brother lawrence | pull up a chair

December 26, 2025

the holy hush of the morning after

sometimes, in the holy hollows of the morning after, the wonder of Christmas drifts deeper into my soul than in the rush of days before. it’s as if snowflakes, the sorts that tumble laconically from above, come down, down, down. quietly. contentedly.

it’s my own hushed holy day.

as is this morning. the old clock is ticking, the fridge is humming as it churns to keep the leftover bits of beast and yorkshire pudding from curdling (or worse), the furnace has just kicked on. and, best of all, the beds upstairs are full. there is no more sumptuous bounty to me than the fullness of beds with lumps under the covers, lumps that rise and fall in respiration. it’s knowing that the dreams of those i love most dearly are all whirling under the one same roof, drafty as it is.

if prayer is practicing the presence of God, as little brother lawrence, the patron saint of pots and pans, long ago taught, then this morning is a prayer. and i am doing the dear little french monk one better: i am not practicing, i am believing. as surely as i fill my lungs with breath, i am sure the presence of something holy, the alpha and omega of Love, is here in this old house.

i’ve been watching it play out, as last night the one i used to call “my little one” all but pulled me away from the sink and plopped me firmly on the couch, so he could take up the last of the dishes, scraping away the bits of feast left behind, as he sensed, from across the Christmasy room, that i was on my last gasp, and could do with a superhero to swoop in to my rescue. that boy (who’d already cooked the beast to perfection, and zhoozhed up the horseradish sauce to picture-perfect perfection) is living, breathing empathy, and benevolence should be his middle name.

i’ve been listening to it, as the sounds of two boys, brothers born with eight years between, plotted late into the night, and their whispers climbed the stairs, rounded the bend, and slithered under the bedroom door to my ears. i know, from the rise and fall of their voices, and the unchecked bursts of laughter, that the distance between their years is slowly, slowly, melting away. and in the deepest, deepest chamber of my heart, i know they will always have each other.

i’ve sensed it, as my mama nestled her head onto my shoulder as she hugged me goodnight, a tenderness that blooms between us these days as never before.

i was wrapped in it, the presence of God, as i sat at my end of the table, watching the postures and gestures of family feasting: heads leaning in to share a retort or rejoinder; arms reaching for bottles or bowls, and serving another; everyone at once shaking with laughter, or knowing the punch lines to stories told again and again over the years.

and so this morning, still alone in the silence, i will sit inside this prayer, and pull it tight round my shoulders, and whisper a holy amen, a declaration proclaiming “it is true” or “so be it,” a hebrew word shared by all the abrahamic religions, derived from the hebrew for faith, emunah (אמונה).

faith, indeed. faith felt real, spelled out in quotidian stuff of one old house, filled this morning with four blessed souls who live and breathe and laugh out loud and sometimes share secrets and dry each others’ tears and make mistakes and say i’m sorry and reach across the table, every time, and squeeze the hand and share the look that says “i love you now, i have loved you always, and ours is a love without end, a love that will vault into eternity.”

amen.

and thank you, holy holy God, born anew each day in each of our most blessed hearts. may it be so….

how and when have you felt the Holy Presence in this whirl of wild days?

i am leaving you two little Christmasy gifts, a beautiful blessing from christine valters paintner, the dancing monk of the abbey of the arts….and a breathtaking tale from an herbalist, eco-therapist, and author named brigit anna mcNeill….

first, the blessing….

A Christmas Blessing

This blessing dances at the doorway
of light and dark, knows both as sacred:
fertile womb space, miracle of blooming.

This blessing breathes
through those moments of labor
when you too birth the holy
into this fragile, luminous, hurting world

as Mary did two thousand years ago,
eyes wide, hands gripping,
waters breaking like crashing waves
of the primordial sea
sending a prayer through time
that echoes still,
pulsing like starlight
in an enormous sky.

This blessing rests a hand
on the back of the lonely
  disoriented
    lost
      hungry
        despairing
          persecuted
to say your humanity is not an obstacle
but a threshold, to remind you
that the wound is a portal
through which your gifts pour forth,
that raw ache you feel
is the terrible wonder of being alive
calling you into a communion
of veil-lifters, catching glimpses
of a world where the greeds
and horrors are turned upside down.

This blessing comes as an Annunciation:
the world needs *you* wild edge-dweller
where the wind cries out,
where the stone endures,

your hands a bowl,
your heart a cave,
your eyes a mirror,
bringing a drink of water,
an ancient song,
a shimmering light
reflecting all that we miss
in days of rushing.

This blessing creates a resting place
to gather your strength
between the diastole and systole
of the heart,
to learn to trust
in roses and pomegranate,
in sparrows and dragonflies,
in the electricity of the storm.

This blessing says:
know this birthing is not
once and for all
but again and again,
erupting like moonlight between
bare branches,
like a hearth fire lit for
all who have been exiled.
This blessing calls you home.

~ Christine Valters Paintner from the forthcoming A Book of Everyday Blessings: 100 Prayers for Dancing Monks, Artists, and Pilgrims

and this, a link to the story “The Wild Teacher in the Night,” by Brigit Anna McNeill

the story begins thusly….

