What Fénelon Said the Christian Must Lose to Gain
⏱ 8 min read
Something has been taken from you and you do not know if it was God taking it or something else. The shape of the loss is clear — a comfort that used to come, a felt nearness that has gone quiet, a confidence in a particular life-direction that has thinned to almost nothing, an attachment that has been quietly pried loose without your permission — and you have been trying, for months now, to read the meaning of the taking. You cannot tell if you are being punished or pruned or simply forgotten.
François Fénelon, writing letters of spiritual direction from the French court in the late seventeenth century, recognised the question immediately whenever it appeared in the letters he received. Spiritual Progress — the collection of those replies — returns to the same answer in many forms across many letters: what feels like loss is, much more often than the soul can perceive in the moment, the soul being slowly emptied to receive. Fénelon’s whole reading of fenelon loss and gain is that the taking, when God is the One taking, is structurally a making-room. The Everspring Dry Season Devotional was built as the daily small home for the woman walking through this exact taking — one short page per evening, one quiet line of scripture, space for the loss to be sat with rather than fought. For now, the Fénelon text.
The loss that does not feel redemptive
You did not see it coming. The thing taken was, until recently, a settled part of how you knew yourself with God — the felt warmth in prayer, the easy certainty about your calling, the marriage that felt secure, the friendship that had carried you for a decade, the work that gave meaning to the week, the health that made the rest possible. The taking happened slowly enough that you did not catalogue it as a single event, and fast enough that by the time you noticed, the thing was already mostly gone.
The redemptive reading does not arrive on its own. You can find the verses about pruning, the lines about loss being gain, the sentences from old saints about consolations being withdrawn for the soul’s good. You can recite them. They do not, in the actual sitting with the loss, produce the felt sense that the loss is for you. The loss continues to feel like loss. Fénelon, who watched this exact pattern in the women he was directing for decades, would not have rushed you past that. He would have written gently, slowly, that the felt sense of redemption is one of the things being withdrawn — and that the work of these months is to learn to walk in the dark of the withdrawal without forcing the felt redemption back.
The first passage: the renouncing that is not striving
“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 twice. The line carries the whole pastoral movement Fénelon makes around loss.
The taking, when God is the One taking, is the slow practical version of this passage — the actual loosening of the things the soul has been quietly loving as self rather than in and for Him. You did not know, until the thing was taken, how much of your sense of self had been built around it. The taking has revealed the structure. The structure was, in many small ways, your will, glory, peace — and Fénelon’s quiet pastoral case is that the soul cannot fully love God while still resting its sense of self in those things, because part of the heart’s attention is always going to them rather than to Him.
This does not mean the things were sinful. The lost marriage, the lost work, the lost felt warmth — most of them were not sinful. They were simply loved as self, and the loving-as-self was the layer the taking has pried up. The loss feels catastrophic because the layer underneath is now exposed, and the exposed layer is not yet sure how to live without the layer that was on top of it. This is, structurally, the soul being emptied to receive — and the receiving has not yet begun, because the room has not yet been quite cleared.
The second passage: dwelling in peace though surrounded by uncertainties
“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
Dwell in peace though surrounded by uncertainties. This is the line to keep near the page through the season of the taking.
Notice the structure of the sentence. Fénelon does not say that the peace arrives when the uncertainties resolve. He says the peace dwells in the middle of the uncertainties — including, by direct implication, the uncertainty about whether the loss was God’s doing or something else. You may never know, this side of heaven, exactly what was being taken or why. The not-knowing is part of what is being taken. The soul that demands to know first, and then peace second, will not have the peace. The soul that abandons itself to the not-knowing, imploring his mercy in plain language, finds the peace inside the uncertainty rather than after it.
This is the deepest pastoral move in the fenelon loss and gain teaching. The peace is not downstream of the answer. The peace is upstream of the answer, available right now, in the middle of the not-knowing, to the soul that has stopped requiring the explanation before the resting.
A pause for the body
Set the page down. Notice the small held tension under the breastbone that has probably tightened while reading. Loss lives in that place — the dull ache that has been the companion of these months, the part of the body that braces against the next taking, the small ongoing effort to hold the chest closed against whatever else might be removed.
Let the breastbone soften. Let one slow inhale come in. Let the held tension release by a small amount. The body has been carrying the loss the whole time the mind has been trying to interpret it. The body can be allowed to soften now, even if the loss is still present, even if the meaning is still unclear. The softening is not pretending the loss is fine. The softening is simply ceasing to brace, for a moment, while the soul sits with what is.
The third 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 it slowly. The closing pastoral move is here.
After the loss has been sat with, after the not-knowing has been accepted, after the body has softened around what is being carried, the remaining work is the simple, daily raising of the heart to God in the simple view of faith. Not striving. Not interpreting. Not auditing the loss for its meaning. The heart raised, in plain faith, toward the One who knows what He is doing — even when what He is doing is structurally hidden from the soul having it done to her. The peaceful dependence is not a feeling. It is a posture. The posture is available even on the days when the felt assurance is not.
This is what the gain underneath the loss actually looks like. Not the restoration of what was taken. The deepening of the soul’s plain dependence on Him, made possible by the absence of the things she used to lean on. The gain is structurally inside the loss, not after it.
(If the dry-middle the loss has put you in feels indistinguishable from the broader dry season the older saints described, why Fénelon said the Christian’s hardest year is year three walks the same ground in a different angle, and the slow growth Fénelon said doesn’t feel like growth names the structural hiddenness of what is happening. The surrender underneath the entire teaching belongs in the Murray strand too — the prayer Andrew Murray said most Christians never pray is the sibling text in the Protestant key, and what Andrew Murray meant by the deeper Christian life walks the same emptied-to-receive thesis under a different dialect.)
What to do in the middle of the taking
Practically, in the season of an active loss, the fenelon loss and gain teaching looks like this. You sit with the loss, daily, without forcing an interpretation. You name to God, in plain language, what has been taken — and ask, without demanding an answer, whether He took it. You let the not-knowing stand. You raise the heart, in the simple view of faith, toward Him. You do not try to refill the room that has just been emptied. You let the emptiness be present long enough for Him to choose what, if anything, He puts into it.
The gain, when it comes, will not look like the restoration of what was taken. It will look like a quieter, deeper resting in Him that you would not have arrived at if the layer on top had not been pried up. The gain is real. It is also slow, and mostly hidden from the soul receiving it, and visible only in retrospect from years away.
Fénelon thought this in 1690. We plan to reprint his letters, slowly, through Everspring Press in the coming years.
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A daily page for the season of the taking
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional. One short page per evening, scripture pre-printed, space for the loss to be sat with rather than fought. For the woman whose felt warmth has been withdrawn and is ready, slowly, to learn to dwell in peace inside the not-knowing.
A slow read in the wider Fénelon arc. Sibling pieces: what Fénelon said about spiritual progress that modern Christians miss and the slow growth Fénelon said doesn’t feel like growth. For the abiding-in-loss thread, see what Andrew Murray meant by the deeper Christian life.
