Fénelon on the Soul That Cannot Surrender
⏱ 11 min read
You know you should surrender, and you cannot, and the shame of the cannot is making the whole thing worse. You have read the books. You have heard the sermons. You have prayed the prayer, more than once, in good faith, and the thing in you that needs to give the yes will not give it. The will sits there, the way a small animal sits when it has decided not to move, and no amount of theological argument can persuade it. And underneath the refusal, quietly accumulating, is the shame — that you are the kind of Christian who, after all these years, cannot do the one thing every contemplative book asks her to do.
François Fénelon, writing in seventeenth-century France as a spiritual director to women in the court who arrived at his study with exactly this stuck place, would tell you — without scolding, without surprise, with the patient kindness of a man who had directed many such souls — that the soul who cannot yet surrender is not failing. She is simply at the beginning of a real surrender rather than the middle of a false one. The book where he names this most carefully is Spiritual Progress, his collected letters of direction. The Stilling Waves Prayer Journal for Women is the 140-day companion practice this essay is the opening pages of — a place where the small daily naming can replace the failed grand gesture. For now — read slowly. The slow read of fenelon when you cant surrender begins, gently, with the recognition that the cannot is itself the first honest material the surrender will be built out of.
Fénelon’s first move with the resistant soul is not to argue her out of the resistance. It is to slow her down. The shame, he understood, was a faster pace than the surrender could happen at. The soul who is hurrying herself toward a yes she cannot give is making the cannot worse. The spiritual director, by contrast, slows the soul, sits beside her, and asks the small simple question that the hurry has been hiding: Why can you not surrender? What, exactly, is in your hands? The surrender begins, in Fénelon’s hand, not with the grand release but with the patient naming of what is being held.
The first passage: when you shall have become calm
The line where Fénelon names the practical first instruction to the soul that cannot yet act is this one:
“When you shall have become calm, then do in a spirit of recollection, what you shall perceive to be nearest the will of God respecting you.”
— François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
Read it twice. Notice how careful the sentence is.
When you shall have become calm. Not immediately. Not force yourself. Not if you really meant it, you would surrender now. Fénelon does not require the calm before the calm is there. He acknowledges, plainly, that the soul cannot act well from the inside of agitation, and that the first work is not the act of surrender but the slow recovery of calm in which a surrender could even be honestly considered. The implicit instruction is the one the resistant soul most needs to hear: do not try to surrender from the inside of the panic. The panic itself is the first thing the spiritual direction addresses. The surrender comes later, in a soul that has been quieted enough to know what she is even saying yes to.
In a spirit of recollection. The seventeenth-century word recollection is the contemplative term for the inward gathering of the scattered attention — the slow bringing of the soul’s many running anxieties back into a single quiet awareness of the presence of God. Fénelon assumes the resistant soul is scattered. The thing she cannot surrender is not the only thing on her mind. The fear of surrendering, the shame of not surrendering, the memory of past failed surrenders, the inner critic, the prayer that has not been answered, the future she is bracing for — all of these are running at once. The surrender cannot happen in a scattered soul because the soul does not know, in the scattering, what she is actually being asked to release. The first work is recollection. Bring the soul back to one point. Sit with Him in the quiet. Then, from inside the gathered calm, do what you perceive to be nearest the will of God.
What you shall perceive to be nearest. Notice the modesty of the instruction. Not do the full surrender now. Not give Him everything. Do what you perceive to be nearest. The next small inward act. The smallest available yes. Fénelon does not ask the soul who cannot surrender the whole thing to surrender the whole thing. He asks her to do the one small nearest piece, in a quiet recollected moment, and then to come back the next day for the next small nearest piece. The surrender, properly understood, is built out of dozens of small nearests, walked one at a time across months. The grand gesture the resistant soul cannot give is not the one she is being asked for. The small nearest piece is. And the small nearest piece is almost always available, even to a soul that cannot give the whole.
The somatic — locating the small nearest piece
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it.
Sit somewhere quiet. Let both feet press flat against the floor. Bring to mind the thing you cannot surrender. Without trying to surrender it, just let it be present in the room. Notice where the body is bracing — likely in the chest, the jaw, the shoulders, the hands. Let one slow inhale come in. On the exhale, slower than the inhale, ask yourself a small honest question: What is the smallest piece of this that I could let Him hold tonight? Not the whole. The smallest available corner of it. The fear of the doctor’s appointment, but not the diagnosis. The grief of one specific Sunday afternoon, but not the years of the loss. The worry about the next conversation, but not the whole relationship. The smallest nearest piece.
When the small piece names itself, let one inward sentence arise on the next exhale: Lord, just this small piece, just for tonight. That is the act. It is not the surrender of the whole. It is the surrender of the nearest. The body will likely soften by a fraction. The chest will open a small amount. The smallest nearest piece, given honestly, is the territory the rest of the surrender will eventually grow out of. Stay with the softening for half a minute. Then continue reading.