There are lessons you can only learn when the world goes dark enough to hear your own bones. In recent evenings, as heartbreak presses its tremors against my ribs and illness narrows the space inside my body, I step out of the granite cottage and into the night. Not searching for signs or answers, just stepping into a different kind of knowing.

merry blessed morning after. may you find a Holy Presence settling in like snowflakes from heaven this day….

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June 27, 2025

incurably circuitous

my favorite reading nook in all the world. o’connell’s dairy farm in drumellihy, county clare

i tried. i truly did. it seems i’ve, well, failed. if failed is the verdict we choose to put to the determined effort to concentrate, to focus, to linearly follow page after page.

instead i am a jackrabbit of a reader. i cannot, for the life of me, trace a straight line. one minute i’m attempting ulysses, starting with an easy reader after traipsing the trail of leonard bloom through dublin. another minute i’ve decided pope francis’s slim collected works, against war: building a culture of peace, is the page i need to put to heart. then it’s onto raising hare, a love story so gentle i found it the perfectly prescribed balm in a week when bombs fell and mistruths fired right, left, and sideways.

i know full well that i set out to stick to one and only one tome till i—or summer—came to its end. etty hillesum was going to hold my attention. but my attention didn’t listen. it was distracted. as it so often is.

my irish poet penpal tadhg described rabbit holes, the literary divots i fall into, in charming irish terms not so long back. he makes every word he writes and utters sound poetic or profound, and he fails not here (his description of how it was that my last name leapt out and caught his attention during a morning’s meditation):

“Like the early Irish monks who doodled mystical nature poems on the margins of sacred manuscripts, I was distracted by the spelling of your name and wandered off, as those monks were wont to do (excuse the arrogant comparison), down a boreen (from Irish bóthairín, diminuitive of bóthar, meaning ‘road’, from the Irish ‘bó’, ‘cow’. A meandering pathway made by a cow).”

i am now—especially after strolling country lanes pocked with aftermath of bovine traipsing—inclined to consider my rabbit holes in more bucolic irish terms, and think of them as my boreens, meandering pathways made by my cow mind.

my boreen, in physical form, looks not bucolic at all. in fact, it’s rather a beehive of possible distraction, all piled and teetering hither and yon:

i cannot for the life of me go straight.

besides gulping down my friend tadhg’s glorious meditations on the stations of the cross, i found my nose deep in raising hare (see last week’s mention), and am tucking in my overnight bag practice of the presence, a glorious little tome of translations from one of my favorite saintly souls ever, brother lawrence, whom i think of as the patron saint of pots and pans, though in fact he’s more oft referred to as the friar of pots and pans, and ultimately the friar of amour (love). he’s the humble little monk who toiled fifty years in a monastery, forty of those in the steamy kitchen, and thirty as a sandal repairer (monks wear through their soles on the road to polishing their souls). he described himself, famously, as “a clumsy oaf who broke everything” in his early attempt at being a hermit, and then a footman. when at last he found the monastery at 74 rue de vaugirard, he found his peace and his place.

and in him, i find mine: the gentle, humble soul who finds grace and God in the most quotidian of daily tasks, and spends his hours in the company and comfort of the Author of It All. even in the steamy monastery kitchen.

what’s notable is that dear brother lawrence hated kitchen work, but in his biographer’s writings it’s told that he did it “with the greatest love possible.” and that his practice of the presence of God in the most ordinary of moments, stirring a kettle, pulling trays of bread from the oven, “grew like dew, or mist on mountains.”

the translation i’ve just found, by carmen acevedo butcher, is extraordinary in the fullest measure, and might be the soothingest read yet of this hot summer.

the little monk’s spiritual maxims, work gently, be humble and authentic, includes this boreen (meandering cow path, remember?) on the highest reach of the soul, writing that in true spiritual union:

“the soul is not asleep as in the other unions, but finds herself powerfully stirred. its activity is more intense than fire, and brighter than the sun when not obscured by cloud. we can, however, misunderstand this feeling, for it is not a simple expression of the heart, like saying, ‘my God, i love you with all my heart,’ or other similar words. no, it is an i don’t know what, a je ne sais quoi of the soul, a something indescribable, loving, and very simple, that carries the soul and nudges her to love, respect, and embrace God with a tenderness that cannot be expressed, and that only experience can conceive.”

to this indescribableness, i dive deep. turning page after page. in no particular order. but trusting i’ll find the grace i seek.

may your distractions, too, carry you to lofty heights and voluminous depths. what distracted you this week?

before i go, and scurry off to a writerly retreat at my dear friend katie’s on the lake, i am sending love without end to my beloved friend andrea whose birth we celebrate tomorrow, and who is closing the book on one fine chapter of her life on the same day. i love her dearly. her wit, her hilarity, her unconditional and undemanding love. she is like no other.

there are a few brother lawrence books out there, but the one i’ve just procured and cannot recommend more heartily is carmen acevedo butcher’s, from broadleaf books. you can find it here.

