Why Fénelon Said the Christian’s Best Prayer Is Wordless
⏱ 10 min read
Your prayers feel like long lists, and you sense prayer wants to be something else. The lists have served you well for years — the people to hold up, the situations to name, the gratitudes to register, the requests to make — and they are not wrong. They are only, finally, not enough. The sense has been gathering for months that the verbal prayer, however faithfully kept, has become the surface of a prayer life whose depth is asking for a different posture entirely. François Fénelon, in Spiritual Progress, wrote whole letters to souls in this exact moment — souls who had prayed well for years and who were being drawn, gently, toward the prayer that has stopped needing words. The Stilling Waves Prayer Journal for Women carries this same patient opening into a daily companion, for the woman whose word-prayer has been faithful and whose wordless prayer is, slowly, beginning to want a place in the day.
Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose private letters of direction became the volume the English-speaking world knows as Spiritual Progress, lived inside a tradition that took wordless prayer seriously as the long second half of the Christian prayer life. The first half, in his pastoral vocabulary, was the prayer of words — the petitions, the confessions, the gratitudes, the structured devotions. The second half was the simple view of faith — the un-worded, un-listed, un-petitioned prayer that is, in his reading, the closer contact the words had been preparing the soul for all along. Wordless prayer is not the absence of prayer. It is the prayer that has shed the scaffolding because the building is, finally, ready to stand on its own.
The first passage — the simple view of faith
Fénelon, in Spiritual Progress, named the kind of attention that wordless prayer asks for, with a brevity the over-worded soul most needs to hear.
“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. Then read it again, slowly.
The line worth keeping near the page is raise our hearts to God in the simple view of faith. Five words inside a longer sentence, and the whole instruction for wordless prayer is in them. Raise our hearts — not raise our voices, not raise our lists, not raise our requests. The hearts. The lifting is interior, silent, un-narrated. The simple view of faith — a phrase that sounds, at first, like nothing, and that contains, on closer reading, the whole of what Fénelon meant by the prayer that has stopped needing words. View — a way of looking, a sustained quiet attention. Simple — un-elaborate, un-decorated, un-argued. Of faith — not of feeling, not of vision, not of mystical experience, but of the steady upward turn the believing heart makes when it is finally allowed to stop talking.
The contemplative French school, of which Fénelon was the gentlest voice, understood wordless prayer not as a higher Christian practice reserved for advanced souls but as the natural settling of the praying heart into the kind of contact that does not require articulation. The hours of word-prayer build the trust. The wordless prayer is the resting in the trust the words have built. The simple view of faith is what is left when the words have done their work — the slow, steady, upward look that does not narrate itself and does not need to. The Christian is still praying. She has only stopped narrating the prayer.
(For the wider context this letter sits inside, the sibling article what Fénelon meant by simplicity of heart names the un-divided interior the wordless prayer rests inside of, Fénelon on recollection — the forgotten Christian practice walks the small daily gathering that makes wordless prayer possible, and why Fénelon said silence is the Christian’s hardest discipline describes the silence the wordless prayer lives inside.)
The somatic — for the body that has been doing the talking
Pause here. The word-prayer has not only been in the mouth. It has been in the chest, in the small forward lean of the body that comes from saying things — even silently, even in the head. The breath has been working at the surface, in shallow inhales that match the cadence of the inner sentence-making. The body has been the medium of the words even when no sound has been produced. Wordless prayer, before it is anything else, asks the body to stop producing the next sentence.
Sit somewhere quiet. Both feet flat against the floor. Let the shoulders lower by an inch — not by trying to relax them, but by stopping the small effort of holding them up. Let the jaw release. Let the back teeth come unstuck. 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, simply be there. No sentence. No list. No next phrase. Just the bottom of the breath, in the company of God.
That is wordless prayer, in its smallest and most ordinary form. The body, lowered. The breath, completed. The heart, in the simple view of faith. The wordless prayer is not waiting for you to become advanced. It is waiting for you to stop, for sixty seconds, the small ongoing production of the next inner sentence. The wordless prayer has been available the whole time. The words have been crowding the room.
The second passage — the secret and intimate communion
Fénelon, a few letters later in Spiritual Progress, named where the wordless prayer most often grows — and named, with characteristic gentleness, the kind of time it needs.
“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 it twice. Slowly.
