Fénelon on Why God Allows Dryness
⏱ 11 min read
God feels gone, and you are trying to figure out what you did wrong. The trying has been quiet — nobody at church knows, nobody at home has been told the full shape of it — but it has been running underneath every prayer for weeks, every chapter you have opened, every chair you have sat down in. The dryness is real, and your first instinct has been to search yourself for the fault that must have caused it. François Fénelon, writing in Spiritual Progress to a soul who had brought him exactly this complaint, did not search her conscience with her. He told her, gently, that the dryness was not an accident, not a punishment, and not always a sign that anything was wrong. The Stilling Waves Dry Season Devotional carries this same patient counsel into a daily companion, for the soul who is in the dryness now and needs a steady hand for the inside of it.
Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose private letters of direction were collected, after his death, into the volume we know as Spiritual Progress, wrote with the assumption that the dryness was part of every serious soul’s path. The contemplative tradition he stood inside had a long vocabulary for it — aridity, the dark night, the absence of consolations — and that vocabulary was not pessimistic. It was simply accurate. The dry stretch arrives, in the lives of women who have been faithful, without warning and often without obvious cause, and the older masters knew it. Fénelon’s pastoral concern was that the modern Christian, having lost the older vocabulary, was reading the dryness as evidence of her failure rather than as the country the deeper soul was being walked through. The dryness, in his reading, is God’s tool, not God’s absence. The whole of his pastoral work on the question is the slow rotation of his reader from the first reading to the second.
This is the first article in our Trials cluster — the long series, drawn from Fénelon’s letters, for the soul who is walking through the kind of trial his pastoral wisdom was, more than anything else, built for.
The first passage — the fidelity that is not built on the lively feeling
Fénelon, in Spiritual Progress, gave the sentence that the dry-season soul most needs to read carefully, because it overturns the most common reading of the dryness in one line.
“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
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
The line worth keeping near the page is a fidelity, unsustained by delights, is far purer. Fénelon is writing to a woman who has reported, with some distress, that the warm feelings of God she once had are no longer present. She has read the loss as evidence that something has gone wrong with her faith. Fénelon, with characteristic gentleness, reads it differently. The loss of the lively emotions is not the failure of her faith. It is the purification of it. The faith built underneath the feelings — unsustained by delights — is the kind that survives weather. The faith built on the feelings was vulnerable to weather all along, and the weather has come.
The contemplative French school, of which Fénelon was the gentlest voice, understood the dry stretch as the slow stripping away of what the older masters called consolations — the felt warmth, the easy prayer, the sense of God close at the elbow. The stripping was not cruelty. It was the slow building of a faith that did not need the consolations to keep going. Fénelon’s instruction to his reader, in this passage, is essentially diagnostic. If your faith is continuing without the delight, that is not the failure of the faith. That is the purer faith arriving. The dryness God allows is the slow purification of the soul’s dependence — from a dependence on the felt sense of Him to a dependence on Him directly, beneath the feelings, where the trust can be unshakeable.
This is the first answer to the question. Why does God allow dryness? Because the faith that survives without the consolations is the faith that holds for the rest of the life, and the dryness is what builds it. Not as punishment. Not as test. As the slow work of making the soul’s relationship to Him no longer dependent on the soul’s weather. (For the wider letter on the inside of this stretch, the bridge article feeling spiritually dry — a letter for the long silence walks the dry season as it actually feels, and when you feel spiritually dry — the practice for the year God goes quiet holds the year-long daily companion for it.)
The somatic — for the body that has been carrying the dryness
Pause here. The dryness has not lived only in the prayer life. It has lived in the body. The chest has been heavier for months. The breath has been working at the surface, because the deep breath is what the body takes when the soul feels held, and the soul has not felt held for a while. The shoulders have been pulled in slightly, in the small bracing that comes from carrying a thing you cannot name in front of people who do not know you are carrying it. The body has been doing the work of the dry season as much as the soul has.
Sit somewhere quiet. Both feet flat against the floor. Let the shoulders lower by a small amount — not to perform anything, only to give the body one minute of not being the carrier of the weight by itself. Let the jaw release. Take one slow inhale, not deep, only slow, and let the breath travel down past the chest into the lower belly. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale, and at the bottom of the exhale, let the body be held by what it is sitting on — the chair, the floor, the bed. The chair has been holding you the whole time. The dryness has not made the chair stop holding you. Stay there for a minute.
The slow exhale is the body’s first small piece of the work the dry stretch is doing. The breath, lowered, teaches the body that the depth is still reachable — even in the dryness, even in the absence of the felt sense of God. The dryness is not in the chair. The dryness is not in the body’s ability to be held. The dryness is the surface weather, and the depth — physical, soulful — is still underneath, waiting to be reached by the slow breath that has been too long held at the surface.
The second passage — the peace amid uncertainties
Fénelon, a few letters later in Spiritual Progress, named the posture the dry soul is being walked toward — and named, with that characteristic gentleness, what the posture costs and what it gives.
