Him.”



Men of the world consider sickness not as a favour from God, and so find only grief and distress in it. “But those who consider sickness as coming from the hand of God ---, find in it great sweetness and sensible consolation.” (This sounds a bit like masochism.)



God is more present with us in sickness than in health. “When pains come from God, He only can cure them. He often sends diseases of the body to cure those of the soul.”



“"Pains and sufferings would be a paradise to me while I should suffer with my God; and the greatest pleasures would be hell to me if I could relish them without Him”.



Faith alone ought to be our support.



Brother Lawrence is always happy and “feels joys so continual and so great that (he) can scarce contain them”.



One’s griefs are proofs of God’s love towards one.



“He is within us: seek Him not elsewhere.”



He asked God for nothing except that we might not offend Him.



The most necessary practice is the presence of God. Secondly, we must converse with Him purely and simply. We must do everything with great care. We must praise God. “Our adoration of God should be done in faith.”



Adoring God in truth is to admit that our nature is just he opposite of His. (This is not what I believe.)



“Brother Lawrence called the practice of the presence of God the easiest and shortest way to attain Christian perfection and to be protected from sin.”



His principal virtue was his faith. He saw nothing but the plan of God in everything that happened to him.



Brother Lawrence appears to have been no less than a saint, totally devoted to God.



But though I myself have had spiritual experiences of divine love, I do not know what it is to love God, whom I do not know as one knows another being.



And it also seems alien to me that God should want us to please Him, and not to offend Him. My more modern understanding is that God is all-encompassing and gives us free will to do whatever we want. He does not judge us, in fact we are He and He is in us (as Lawrence also understands).



I think that while B. Lawrence feels we should love and please God, we in this age do this by trying always to do the right thing, to do things as well as possible, though we may not always succeed in this.



I found the book inspiring but somewhat repetitive and overwhelming as regard to Lawrences’s love, faith and purity. The most informative part was the final “Life of Brother Lawrence”. ( )