Hello, friend.
Welcome back. I'm glad you're here.
Last time, we talked about Jan Amos Comenius and his dream of universal education---the idea that every child, no matter who they are or where they come from, deserves to learn. It was a vision born in the middle of war and loss, and it changed the world.
Today, I want to tell you about something quieter. Something that happened not in a classroom or a printed book, but in a monastery kitchen. A place most people wouldn't think to look for God at all.
His name was Brother Lawrence. And what he discovered---what he lived---was this: the sacred isn't somewhere else. It's not waiting for you in a chapel or a mountaintop or a moment of perfect silence.
It's right here. In the work. In the ordinary. In the pots and pans.
Let me show you what I mean.
Picture this.
Paris, in the 1600s. A monastery tucked into the city. Stone walls, narrow hallways, the smell of candle wax and old wood.
And in the back, past the chapel where the priests chanted their prayers, past the quiet cloisters where monks walked in silence---there was a kitchen.
Hot. Loud. Crowded with work.
Pots boiling over. Onions to chop. Bread to bake. Dishes piling up faster than anyone could wash them. The kind of place where you can't hear yourself think, much less pray.
And there, moving through it all, was a man with a limp.
His leg hurt. It had hurt for years, ever since the war. Every step was a reminder. Every time he stood too long at the worktable, the pain flared.
But he didn't stop. He didn't complain.
He chopped vegetables. He stirred soup. He scrubbed pots until his hands were raw.
And the whole time---the whole time---he was praying.
Not the kind of prayer you say with your eyes closed and your hands folded. Not words from a book or a ritual at the altar.
This was different.
He talked to God while he worked. He offered every onion, every pot, every ache in his leg as a kind of gift. The kitchen noise didn't drown out his prayer. The kitchen was his prayer.
His name was Brother Lawrence.
And I remember watching him---this limping man in a hot, chaotic kitchen---and thinking: he's found something most people spend their whole lives looking for.
He'd found God in the last place anyone expected.
His name wasn't always Brother Lawrence.
He was born Nicolas Herman, around 1614, in a village called Hériménil in the Lorraine region of France. It was a hard time to be alive. The Thirty Years' War was tearing through Europe---armies marching back and forth, villages burned, people starving in the fields.
Nicolas became a soldier. He didn't have much choice. Young men rarely did.
And then, one day, he was wounded. A leg injury that never quite healed right. The kind of wound that stays with you. That reminds you, every single day, that your body isn't what it used to be.
He left the army. He tried working as a footman for a while---serving in someone's household, carrying things, doing what he could. But his leg made everything harder.
Eventually, he found his way to a monastery in Paris. The Discalced Carmelites---a strict order, known for their poverty and simplicity.
He didn't become a priest. He became what they called a lay brother. That meant he did the work no one else wanted to do. The cooking. The cleaning. The endless, grinding labor that kept the monastery running while the priests prayed and studied.
For most of his life there, Brother Lawrence worked in the kitchen. Hot, crowded, relentless. Meals for dozens of monks, day after day. His leg aching the whole time.
And later---when he was older, when standing over a stove became too much---they moved him to the sandal workshop. Making shoes. Repairing shoes. Stitching leather with stiff, worn hands.
Not glamorous work. Not the kind of thing anyone writes home about.
But people started noticing something about him.
He was... peaceful. Steady. He had this quiet joy that didn't make sense. Visitors to the monastery would come to the kitchen or the workshop just to talk to him. To ask him how he did it. How he stayed so calm, so present, in the middle of all that noise and work.
And he would tell them.
He lived until 1691---decades in that monastery, most of it in the kitchen or bent over a workbench making sandals.
After he died, some of the people who'd known him gathered up his letters and the notes from their conversations with him. They put it all together in a little book.
They called it The Practice of the Presence of God.
And that book---those simple words from a limping man who spent his life in a kitchen---traveled farther than he ever did.
Here's the thing you have to understand about 17th-century France, about monasteries, about the whole religious world Brother Lawrence lived in.
There were rules. Schedules. A proper time and place for everything.
Prayer happened at certain hours. You went to the chapel. You knelt. You said the words. You followed the form.