“We court the reproach of Christ Jesus, and dwell in peace though surrounded by uncertainties; the judgments of God do not affright us, for we abandon ourselves to them, imploring his mercy according to our attainments in confidence, sacrifice, and absolute surrender.”
— François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
Read it twice. Slowly.
The line worth keeping near the page is dwell in peace though surrounded by uncertainties. The dry-season soul has been assuming that the peace will arrive once the uncertainties are resolved — once she knows why God has gone quiet, once she has located the fault, once the felt sense returns. Fénelon names a different relationship to the uncertainties altogether. The peace is not the result of the dryness lifting. The peace is the country you live in while the dryness remains. Dwell — again the verb — not visit. The peace is the address, not the destination. The uncertainties are the weather inside the country, and they do not have to change for the address to be where you live.
We abandon ourselves to them. This is the sentence the dry soul has been the most afraid of, because abandonment sounds, at first, like giving up. Fénelon means something quieter. The abandonment is the slow release of the demand that the dryness be explained before it can be inhabited. The soul who has been trying to figure out what she did wrong has been refusing the abandonment. The soul who can finally say, with Fénelon, I do not know why this stretch is happening, and I am going to dwell in peace inside it anyway — that soul has performed the abandonment. The dryness, for the first time, has a country inside it. The Stilling Waves Dry Season Devotional holds this exact rotation across one hundred and forty days — a short passage, a small page, room for the honest sentence, with the slow daily structure that lets the abandonment be performed without your having to feel different than you do.
This is the second answer to the question. Why does God allow dryness? Because the abandonment that survives the dryness is the abandonment the rest of the spiritual life is going to require, and the dryness is the country in which it is most clearly learned. The peace amid uncertainties is what the dry season is teaching. The peace will, slowly, hold even when the felt sense does not return.
The third passage — the simple view of faith that remains
Fénelon, writing to a soul who could not see any way through the dryness, gave the sentence that names what is still available even when the consolations are gone.
“We must make use of all that Christian vigilance so much recommended by our Lord; raise our hearts to God in the simple view of faith, and dwell in sweet and peaceful dependence upon the Spirit of grace, as the only means of our safety and strength.”
— François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
Read it once at speed. Then read it again, slowly.
The line worth keeping near the page is raise our hearts to God in the simple view of faith. The dry soul has been trying to feel her way back to God. The feeling is not coming. Fénelon names what is still available when the feeling is not. The simple view of faith. The bare upward turn of the heart, with no consolation attached, with no warmth required, with no sense of His nearness reported back. The simple view is, in Fénelon’s vocabulary, the prayer of the dry stretch. It does not need the dryness to lift. It does not require any inner spectacle. It is the small daily lifting of the heart that continues, faithfully, in the absence of every reward.
Sweet and peaceful dependence upon the Spirit of grace. The Spirit is the keeper of the dry soul, by Fénelon’s account, in a way that the felt seasons did not require her to notice. In the felt season, the warmth made the dependence feel obvious. In the dry season, the warmth has gone, and the dependence remains — and the dependence, finally, is on the Spirit Himself, not on the felt sense of Him. The Christian whose dry season is teaching her this is being trained in a deeper way of leaning. The leaning will be the spine of the rest of the spiritual life. The dry season is what built it.
What the slow practice will do over a year
If you walk the question of why God allows dryness with Fénelon’s three passages as your quiet companion for the next year, the dryness may not lift on any particular timetable. Fénelon does not promise it will. What will change is your relationship to it. The searching for the fault will, slowly, stop being the engine of the dry-season days. The peace amid uncertainties will become more often available than not. The simple view of faith will become the practice the dry days are built around. By the end of a year, the dryness will no longer be read as God’s absence. It will be read, with Fénelon, as the slow work He has been doing all along — the purification of the fidelity, the building of the deeper dependence, the country in which the soul is being trained to dwell with Him beneath the level of feeling.
The Trials cluster that opens with this letter will walk the related stretches Fénelon’s pastoral hand was built for — the use of humiliations, the dark night that is not punishment, the soul God has hidden in a corner on purpose. Each of them is a different angle on the same patient reading of the trial: God allows it, and the allowing has a use. (Fénelon on the use of humiliations walks the small humblings that work what success cannot. Why Fénelon said the dark night is not punishment names the night as mercy in a form mercy does not usually take. Fénelon on the Christian who has been forgotten walks the soul God has hidden in a corner, on purpose.)
We plan, in time, to reprint Fénelon’s letters through Stilling Waves Press, in a slow modern edition for the soul whose dry stretch is asking to be read by the older masters who knew its country well.
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A daily home for the dry-season practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — a small daily page built for the soul who is in the dry stretch now, and who needs the patient older hand Fénelon’s letters were always offering.
The Stilling Waves Dry Season Devotional carries Fénelon’s slow vocabulary — the fidelity unsustained by delights, the peace dwelt in though surrounded by uncertainties, the simple view of faith that remains when the consolations do not — into a daily companion for the woman whose dryness is real, whose searching for the fault is, finally, ready to be set down, and who is ready to read the dry stretch as the patient work it has been all along.
