The Slow Growth Fénelon Said Doesn’t Feel Like Growth
⏱ 10 min read
Your friends seem to be sprinting in their faith and you feel stuck. The small group friend who, last year, was where you are has begun to speak in a vocabulary you do not have. The colleague who started her devotional practice the same month you did has settled into something visibly settled, and her settledness is, on the difficult Wednesday afternoons, hard to look at without a small inward ache. You are not sure whether they are growing faster than you or whether they only look as though they are — and the not-knowing has begun to feel like a small private failure that you do not have anyone to bring it to.
François Fénelon, in the pastoral letters collected as Spiritual Progress, wrote to many women in exactly this position. The women in his spiritual care at the French court compared themselves to each other often, and Fénelon’s letters return, again and again, to a single quiet correction: the visible growth in another soul is almost never the full picture, and the invisibility of growth in your own soul is almost never evidence that growth has not been happening. The interior life, Fénelon insisted, is mostly hidden — and most hidden, by design, from the one growing. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women was built as the daily small home for that hidden growth — one short page per evening, room for one quiet line, no requirement that today’s page feel like progress. For now, the Fénelon text.
The comparison the seventeenth-century court already had
It is tempting to read the spiritual-comparison problem as a modern one, born of small groups and social-media testimonies. Fénelon’s letters reveal it is older. The seventeenth-century court of Louis XIV was a small spiritual community in its own right, with its visible souls and its hidden ones, its public conversions and its quiet middle-aged women whose growth no one saw. The court had its sprinters. It had its stuck ones. The letters from the stuck ones to Fénelon read, with only a change of vocabulary, like the small private confidences of the modern Christian woman whose small-group friend has begun to speak in a vocabulary she does not have.
Fénelon’s response, across forty years of correspondence, was patient and unmoved. The visible growth in another soul, he would say, is the surface of a life you cannot see the inside of. You are watching her arrival at a place she may have struggled toward for years in private. You are reading her settledness backwards, from the finished part, without access to the unfinished parts she does not mention. And your own growth — being unfinished, being interior, being mostly invisible to you — cannot be honestly compared to her surface, because you are comparing two things of different kinds.
The comparison problem, in Fénelon’s pastoral reading, is not a small failure of contentment. It is a structural error in what the soul is using to measure itself. The soul measuring its own growth by what other souls visibly display will always come up short, because what you see in them is the outside and what you have of yourself is the inside, and the two are not on the same scale.
The first passage: the secret and intimate communion
“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 once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the words secret and intimate. Fénelon is not describing a public testimony or a small-group share. He is describing a secret and intimate communion with God — the kind of communion that, by definition, no other soul sees. The growth of the interior life happens, almost entirely, inside this secret communion. The leisure hours. The small private returns to Him at the kitchen table, in the car, at the end of the difficult phone call. The growing-up of the soul into deeper love for God happens in rooms no one watches.
This is the line for the woman who feels stuck because her growth is not being seen. Fénelon’s gentle counter is that growth that is being seen is not the deepest kind. The deepest kind is the secret kind. The sprinting friend, whose growth has become visible, may be visible because she has reached the stage where the outer of her life has begun to express what the inner of her life had been quietly building. Your growth — still inside the secret communion, still in the refreshing of spiritual strength phase — is at an earlier visible point on the surface, which says nothing about the depth at which it is happening underneath.
The fenelon on christian growth perspective is, almost always, this perspective: the surface is not the depth. The surface lags the depth by years. The friend whose surface looks settled is showing a depth that was being built quietly long before you noticed. Your surface, looking unsettled, is the surface of an interior also being built quietly — and the surface will catch up, in its own time, when the interior has reached the moment for it. The timeline is His. Not yours, and not your friend’s.
The second passage: peaceful dependence
“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. Dwell in sweet and peaceful dependence.
Notice the verb. Dwell. Not visit. Not aspire to. Dwell — the soul is asked to take up residence in sweet and peaceful dependence upon the Spirit of grace, as the daily climate of the interior life. The dependence is not a posture you adopt when growth feels visible and abandon when it feels hidden. The dependence is the dwelling place. The growth happens inside the dwelling.
For the woman comparing herself to the sprinting friend, the line lands quietly. The sprinting friend is dwelling somewhere. Whether she dwells in sweet and peaceful dependence or in a performance of growth visible to small-group eyes, Fénelon would not pronounce on. That is between her and the Lord. The question Fénelon would ask of you is simpler: Are you dwelling? Is the interior of your week shaped by peaceful dependence upon the Spirit of grace, regardless of what the surface of it looks like to other people, regardless of how much growth you can yourself measure?
