Fénelon’s Final Counsel for the Soul Walking the Slow Path
⏱ 11 min read
Fénelon’s Final Counsel for the Soul Walking the Slow Path
You have been walking with God a long time and you do not know how to keep going. You are not in crisis. You are not tempted to walk away. You are simply, quietly, tired in the way the long-walking soul becomes tired — and the early metaphors for the Christian life, all of them written for the first decade of the walk, have stopped speaking to the stretch you are in. You need a different kind of counsel. You need the counsel of someone who walked a long time himself.
François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose pastoral letters were gathered after his death into the volume we read in English as Spiritual Progress, wrote a small closing letter for the soul in exactly this position. He had walked the path himself — through court favour, public disgrace, papal censure, a lifetime of slow obedient pastoring of one quiet diocese — and his closing counsel to the long-walking soul is shaped by the long walk he had himself completed. The letter we are reading here is the close of the correspondence: a quiet pastoral note from a man who knew, by the time he wrote it, what the long Christian life actually asks and what it actually gives. The Stilling Waves Prayer Journal for Women was built as the daily small home for this exact long stretch — one short page per evening, one quiet sentence, one return to the page that does not depend on the day having been a notable one. For now, the Fénelon text.
The shape of the long walk
The first decade of the Christian life is dramatic. There are conversions, awakenings, callings, decisions, deliverances, breakthroughs. The metaphors of the early Christian writing are mostly metaphors of movement — running the race, fighting the fight, pressing on toward the prize. The soul in the first decade needs these metaphors. The soul in the third or fourth or fifth decade has, quietly, outgrown them. The fenelon long obedience slow path counsel is for the soul who has noticed that the movement metaphors no longer describe what her actual day-to-day faith looks like, and who has begun to suspect that something quieter is being asked of her.
The shape of the long walk, in Fénelon’s reading, is not movement. It is constant communion. The soul that has walked thirty years is no longer being asked to go somewhere. She is being asked to abide somewhere. The dramatic movement of the early years is being replaced by the quiet, daily, unspectacular being with — the steady, unwavering, un-noticeable keeping-of-company with Him that the long-walking saint is shaped, over decades, into being able to sustain. The long obedience is in the same direction because the direction stopped changing years ago; the soul is no longer choosing the path each morning. The path has been chosen. What is being practised now is the staying on it.
The first passage: the constant communion
“Carefully purify your conscience, then, from daily faults; suffer no sin to dwell in your heart; small as it may seem, it obscures the light of grace, weighs down the soul, and hinders that constant communion with Jesus Christ which it should be your pleasure to cultivate; you will become lukewarm, forget God, and find yourself growing in attachment to the creature.”
— François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice what Fénelon calls the goal of the long walk. Constant communion with Jesus Christ which it should be your pleasure to cultivate. Not great works. Not visible faithfulness. Not even, in this passage, growth in holiness. Constant communion — the steady, daily, ongoing keeping-of-company with Him that, by the third or fourth decade, has become the actual content of the Christian life. The long-walking soul is being slowly formed into someone whose ordinary moment-by-moment interior is a quiet communion with Him, and whose work, words, family life, evenings, and small unphotographed days are all conducted out of that steady undercurrent.
Pleasure to cultivate. This is the small phrase that often shocks the long-walking soul into a quieter posture. Fénelon does not call the constant communion a duty to maintain. He calls it a pleasure to cultivate. The long Christian life is not, in his reading, a heavy thing you are obliged to keep performing. It is, slowly and by degrees, the most natural pleasure of your interior — the steady companionship of the One who has been with you for decades, whose nearness is the daily warmth your interior has been formed around. The carefully of the line is gentle gardening, not anxious self-policing. The small daily faults are pulled like small weeds — quietly, without alarm — because they obscure the light of grace and dim the pleasure of the constant communion, and you have, by year thirty, no real reason to keep them.
This is the line for the long-walking soul: constant communion which it should be your pleasure to cultivate. The long obedience is not endurance. It is the slow daily cultivation of the steady pleasure that has become your interior life.
The second passage: the secret and intimate hour
“Our leisure hours are ordinarily the sweetest and pleasantest for ourselves; we can never employ them better than in refreshing our spiritual strength, by a secret and intimate communion with God.”
— François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
Read this one twice. Secret and intimate communion with God.
The long-walking soul has, almost without noticing, learned what the leisure hour is actually for. In the early decades, the leisure hour was variously the hour of recovery, the hour of pleasure, the hour of the children, the hour of the work-that-overflowed-its-allotted-time. By year thirty, the leisure hour has begun to declare itself as the hour of secret and intimate communion — the small unbroken half-hour, the early morning before the house wakes, the evening after the dishes, the slow Saturday afternoon — when the long-walking soul finds, with mild surprise, that the thing she most wants to do is sit quietly in His company.
Refreshing our spiritual strength. Notice the verb. Not building. Not growing. Refreshing. The long-walking soul is no longer in the building phase. The structure is built. What she needs, in the leisure hour, is the refreshing — the small daily replenishment of the spiritual strength that the day’s slow ordinary faithfulness has been quietly drawing from. The leisure hour is the well. The day is the bucket. The long walk is sustainable because the leisure hour, given honestly, refills the strength that the day draws on.
For the daily home this leisure hour needs, the Stilling Waves Prayer Journal for Women holds a short page for the evening secret and intimate communion and the morning return to constant communion, structured for the long-walking soul whose interior has been quietly forming for years and who needs a written room in which the daily refreshing can take its small unhurried shape. Not a programme. A page, a chair, a quiet hour, daily.
