Why Fénelon Said the Christian’s Hardest Year Is Year Three
⏱ 11 min read
Your first years of faith were full of feeling and now nothing happens at devotions. The verses that used to surface tears now read as ink on paper. The prayers that used to leave a small warmth behind them have become a small list of names spoken into a quiet room. You sit down at the same chair you sat down at three years ago, and the chair is the same and the Bible is the same and the morning light is the same — but the inside of you is not the same, and the not-sameness has begun to read like a slow disaster you do not have the vocabulary to name.
François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop of Cambrai, called this the dry middle — and he wrote Spiritual Progress in part for the women in his pastoral care who had reached it. Fénelon’s quiet observation, repeated across many letters, was that the Christian’s first years are usually warm; the long stretch after them is usually dry; and the dry middle is not a falling away but a passage every walking soul must eventually walk. The Stilling Waves Dry Season Devotional was built as the daily small home for that dry middle — one short page per evening, room for one honest line on the cold morning, no demand that the page produce a feeling. For now, the Fénelon text.
Why the second stretch is harder than the first
The first stretch of any Christian life is, almost always, accompanied by what Fénelon and the older contemplatives called sensible consolations — felt warmth, felt closeness, felt confirmation that the devotional practice is working. The consolations are given by God, freely, and they are part of how the soul is drawn into the early life of prayer. The consolations are real, and Fénelon never dismisses them. They are the way the early soul is tutored into the practice of devotion.
The second stretch is harder because the consolations are withdrawn. Not as punishment. As maturation. The soul that has learned to walk with God with the consolations is now being taught to walk with God without them — not because God has changed but because the soul, in order to grow, must learn a kind of love that does not depend on its own emotional confirmation. The withdrawal is the curriculum. The dryness is the lesson. The year three darkness, Fénelon would say, is not the end of the walk. It is the middle of it.
The reason it is hardest is structural. The first years had a vocabulary — the felt closeness, the warm prayer, the moving sermon. The dry middle is at first wordless. The soul in it does not yet have a vocabulary for the new climate. She is using the old vocabulary and being disappointed by it. Nothing is happening at devotions is the early sentence of the dry middle, spoken by the soul who is still measuring with the early instrument. The new instrument has not been put into her hands yet. Fénelon, in his letters, is patiently putting it there.
The first passage: the lukewarm danger and the hidden danger
“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 is and is not saying. He is not saying that the dryness is itself a sin. He is naming a different danger — the small daily faults that, if left to dwell, will obscure the light of grace and weigh down the soul. The danger inside the dry middle is not the dryness. The danger inside the dry middle is the slow drift toward lukewarmness that the unfelt walk makes easier than the felt one.
This is the line that re-frames the dry season for the woman who has begun to suspect her flatness is itself a moral failure. Fénelon, gently, separates the two. The dryness is the climate. The lukewarmness is the temptation inside the climate. The two are not the same. The dryness is given. The lukewarmness is a small slow accumulation of daily faults — the half-honest evening, the small short-cuts in attention, the gradual loosening of the vigilance that the warm years held automatically and the dry years require deliberately.
Fénelon’s pastoral instruction inside the dry middle is, therefore, the opposite of what the soul expects. The soul expects to be told to try to feel more. He tells her, instead, to carefully purify the conscience from daily faults. The work of the dry middle is the small daily vigilance — not the production of warmth, which she cannot produce, but the protection of the small attentive life that allows the constant communion with Jesus Christ to continue at the depth it has reached, regardless of whether the depth is being felt.
The fenelon spiritual dryness teaching is, in part, this: the dryness is not the enemy. The enemy is the slow drift into half-attention that the dryness makes possible. The remedy is not new feeling. The remedy is renewed care.
The second passage: vigilance in the dry season
“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 this one twice. Raise our hearts to God in the simple view of faith.
Notice the instrument Fénelon hands the woman in the dry middle. The simple view of faith. Not the warm view. Not the felt view. The simple view — the bare, unfelt, structural lifting of the heart toward God, without the help of an accompanying emotion, on the authority of faith alone. Faith, in Fénelon’s vocabulary, is the instrument the dry middle is asking the soul to learn to use. The early years used feeling. The middle years use faith. The exchange of instruments is the difficulty and the gift of year three.
The lifting in the simple view of faith is a quiet daily act. You sit at the chair. The Bible is open. There is no warmth. You lift the heart anyway, by the simple structural decision of faith — I believe You are here, I believe You hear me, I believe this hour at the page is doing its work even though I cannot feel any of it doing it. The lifting does not produce the warmth. The lifting is not for the warmth. The lifting is the practice that the dry middle is teaching, and the practice is its own kind of growth.