The second passage: a fidelity unsustained by delights
The second passage Fénelon sets next to the first — and the one that names the shame the resistant soul is carrying most directly — is from the letter on the soul who does not feel God:
“God does not call you by any lively emotions, and I heartily rejoice at it, if you will but remain faithful; for a fidelity, unsustained by delights, is far purer, and safer from danger, than one accompanied by those tender feelings, which may be seated too exclusively in the imagination.”
— François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
Slow down at I heartily rejoice at it.
This is the sentence that, more than any other in the book, reframes the shame of the soul who cannot surrender. Fénelon, who saw many women whose surrenders were emotional, has noticed that the surrender that comes accompanied by lively emotions is not, in fact, the most reliable surrender. It is often the surrender of the imagination rather than the surrender of the will. The woman who weeps her yes on retreat and then quietly resumes her old grip three weeks later has given a surrender that was seated too exclusively in the imagination. The yes was real to her at the moment of the weeping. The will did not actually move.
The soul who cannot weep her yes, who cannot summon the lively emotion, who sits stuck and dry and unsurrendering, is — Fénelon says — in a purer place than she knows. The dryness is not the absence of grace. The dryness is the absence of the emotional packaging in which false surrenders are most easily delivered. The yes that the dry soul eventually gives, when it comes, will come from the will rather than from the imagination, and it will take in a way the emotional yes does not. A fidelity, unsustained by delights, is far purer.
This does not mean the dryness is comfortable. It means the dryness is not what the shame says it is. The shame says: I cannot surrender because something is wrong with me. Fénelon, in this passage, says: You cannot surrender in the emotional manner because grace is sparing you a surrender that would not hold. The yes that is being slowly formed in you, in the dry, in the quiet, in the inability — that yes, when it comes, will be made of more durable material.
This is the consolation hidden in the inability. The cannot is not a sign of failure. It is, in the patient hand of the spiritual director, often a sign of a deeper work being done — the slow formation of a yes that is not dependent on the weather of feeling and that, exactly because of the dryness, will not blow off in the first cold week.
The daily slow practice this kind of formation requires is what the Prayer Journal for Women was built to hold. Not a journal that demands the lively emotion. A journal that holds the dry yes, the small nearest piece, the patient daily presence with Him in the place the surrender is still being slowly built. The 140-day shape is deliberate. The surrender of the resistant soul is not a one-evening yes. It is a slow accumulation of small honest sittings in the presence of God, and the journal is one shape that accumulation can take.
(The sibling essays in this Fénelon cluster — What Fénelon Meant by Abandonment to God’s Will, Fénelon on the Difference Between Abandonment and Resignation, and Why Fénelon Said Self-Will Hides in the Holiest Things — walk the surrounding angles. Because the Fénelon cluster overlaps the Murray hub at the centre, What Andrew Murray Meant by Absolute Surrender and Andrew Murray on the Surrendered Will walk the same territory from the other side of the contemplative library.)
What the resistant soul is actually being asked to do
Hold the two passages together. The first names the patient first instruction — become calm, recollect, do the small nearest piece. The second names the consolation that frees the soul from the shame — the dryness is purer; the yes being slowly formed in you will, when it comes, hold. Together they form Fénelon’s quiet teaching for the soul who cannot yet surrender: the cannot is the first honest material. Name it. Sit with it. Give Him the smallest available nearest piece. Trust that the yes being formed in the dry is more durable than the yes that is being demanded in the panic.
The resistant soul is not being asked to perform a surrender she is not yet capable of. She is being asked to come to Him in the place where the inability is, daily, in small honest sittings, and to let the yes form slowly out of the sittings rather than out of any heroic decision. The shame, in Fénelon’s hand, is recognised as the enemy of the surrender, not its prerequisite. The faster the soul shames herself for not surrendering, the longer the surrender takes. The slower she lets herself sit with Him in the cannot, the sooner the cannot quietly becomes a can.
This is patient work. It takes weeks and months. The shame will recur. The cannot will recur. The small nearest piece will, on some days, be even smaller than yesterday’s. The honest daily return is itself the surrender. The grand gesture is not the goal. The slow accumulation of small honest presences is. And in the slow accumulation, the will quietly does what no amount of forced effort could persuade it to do: it softens, in the presence of the One who has been patient with it the whole time, and the yes the soul could not summon at the start arrives, on some unremarkable evening months later, almost without ceremony.
The line worth keeping near the page
If you take only one sentence from Fénelon into the week ahead, take this one:
“When you shall have become calm, then do in a spirit of recollection, what you shall perceive to be nearest the will of God respecting you.”
Write it small. Put it where the cannot will find it — by the bed, on the inside cover of the journal, near the kitchen window. The question is not whether you can give the whole yes tonight. The question is whether you can let yourself become calm enough to perceive the small nearest piece, and then give that. Your job is not to overcome the inability. Your job is to come, again, into His presence in the place the inability lives, and let the slow work of formation happen at the pace He chooses. (Stilling Waves Press is, in time, hoping to bring Fénelon’s letters back into a slow contemplative edition; for now the essays in this Fénelon library are the working library that reprint will be built on.)
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