Nicholas Herman was born around 1614 in Hériménil, in the Lorraine region of what is now northeastern France. Little is known of his early years beyond his own account of a winter scene—a bare tree stripped of its leaves—that struck him, suddenly and without elaboration, with a vivid sense of God's providence and care. He served as a soldier and later as a footman before entering the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Paris around 1640, where he spent the remainder of his life as a lay brother under the name Lawrence of the Resurrection.
His world was one of religious war, theological controversy, and the competing spiritual currents of seventeenth-century France, where Jansenism and Quietism each pressed hard questions about grace, effort, and the interior life. Lawrence stood apart from these debates not through formal argument but through simplicity. He worked for many years in the monastery kitchen, and later in the sandal-repair shop, occupations he accepted as the unambiguous site of his devotion.
What Lawrence taught, and what was gathered after his death in the slim volume known as *The Practice of the Presence of God*, is the discipline of attending to God in every moment and every task—not through extraordinary states of prayer but through habitual, gentle recollection. His letters and the conversations recorded by his superior, Joseph de Beaufort, describe a soul that sought to make no distinction between designated times of prayer and the noise of a busy kitchen. "The time of business," he wrote, "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."
He died in Paris in 1691, and his modest record of an ordinary life ordered toward continual communion has since become one of the most widely read works of Christian devotion across denominational lines.