Dwell in sweet and peaceful dependence upon the Spirit of grace. The second clause holds the climate the soul is being asked to take up residence in. The Spirit of grace is the only means of our safety and strength in the dry middle, because the soul has no other means. The warmth is gone. The felt assurance is gone. What remains is the peaceful dependence on the Spirit, who is present and at work whether or not the soul can feel Him at work. The dwelling in this dependence is the year-three posture. The years after will be built on it.
For the daily home this dwelling needs, the Stilling Waves Dry Season Devotional holds a short page for the cold morning, the un-warm prayer, the simple act of faith offered in the absence of feeling. The page does not promise the warmth will return next Tuesday. The page holds the small daily lifting, in the simple view of faith, that the dry middle is asking the soul to learn.
The somatic — the cold morning sit
Pause here. Sit somewhere quiet. Notice that the body, on a dry morning, has its own resistance to the chair. The shoulders are slightly slumped. The breath is slightly shallow. There is a small refusal in the chest — what is the point of sitting if nothing happens when I sit. The refusal is somatic before it is theological.
Let the body sit anyway. Place both feet flat on the floor. Let the spine lengthen a small amount, not into rigidity but into the gentle uprightness of a small daily fidelity. The body is sitting because faith is asking it to, not because it expects something to happen. Raise our hearts to God in the simple view of faith, at the level of posture, is this. The small daily upright sit in the absence of any felt invitation to sit.
Stay there for thirty seconds. Then continue reading.
The cold-morning sit is the bodily form of the dry-middle practice. The body that sits on the dry mornings is the body of the soul that has begun to walk by faith rather than by feeling. The exchange happens at the level of the chair before it happens at the level of theology. The body teaches the soul, here, more than the soul teaches the body. Sit. The growth is being done while you sit.
The third passage: the calm before the next step
“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 slowly. When you shall have become calm.
This is the line that names the only forward motion the dry middle allows. The soul in year three is often desperate for a direction — a new ministry, a new prayer practice, a new spiritual reading, anything to break the flatness and confirm she is still moving. Fénelon’s counter is patient and unmoved. When you shall have become calm — first the calm, before any new step. Then do in a spirit of recollection what you perceive to be nearest the will of God. Not the dramatic step. The nearest one. The next small act of fidelity, taken from the place of calm.
The dry middle, in Fénelon’s pastoral framing, is mostly the becoming calm. The settling of the soul into the new climate of unfelt walking. The acceptance, without panic, that the warm season has passed and the dry one has come, and that both are in His ordering. The calm comes slowly — not in a week, not in a month, often only across a year. But the calm is the precondition of the next true step. The unsettled soul, leaping for any forward motion to escape the flatness, takes wrong steps. The calmed soul, in a spirit of recollection, takes the nearest right one.
This is the line for the year-three woman who is afraid she will do nothing forever if she accepts the dryness. Fénelon’s reply is that doing the next thing is allowed — but only from the place of calm. The calm is built daily. The next step will appear, in its own time, nearest the will of God respecting you, and the calmed soul will recognise it when it appears. The flatness is not the absence of forward motion. The flatness is the slow groundwork for the forward motion that will, eventually, come.
(For the sibling readings inside this slow-growth cluster: what Fénelon said about spiritual progress that modern Christians miss walks the wider thesis that real growth feels like loss before it feels like gain, the slow growth Fénelon said doesn’t feel like growth walks the hiddenness of interior growth, and Fénelon on the Christian who has stopped feeling anything walks the question of what remains when feeling is gone. For the bridge to Andrew Murray’s neighbouring contemplative thread, what Andrew Murray meant by the deeper Christian life walks the slower Christian life Fénelon would recognise as a near-cousin to his own.)
What changes, slowly
The dryness will not lift on a schedule. The year-three flatness, in Fénelon’s pastoral observation, is a long passage — often two or three years in itself, sometimes longer — and what is being grown inside it is the faith-instrument the rest of your life will be walked by. The growth is largely invisible. By the time you notice the calm has come, the calm has already been working in you for months. By the time you notice the simple view of faith has become natural, the faith has already been carrying you for a season.
This is what fenelon spiritual dryness finally is. Not a season of decline. The slow construction of the soul’s capacity to walk with God without the help of feeling. The walking, built in this dry middle, is what makes the long Christian life possible. The years after are walked on what these years quietly built.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional.
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The Fénelon reading library on Stilling Waves Press carries slow readings of the seventeenth-century French archbishop’s pastoral letters, with the matched journals at the centre of the practice. Stilling Waves is preparing reprints of Fénelon’s correspondence, including Spiritual Progress, for the soul in the dry middle who is ready, slowly, to learn the new instrument the dry middle is teaching her.
