Finding God in the Kitchen…or Computer...or Café
Brother Lawrence found God in the kitchen. In the small, everyday moments he found God. In the everyday spaces of turning the cake in the pan, spoon in mixing bowl, and all the dirty dishes and tables to clean, in that, he found God. Maybe it's because he was looking for Her, because I know it’s not always the first place I look.
This 17th Century Lay Brother was born in a region not only blighted by poverty but traumatized as a frequent battle ground for the 30 years war that raged in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the battles for power that followed. He entered military service as a young man because he would be promised two meals a day (that’s what it means to volunteer when you don’t really have another way). He is assigned the duty of valet ,and I don’t know if that looks a lot like it does on Downton Abbey but he does say he was clumsy and well, a modern HR specialist might say, it just wasn’t a good fit. He leaves military service eventually with wounds inside and out, and he has a religious experience, an awakening moment. The thing I love about Brother Lawrence is his experience is more clarifying that spectacular. For me it feels more approachable then some of his fellow monastics and their visual extravaganzas that leave me wondering what other kind of medicinal products were baked into the monastic brownies. Brother Lawrence is incredibly approachable. He sees a tree, branches barren. It looks dead, we can imagine this with him, the branches fighting the winter winds and yet the roots run deep. He sees it as a image of grace, a promise that there is life to come, a season of fruitfulness, a season of buds and blossoms and leaves. The tree moves him from death to a promise of life, even if it looks unlikely.
With a determination for life, he joins a monastic community in Paris and waits for his assignment for the work he will be doing in the life of the community. And somehow the great sorting hat or the Abbot send him to the kitchen. That’s where he finds God and before we think, “Oh, its a French monastery,” and imagine him taking to the kitchen with the joy of Julia Child, he does not, he is not out to win a James Beard Award, and he is not blogging like the Pioneer Woman to make a living and a profit and a cute line of kitchen products. This is probably more like Kitchen Duty. My Grandpa speaks of kitchen duty from WWII Navy life, and it’s not something folks did for fun, it was mundane, mind numbing work, essential and viewed as easy, often made a form of punishment. Kitchen work never ends, people keep eating, cakes keep needing to be turned, the dishes and the tables need to be washed again and again and again. We know how much we have value this work when we call it women’s work, not much.
But there in the kitchen, at the bottom of the ladder, even the monastic ladder, Brother Lawrence finds God and he connects so deeply with God that other folks notice. Folks notice so much that important, powerful people begin to wonder what he is doing, how he has this much peace and compassion. I imagine his presence just radiating love and grace, it must have drawn people and bewildered them at the same time. He is suspicious of folks wanting to know more and one reverend Mother succeeds in learning from Brother Lawrence as they write to each other. He ultimately shares with the promise that she will burn his writings, she does not, and I, for one, am grateful for her pragmatic approach. Lawrence shares that he tried reading about prayer and spiritual practice but found this actually to be the practice that mattered to him. It changed him and it's not because he loved cooking, in fact at the start, he didn’t love it.
“This presence of God, though a bit painful in the beginning, if practiced faithfully, works secretly in the soul and produces marvelous effects and draws soon into it in abundance the graces of the Lord and leads it insensibly to the simple grace, that loving sight of God everywhere present, which is the most holy, the most solid, the easiest, the most efficacious manner of prayer” (Invitation to Christian Spirituality: An Ecumenical Anthology edited by John R. Tyson, p 317).
He didn’t love it but he practiced it. He “stayed close to God” he had a mantra, “My God, I am all yours,” “God of love, I love You with all my heart,” “Lord, make me according to Your heart,” and any such words that love may beget on the spur of the moment (316). And this kept him close to God. He would eventually feel like he could be centered in God even when he was in the midst of his every day work. Wash the dish, “My God, I am all yours.” Wash the dish, “God of love, I Love You with all my heart.” Wash the dish and think of God not the dish. Wash the dish and think of it as an act of love, not a dish. That’s how we found God, that’s why powerful folks noticed this man in the kitchen, he resonated God’s presence in the details.
"Nor is it needful that we should have great things to do. . . We can do little things for God; I turn the cake that is frying on the pan for love of him, and that done, if there is nothing else to call me, I prostrate myself in worship before him, who has given me grace to work; afterwards I rise happier than a king. It is enough for me to pick up but a straw from the ground for the love of God."
When we think of spiritual practices, we don’t often think of dishes and turning cakes and anything else that happens in a French monastery kitchen. I think we are inclined to think of meditations that sound smart and centering pray spaces with the lighting just right where we can sit on the floor, ring a singing bowl, enter silence, and then if you are like me, you wake up two hours later thinking, “Crap, I fell asleep again.” We often think spirituality is hard, and needs to be set apart, like we will be spiritual when we go on vacation or sign up for that class or get to yoga every day or every other day or once a month. I’m not suggesting spiritual growth is easy, but I am suggesting that maybe Brother Lawrence is on to something, it's a part of the everyday.
"Men invent means and methods of coming at God's love, they learn rules and set up devices to remind them of that love, and it seems like a world of trouble to bring oneself into the consciousness of God's presence. Yet it might be so simple. Is it not quicker and easier just to do our common business wholly for the love of him?”
Brother Lawrence makes the everyday sacred by his intention. He tuns the cake in love he washes the dish in love, he cleans in love, he mixes in love, everything is done in love and love is expressed. Perhaps you wash dishes and turn cakes or perhaps you send emails, go to meetings, type data, or answer calls. What would it look like, what would it feel like if every little thing was done in love. What is you pause before you start to type and said, "God of love, I love you with all my heart." What would it mean if in a meeting you stopped to think, "Lord, make me according to your heart." Would people start to wonder about you too? Would people find you centered even when surrounded by tasks and deep in the work? Details matter, every little detail matters, and the heart for our work matters.
May it be so, Amen.
More Resources:
https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/people/innertravelers/brother-lawrence.html
https://renovare.org/articles/an-habitual-sense-of-gods-presence
https://www.ccel.org/ccel/lawrence
Flunking Sainthood: A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray and Still Loving My Neighbor by Jana Riess (Chapter three is about Brother Lawrence but all of them are a delight)