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March 8, 2013

the barefoot monk and his God of pots & pans

dispatch from 02139 (in which we meet a 17th-century monk with wisdom for the ages….)

the snows have been tumbling since the cloak of twilight fell last eve. a short pause here and there, but mostly tumbling, tumbling. with little sound but the shooshing of slush as it spits out from under thirsty tires on the street below, i’m tucked inside, home alone, curled up with a tiny blue slip of a book.

i’d not heard of the book, nor its author, until just a week or so ago, when a wise woman of letters likened something i’d written to the musings of brother lawrence, he with his God of pots and pans.

she mentioned this in passing, as if of course i knew the fellow. i did not.

no more need be whispered. i stood intrigued. and i set out to unearth this humble fellow who stumbled on the Holy amid the clangings of his monastery kitchen, not long after the pilgrims pulled ashore at plymouth.

i marched straight to the nearest epicenter of literary procurement — aka, the cambridge public library — and there i found the shelves were hollowed of brother lawrence and his sole literary offering, “practice of the presence of God,” a line i’d heard over the years — been struck by, really — though i never knew its origins. nor ever thought to wonder.

my friendly librarian managed to scrounge up a solitary copy from the bowels of some far-flung college archives. she dispatched it swiftly, and it came into my possession just days ago.

this white-freckled morn of mounding drifts offered the perfect occasion for making its acquaintance.

so down i plopped. and here i share the tale.

no bigger than a folded-in-half index card, a mere 80 yellowed pages, the title etched in gold gothic letters across a navy canvas, it’s a wisp of a volume. weightless as the wing of a dove. a book that might get swallowed whole at the bottom of a satchel, where it nearly did get lost this week.

yet it packs a mighty wallop.

it’s a humble collection of conversations and letters of one barefoot monk who, back in 1666, spilled the wisdoms soaked up in its now fragile pages.

the gentle fellow took the name “brother lawrence” upon entering the monastery of the barefooted carmelites in paris, not long after an uncanny conversion that came one winter’s day, staring at a tree, dry and leafless. seems the good brother absorbed the stark emptiness, but in that way that saints and wise souls do, he saw beyond it.

he imagined the possible.

as is written in the six-itty-bitty-page preface: the soon-to-be brother lawrence stood before the naked tree “reflecting on what a change God would make in it with the returning spring.”

and thus he was hit, head-on. the surging sense of the immensity of the Holy One all but knocked him down, realizing the life force, the Beautiful that would burst from the Barren.

again, from the preface: “it may seem strange so affecting a sense of Divine attributes should have been occasioned by so common an incident as seeing a tree, dry and leafless in the winter, and by reflecting what a change God would make in it with the returning spring. this may seem strange; but, in fact, it is rather to be wondered at, that others are not affected as he was, and that the little miracles of nature make so little impression upon us.”

and so, a little miracle of nature led the man, born nicholas herman of lorraine, to the great stone monastery in paris around the year 1626, when he was but 18.

there, brother lawrence, who described himself as “a great awkward fellow who broke everything,” (indeed, so kindred a spirit is my newfound bumbling ally, ol’ larry) found himself dispatched to the kitchen, “to which he had naturally a great aversion.” for some 15 years, he was cook to the society of monks.

amid the pots and pans, he established a profound yet simple spiritual practice: “i began to live as if there was none but He and i in the world,” he writes in the first of 14 letters pressed into the pages of his book.

in his second letter, he writes: “i make it my business only to persevere in His holy Presence…an habitual, silent, and secret conversation of the soul with God.”

in other words, imagine that God is always near, dangling over your shoulder, tucked in the pocket of your dungarees. no need for piety, or gilded cathedral walls. no need for practiced vespers, or slipping away from the cacophony of the everyday. brother lawrence’s is the God of the here and now, especially when it’s messy.

“it is not necessary for being with God to be always at church,” he says. “we make an oratory of our heart, wherein to retire from time to time, to converse with Him in meekness, humility, and love…”

from the tenth letter: “He is always near you and with you; leave Him not alone. You would think it rude to leave a friend alone, who came to visit you; why then must God be neglected? do not then forget Him.”

and in perhaps brother lawrence’s most oft-quoted line, and one which i’ll now carry to the cookstove, especially in the harried half-hour when tummies are growling, and what’s in the skillet spews coils of smoke:

“it was observed, that in the greatest hurry of the business of the kitchen, he still preserved his recollection and heavenly-mindedness. he was never hasty nor loitering, but did each thing in its season, with an even composure and tranquility of spirit. ‘the time of business,’ said he, ‘does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clutter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, i possess God in as great tranquility as if i were upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament.’”

surely, i was meant to know the barefooted brother. a fellow as likely to be thunderstruck by the lifeless silhouette of woods in winter, a good soul brought to bended knee by delphinium on the brink of brilliant blue. a reluctant cook who carries on heavenly discourse while the spaghetti scorches in the pot.

who, pray tell, inspired you this week?

and before i go, a few more lines from brother lawrence:

“…we ought not be weary of doing little things for the love of God, Who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.”

“our only business was to love and delight ourselves in God.”

“…his prayer was nothing else but a sense of the presence of God…”

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