If the answer is yes — even on the weeks the growth feels invisible, even on the months it feels stuck — then the growth is happening. You are not the right judge of its rate. The Spirit of grace is the rate-setter. You are the dweller. The dwelling is the practice. The growth is His to grow in you, on the timeline He has chosen, in the places of your interior that He alone can see.
For the daily home this dwelling needs, the Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women holds a short page for the small daily raising of the heart in the simple view of faith, the brief evening sentence written without measurement, the long-form 140-day shape of the dependence Fénelon is naming. The page does not ask you to compare yourself to anyone. The page asks only that you dwell.
The somatic — the un-watched hands
Pause here. Sit somewhere quiet. Place your hands open on your lap, palms up, where no one can see them. Notice the small habit your hands have of being for an audience — the way they sit when someone is in the room, the way they sit when you are walking through a public space, the way they hold themselves a half-degree more composed than they need to for the room you are actually in.
Let the half-degree go. The palms are open. There is no audience. The hands are not being watched, including by you. Let them rest on the lap as hands that nobody, including the one whose hands they are, is currently observing.
Stay there for thirty seconds. Then continue reading.
The unwatched hands are the body’s small enactment of unwatched growth. The hands that are always slightly performing — even for their own eyes — are the body of the soul comparing itself to other souls. The hands resting open and unobserved are the body of the soul that has, for the length of a breath, let its growth be invisible to itself. The interior life is shaped at this scale. The small daily un-watching is the bodily form of the secret and intimate communion Fénelon is asking the soul to dwell in.
The third passage: the love that is not for self
“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 slowly. Forever lose sight of self.
This is the deepest of the three passages, and the one that names the cure for the comparison ache. The soul that compares itself to other souls is the soul that has sight of itself — that is watching its own progress, measuring its own state, registering its own position relative to the sprinting friend. Fénelon’s call is to forever lose sight of self. Not to hate the self, not to deny that the self is there, but to lose sight of it — to let the eye, instead, rest on Him, until the self is no longer the object the eye is tracking.
For the modern Christian woman, this is the line that quietly resolves the small-group ache. The ache exists because the soul is watching itself in the mirror of the friend. The cure is not to watch the friend less. The cure is to forever lose sight of self — to take the eye off the mirror altogether, and let it rest on God. The friend can go on sprinting. You can go on dwelling. Neither is being measured by the other any more, because the eye that was doing the measuring is now resting somewhere else.
Love Thee without loving self except in and for Thee. This is the only spiritual posture Fénelon trusts as durable. The love that loves God and also tracks its own state is divided love. The love that loves God only, and lets the self be loved only inside His loving of it, is undivided. Undivided love is what the long Christian life grows toward. The growing is, by structural necessity, hidden from the one growing — because the one growing is no longer watching herself.
(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, why Fénelon said the Christian’s hardest year is year three walks the dry middle every soul must walk, and Fénelon on the Christian who has stopped feeling anything walks the flattening of devotional feeling. For the bridge to Andrew Murray’s neighbouring contemplative thread, what Andrew Murray meant by the deeper Christian life walks the slower interior life Fénelon would recognise as a near-cousin to his own, and the prayer Andrew Murray said most Christians never pray names the surrender-prayer underneath the dwelling.)
What changes, slowly
The sprinting friend will continue to sprint, or she will not. That is not your business. Your business is the small daily dwelling, the secret and intimate communion, the unwatched hands, the eye that is slowly being trained to rest on God rather than on its own progress. By month three of daily dwelling, the comparison ache begins to soften. By month six, it is rarer. By the end of a year, you will catch yourself going whole weeks without measuring yourself against anyone — because the eye has settled on Him, and the eye that is resting on Him is not free to measure anything else.
This is what fenelon on christian growth finally describes. Not the visible sprint. The slow unmeasured dwelling. The growth that does not feel like growth because the one growing is no longer watching, and the not-watching is itself the larger part of the growth.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women.
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The Fénelon reading library on Everspring Press carries slow readings of the seventeenth-century French archbishop’s pastoral letters, with the matched journals at the centre of the practice. Everspring is preparing reprints of Fénelon’s correspondence, including Spiritual Progress, for the soul whose growth is happening quietly and is ready, slowly, to stop measuring itself.