The somatic — the soft hands
Pause here. Sit somewhere quiet. Look at your hands.
The long-walking soul carries the long walk in the hands. By year thirty, the hands have a small accumulated firmness — not gripping, exactly, but set. The thumbs are slightly braced. The fingers have a small habitual tension at the knuckles. The hands have been the carriers of the long faithfulness, the long work, the long care of others, the long quiet bearing-up under things that were never given a name. The hands have learned to hold steady, and the holding-steady has settled into the resting posture.
Let the hands rest, palms upward, on your knees or on the page. Let the small firmness ease by a quarter. Let the thumbs un-brace. Let the fingers be soft. The long walk does not, at this stage, need the small chronic firmness in the hands. The long walk is being carried by Him; the hands have only ever been the small physical companions of His carrying. Let the soft hands receive what they have always received: His own steady presence in them, His warmth across the years, the constant communion that is older than your tiredness.
Stay in the soft hands for one slow breath. The body remembers what the long walk has been. The body has, by year thirty, become the un-performed body of a soul who is no longer trying — who is simply with Him, in the steady ordinary undramatic being with that is the substance of the long path. Let the hands stay soft for a moment more. Then read on.
The third passage: the fidelity that is pure
“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
The third passage names what the long walk actually is. Fidelity, unsustained by delights, is far purer.
The long-walking soul has, by her third or fourth decade, made peace with the absence of the felt nearness that fed her first ten years. The lively emotions of the early seasons — the warm assurance in worship, the lifted heart in prayer, the sense, walking through the morning, that He was particularly near — have not been a daily feature for a long time. What has replaced them is the fidelity unsustained by delights — the steady, undramatic, slowly purified faith that walks because walking is what it does, not because the walking is each day rewarded with a felt return.
I heartily rejoice at it. Fénelon is rejoicing at the felt austerity of the long-walking soul. He is rejoicing because the fidelity unsustained by delights is, by the seventeenth-century French director’s reckoning, the far purer and safer condition — the place where the faith has finally become the load-bearing thing it was always meant to be, no longer dependent on the imagination’s tender feelings, no longer requiring the small emotional confirmations that sustained the early years. The long walk has produced a naked faith — bare, steady, ordinary, undramatic — and the naked faith is what the soul can keep walking on for the rest of her life. The fenelon long obedience slow path counsel arrives here, in the gentle pastoral honouring of the soul who is walking faithfully in the fidelity unsustained by delights, and who has been quietly assuming she was supposed to feel something more than she does.
Three small returns for the long walk
If you take nothing else from this letter, these three returns are the spine of the long-walking posture:
The first return is the small daily gardening — the careful, gentle, undramatic morning purification of the small daily faults, kept low not by anxious self-policing but as the small weeding of the soil in which the constant communion is being cultivated as your steady ordinary pleasure.
The second return is the secret and intimate leisure hour — the small daily unbroken half-hour given quietly to Him without programme or productivity, in which the spiritual strength the day draws on is honestly refreshed and the long walk is made sustainable for another stretch.
The third return is the fidelity unsustained by delights — the daily quiet acceptance that the long walk does not need the felt nearness of the early years, that the naked faith is the purer and safer thing, and that you are walking faithfully whether or not the imagination is currently being given the tender feelings it once was.
For the wider field this letter sits inside, the sibling letters walk the neighbouring long-walking souls: Fénelon’s Letter to the Soul in Scruple walks the over-careful soul whose long walk has been weighed down by her own conscience, Fénelon’s Counsel for the Christian Who Cannot Be Still walks the restless soul whose long walk has not yet settled into the steady stillness of the later decades, and Fénelon’s Letter for the Perfectionist Christian walks the soul whose long walk has been over-driven by self-judgement. If the underlying question has been one of prayer in the long stretch, Andrew Murray’s counsel for the Christian who cannot pray walks the prayer-side companion, and what to do when you’re doubting God walks the doubt-side companion for the long-walking soul.
What changes, slowly
The long walk does not become exciting again. The dramatic metaphors of the first decade do not return. What changes is your settling into the kind of walk the long obedience actually is. By month three of the small daily constant communion, the fidelity unsustained by delights has stopped feeling like an austerity and started feeling like a quiet companionship. By year one of the secret leisure hour, the spiritual strength has begun to be steadily refreshed in the well it was always meant to be drawn from. By the end of the next decade, you will look back and recognise that the not knowing how to keep going was itself a phase — and that what was being given to you in the not-knowing was the gentle invitation to keep going differently, in the slow steady constant communion the long obedience finally settles into.
This is what Fénelon offered the soul walking the slow path: not a more advanced doctrine, not a final breakthrough, but the steady small daily constant communion, the secret and intimate leisure hour, and the fidelity unsustained by delights — the three quiet practices that make the long obedience in the same direction a sustainable interior life rather than an exhausting endurance.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women.
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This essay closes the Fénelon reading library on Stilling Waves Press — fifty slow readings of the seventeenth-century French archbishop’s pastoral letters on the inner life, with the matched journals at the centre of the practice. It also stands as the four hundredth article on Stilling Waves Press: the quiet milestone of a long, slow library, built one essay at a time, for the woman walking the slow path. Stilling Waves is preparing reprints of Fénelon’s corpus, including Spiritual Progress, for the long-walking soul whose interior is ready, quietly, to settle into the constant communion the long obedience finally opens into.