The rest of the time? That was just... work. Necessary, but not sacred. Something you had to get through so you could return to the real spiritual life---the prayers, the silence, the contemplation.
There was a hierarchy to it all. Priests were closer to God than lay brothers. Contemplation was holier than labor. The chapel was sacred. The kitchen was not.
Brother Lawrence didn't argue with any of this. He didn't write treatises or challenge the system.
He just... lived differently.
And it started, honestly, with struggle.
His first ten years in the monastery were hard. Spiritually hard. He felt dry. Empty. Unworthy. He'd go to prayer and feel nothing. He'd try to focus on God and his mind would wander to the onions that needed chopping or the pots that needed scrubbing.
He felt like a failure.
But somewhere in those years, something shifted.
He stopped trying so hard to feel spiritual. He stopped waiting for God to show up in the quiet moments, in the official prayers, in the times when he could finally stop working and be properly religious.
Instead, he started talking to God in the kitchen.
Not out loud. Just... internally. Constantly. While his hands were busy and his leg was aching and the noise was all around him.
He offered every task as a prayer. Every pot he scrubbed. Every vegetable he chopped. Every sandal he stitched.
Not because he was trying to make work holy. But because he realized work already was holy---if he did it with love. If he did it with God instead of away from God.
It sounds simple. And it was.
But it was also revolutionary.
Because what Brother Lawrence was saying---what he was living---was this: God doesn't wait for you to stop working to pay attention to you. God is right there, in the middle of the work, in the middle of the noise, in the middle of the pain in your leg.
You don't have to escape your life to find God.
You just have to turn toward God in your life.
The other monks noticed. Visitors noticed. Here was a man who spent his days in the lowest work imaginable---who never got to sit in the chapel for hours of contemplation---and yet he seemed more at peace than anyone.
He'd found something they were all looking for.
And he'd found it in a kitchen.
So what did Brother Lawrence add to the world's spiritual imagination?
What did he give us that wasn't there before---or at least, wasn't said quite this way?
He gave us permission.
Permission to stop separating our lives into pieces. Sacred time and ordinary time. Holy work and mundane work. The place where God is and the place where God isn't.
Before Brother Lawrence---or really, alongside him, because he wasn't the only one thinking this way---there was this idea that if you wanted to get close to God, you had to withdraw. You had to leave the world behind. Go to a monastery. Sit in silence. Pray for hours. Clear away all the distractions of ordinary life.
And for some people, that path made sense. It still does.
But Brother Lawrence was saying something different. He was saying: most of you can't do that. Most of you have work to do. Meals to cook. Shoes to repair. Bodies that hurt. Lives that are loud and messy and full.
And that's okay.
Because God doesn't need you to escape all that to meet you.
God is in all that. Already. Waiting for you to notice.
It's such a simple idea. But it opened a door.
Suddenly, a mother kneading bread in her kitchen could be doing the same spiritual work as a monk in a chapel. A craftsman bent over his workbench could be praying just as truly as a priest at an altar.
Your life---exactly as it is, with all its noise and pain and endless tasks---could be a prayer.
After Brother Lawrence died, that little book of his letters and conversations started moving through the world. It got translated. Passed from hand to hand. Read by people who would never set foot in a monastery but who recognized something true in his words.
It influenced mystics and teachers across traditions. Quakers and Methodists and contemplatives of all kinds found something in it that resonated.
Because what Brother Lawrence had discovered wasn't unique to Christianity, really. It was something deeper.
The idea that the sacred isn't somewhere else. That presence matters more than ritual. That love transforms ordinary action into something holy.
You can see echoes of it in other traditions---the Zen monk washing dishes with full attention, the Sufi finding God in every moment, the yogi seeing the divine in all things.
Brother Lawrence didn't invent this understanding. But he lived it so simply, so humbly, in such an ordinary life, that he made it real for ordinary people.
He made it possible to believe that you didn't need anything special to find God.
You just needed to be where you were. Doing what you were doing. With your whole heart.
And that---that quiet, revolutionary idea---has been traveling through the world ever since.
We've inherited the idea that our lives are split in two.
