Mikuláš Hermann – later brother Lawrence of the Resurrection – was born in 1614. In his youth, he was enlisted in the Thirty Years' War, participated in pillaging and looting, and escaped the gallows. Due to an injury, he returned home, but both physically and mentally, he healed only slowly. In 1640, he entered the Carmelite monastery in Paris. Here, memories of his military life kept returning to him, haunted by fear. He spent ten years in anxiety and unrest, without experiencing relief in prayer or through the compassion of another person. Only later was he granted to grasp his suffering as a sign of his great love for God and to accept his life's path.
“The fear that I do not belong to God as I would like, my former sins that I always had before my eyes, and the great graces with which God favored me were the reason and source of all my troubles. Throughout this time, I often fell and quickly rose again. It seemed to me that creatures, reason, and even God were against me and that only faith was on my side. Sometimes I was tormented by the thought that I was presumptuous and that I wanted to reach a place where others only arrive with difficulty too quickly and easily; at other times, I thought that I was surely damned and had no hope of salvation. Just when I thought I would live out my days in this confusion and unrest (which, however, did not diminish my trust in God, but only served to increase my faith), I experienced a sudden transformation. And my soul, until then confused, felt a deep inner peace, as if it had found its center and place of rest.”
(Adapted from the book Basic Themes of Carmel Spirituality;
the quote in quotation marks is from the correspondence of Lawrence of the Resurrection /1614–1691/)