The line worth keeping near the page is a secret and intimate communion with God. Two adjectives that distinguish this prayer from every other kind. Secret — not shared, not narrated, not performed, not even spoken to oneself. Intimate — not formal, not structured, not at any kind of distance. The wordless prayer is the prayer that does not need an audience, including the inner audience the worded prayer has often been quietly performing for. The Christian who has been praying for years for the people who love her, for the work she is doing, for the world she is in, is being drawn, in Fénelon’s reading, toward the prayer that is only between her and Him, with no third party in the room — including the part of herself that would observe the prayer.
Refreshing our spiritual strength. This is the function the wordless prayer serves in Fénelon’s vocabulary. The worded prayer has been the work. The wordless prayer is the refreshment. The soul has been pouring out, faithfully, in the petitions and the intercessions and the structured devotions, and the wordless prayer is the slow daily refilling that lets the pouring out continue. The Christian who tries to live on the worded prayer alone, without the wordless, slowly empties. The wordless prayer is not an optional addition. It is the replenishing the structured prayer has been doing the work that needed to be replenished.
Our leisure hours. This is the practical instruction the over-busy Christian most needs. Wordless prayer does not happen in the same window as the petition list. It happens in the small daily margins — the kettle boiling, the bath running, the ten minutes before the children come downstairs, the slow walk to the car at the end of the day. The leisure hours, Fénelon says, are the sweetest and pleasantest. He does not mean idle. He means the hours when the soul is not under demand, when nothing is being produced, when the body and the mind are, briefly, at rest from the day’s required output. Those are the hours wordless prayer wants. The Stilling Waves Prayer Journal for Women is built around exactly this kind of marginal contact — a short passage that the leisure hour can carry, a small page that does not require a long sitting, a structure for the wordless prayer to be held without being talked into existence.
The third passage — losing sight of self in order to love Him only
Fénelon, writing to a soul who could not see how the wordless prayer was supposed to happen, gave the sentence that names what the prayer is finally for.
“We must renounce, forget and forever lose sight of self, take part with Thee and shine, O God, against ourselves and ours; have no longer any will, glory or peace, but thine only; in a word, we must love Thee without loving self except in and for Thee.”
— François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
Read it once at speed. Then read it again, slowly.
The line worth keeping near the page is love Thee without loving self except in and for Thee. The worded prayer, however faithful, has had the self in the room. The petitions have been about the situations the self is in. The intercessions have been about the people the self is loving. The gratitudes have been about what the self has received. None of that is wrong. It is only — finally — not the deepest prayer the soul was built for. Wordless prayer is the prayer in which the self has, slowly, lost sight of itself, and the only object of attention is God. The lists are quiet. The petitions are at rest. The self is no longer the subject. Him only is in the room.
This is, in Fénelon’s hand, why the wordless prayer is the best prayer. It is not better because it is more advanced. It is better because it is more free of you. The worded prayer has been about the relationship between the self and God. The wordless prayer is the relationship itself, no longer needing to be talked about. The Christian who learns to give the leisure hour to the wordless prayer, faithfully, over months and years, is the Christian whose interior is, slowly, being emptied of self and filled with Him. The words helped. The wordless prayer is what they were preparing the soul to enter.
What the slow practice will do over a year
If you walk the question of wordless prayer with Fénelon’s three passages as your quiet companion for the next year, the worded prayer will not disappear. The lists will still be made. The petitions will still be offered. The intercessions will still be carried. What will change is the small daily margin you give to the prayer that has stopped needing words. Five minutes, in the leisure hour, with no sentence in your mouth and no list in your hand. The simple view of faith. The secret and intimate communion. By the end of a year, the wordless prayer will be the room the worded prayer is held inside of — the slow, steady, upward look that does not narrate itself and does not need to, the prayer Fénelon spent his letters quietly opening for the souls who had finally written enough.
(For the bridge into the closely related practice the Reformed tradition has named in its own vocabulary, the Holy Spirit’s role in prayer — Andrew Murray’s plain answer walks the One who prays the wordless prayer the soul is finally free to stop producing, and Andrew Murray on the inner chamber and the outer life names the small room where the wordless contact most naturally happens.)
We plan, in time, to reprint Fénelon’s letters through Stilling Waves Press, in a slow modern edition for the Christian whose worded prayer has been faithful and whose wordless prayer is, finally, ready to be entered.
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A daily home for the wordless-prayer practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — a small daily page that holds the leisure-hour contact Fénelon’s wordless prayer most naturally grows in, without demanding any list at all.
The Stilling Waves Prayer Journal for Women carries Fénelon’s slow vocabulary — the simple view of faith, the secret and intimate communion, the losing sight of self in order to love Him only — into a daily companion for the Christian whose worded prayer has been faithful for years, and whose wordless prayer is, finally, ready to be the room the rest of the prayer life is held inside of.
