Cheese rolls and Brother Lawrence in the monastery kitchen

Hands peeling potatioes

»The good old days! Back then, everything was pure and harmonious, and not as hectic as it is today...«

Pretty girls, barely 17, dance a ring around the maypole. Happy, well-educated children in clean clothes play laughing and singing happily on flower-strewn meadows, with the Alps and their snow-capped peaks in the background. And the stream doesn't know where to put all the trout, salmon and colorful pebbles that eager children's hands pile up to form dams. In the monastery, skilled scribes copy the most wondrous, valuable books in artistic calligraphy; Goethe writes Faust, and everyone is content with themselves and the world. Yes, yes, the good old days, when everyone still knew their place!

And then you look out, don't you? At hectic streets, at subtly frustrated and annoyed human faces hurrying to the next appointment. At concrete madness and noise. At honking, annoyed drivers and into the careworn faces of the overworked population. Disappointed faces, frightened, hunted faces. You hear the news that hurts your ears and even more your heart. You realize how your own values are going down the drain and your zest for life is being lost in the hustle and bustle of life, in the constant pressure to perform, in the demands of adulthood.

We all have a tendency to glorify and romanticize, especially when times get hard, demanding and somehow hopeless. What has life not promised to be? But where is the life between mountains of laundry, job, family conflicts and an increasing disintegration of social structures? We rush past our lives and only occasionally catch a glimpse of what might be possible.

Last year I wrote a book. In the run-up to it, the idea seemed totally romantic to me, and to be honest, I'm glad I didn't know what to expect. Romanticization elevates us. It drives us to live ideals. And it sweeps all mountains, stumbling blocks and obstacles out of the way with a vigorous 'nothing can stop this! We want to have an ideal! And everything that stands in the way is simply not real, not wanted, not genuine.

But is it that simple?

Or does it take more to really live hope, vision and ideals?

One of my favorite personalities is the French friar Brother Lawrence. He became famous solely because at some point someone came up with the idea of publishing his pastoral letters. And in his time he was known because he radiated a joy that was incomprehensible.

Brother Lawrence lived, as the name easily suggests, in a Catholic monastery. Whether and if, how much this life was his conscious decision, we do not know. It is questionable whether he always wanted to go to the monastery. Even there, he seems not to have been much more useful than peeling potatoes. And well: at that time, some son – usually the one with a disability or the last one without land and goods – always ended up in the monastery in a roundabout way. Brother Lawrence is described by contemporaries as clumsy, awkward, somehow not quite together. He is neither a religious hero nor a popular preacher. But he found something that set him apart: he found joy in God, yes, you could even say he cuddled with God. Outwardly, this man was nothing special: neither handsome nor successful, no warrior nor second Casanova, no businessman or even abbot. No: he peeled potatoes, for quite a long time and over and over again. For everyone in the monastery. Every day. Mountains of potatoes. The monastery kitchen will at least have been warm, warmer than average, because of the fire – and thus more pleasant than the scribes' rooms, which were so cold that novices and monastery schoolgirls complained in their letters that their feet were frostbitten and their fingers were stiff.

Brother Lawrence is the romanticized ideal of the mystic, the charismatic par excellence. And I think from a distance, with a healthy dose of romantic idealization, I understand that. He felt God. He loved God. He lived in the presence of God. He thought about God day and night. He was content to be a simple gatekeeper in the house of God. What he found was immeasurable: closeness, hope, joy, wisdom, peace and meaning. What he didn't find was recognition, success, significance, at least not in his lifetime. His life was a hard one, full of privation, strict rules, poverty and humility. And yet, it was precisely in this that he found God.

But what do cheese rolls have to do with it?

Well, it is my impulse for you to think about how you can find God in an everyday life that may not live up to the grand vision: Do you find God digging in the garden bed? Baking cheese rolls? Do you find his presence in small, unseen gestures of service? In your everyday life, when the sun reminds you that the storm is raging only within you?

I often find God in such moments. When I wrote Hybrid Hearts, I was like in a monastery cell. And there was no end to it: the social isolation. The hours at my desk. What was planned as a rather light book became a theological journey. And along the way, God made me one of the least: with a helper job, with little income. With hours in the field, praying, wrestling, laughing, crying. He took away all external help and threw me at himself. And when I look back today, I say: It was this feeling of being taken out that brought me the closest to God.

How often did I want to finally get out into the world?

I'll let you in on a secret: I'm out again, sent out, back from seclusion. And often I long for that intimacy, for that absolute, undisturbed closeness to God.

So, just as Brother Lawrence found it without striving, simply by doing what fell at his feet, just as I took on the challenge of surrendering to the prescribed silence and doing what I had to do: day in, day out, for hours on end, you might want to try it too. Because, let's be honest, no, there is no romanticized reality.

But there are windows through which the birds chirp. And the more consciously you hear them in the noise of the world, the closer you come to God.

And whether or not he brings you success – well, what he sees as success is different from what we understand by it. Often it is the small, somewhat clumsy, left-behind, insignificant little people who experience the greatest blessings.

Much love.

Sibylle.

• Try to do everything you do for Jesus. To do with Jesus. To cast upon him. And accept everything he gives you. And cuddle with him. Like Brother Lawrence. How does that sound?