There's our work life---the meetings, the emails, the tasks that pile up, the things we have to get done. And then there's our spiritual life---the part we're supposed to cultivate separately. The meditation we squeeze in before dawn. The prayers we say when we finally stop moving. The weekend retreat we promise ourselves we'll take someday.
And we exhaust ourselves trying to balance them. Trying to find time for the spiritual part while we're drowning in the ordinary part.
As if those eight or ten or twelve hours we spend working aren't really our lives. As if they're just... the stuff we have to get through to get to the real thing.
But here's what Brother Lawrence understood, what he lived in that hot kitchen with his aching leg.
There is no split.
Your spiritual life... is your life. All of it. The work you do. The people you care for. The meals you make. The problems you solve. The things that need doing.
When you approach them with intention---with love, with honesty, with your whole heart---they become prayer. Not metaphorically. Actually.
You can feel this understanding moving through the world, can't you? People sensing that the old divisions don't quite hold anymore. That there's something sacred in work done with integrity. Something meaningful in service to others. That we don't need to escape our lives to find purpose---we need to see our lives differently.
The meeting that requires patience? That's spiritual practice. The project that demands your best effort? That's spiritual practice. The conversation that needs kindness when you're tired? That's spiritual practice.
It's not about doing more. It's not about adding another layer of spiritual discipline to an already overwhelming schedule.
It's about seeing what's already there.
Brother Lawrence didn't transform the kitchen by leaving it. He transformed it by being fully present in it. By offering each moment---even the painful ones, especially the painful ones---as something that mattered. Something that connected him to something larger than himself.
And that possibility? It hasn't gone anywhere.
It's still here. Still available. Still true.
Your life---exactly as it is, with all its noise and demands and ordinary moments---can be a prayer.
You don't need a monastery. You don't need to become someone else or go somewhere else.
You just need to be where you are. Doing what you're doing. With your whole heart.
That's what Brother Lawrence found among the pots and pans.
And it's what's waiting for you, too. Right now. Right here.
So let me ask you something.
What part of your day feels furthest from sacred?
What's the thing you do that feels most ordinary, most mundane, most... not spiritual?
Maybe it's the commute. The dishes. The paperwork. The emails that never stop coming. The care that feels repetitive. The work that nobody notices.
The thing you just have to get through.
Now imagine---just for a moment---what would shift if you saw it differently. Not as something blocking you from your real life, but as your real life itself. As something that could be offered. That could matter.
I'm not talking about working harder. Or being more perfect. Or suddenly loving every tedious task.
Brother Lawrence's leg still hurt. The kitchen was still hot and loud. The work was still work.
But his attention changed. His intention changed.
He wasn't trying to escape what he was doing. He was trying to be fully present in it. To do it with love. To offer it as something that connected him to God, to meaning, to something beyond just getting through another day.
And that changed everything.
So what if you tried it? Just once. Just one ordinary task today.
What if you did it as if it mattered? As if you mattered? As if this moment---this exact, unremarkable moment---was holy?
Not because you're trying to be more spiritual.
But because maybe, just maybe, it already is.
Next time, I want to take you somewhere very different.
Fast forward two hundred years from Brother Lawrence's quiet kitchen. From that one man, talking to God while his hands were busy and his leg ached.
Chicago. 1893. The World's Columbian Exposition---a grand celebration of progress and industry and everything the modern world thought it could become.
And in the middle of all that noise and spectacle, something unprecedented happened.
Something the world had never seen before.
Religious leaders from every tradition you can imagine---Christians and Jews, Buddhists and Hindus, Muslims and Zoroastrians, voices from East and West and everywhere in between---gathered together in one place. Not to debate. Not to convert each other. But to speak. To listen. To see if they could find common ground.
They called it the World Parliament of Religions.
And the man who made it happen---the Presbyterian minister who had this audacious, impossible vision and somehow brought it to life---was Reverend John Henry Barrows.
Next time, we'll meet him. And we'll begin a short series exploring this remarkable moment when the world's spiritual traditions looked at each other face to face for the first time.
It planted seeds. Seeds that are still growing today.
But that's next time.
For now, remember what Brother Lawrence knew. The sacred isn't somewhere else. It's right here. In your hands. In your work. In this moment.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.