Fénelon on the Disinterested Love That Survives Loss
⏱ 10 min read
God has removed something you loved, and you have begun to wonder whether you loved Him, or whether you loved what He was giving you. The grief is real. The question underneath the grief is realer — and quieter, and harder to ask aloud, because to ask it is to admit that the long faithfulness might have been resting on the felt nearness rather than on Him.
François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century Archbishop of Cambrai, wrote Spiritual Progress for the woman holding exactly that question. His pastoral correspondence — collected after his death from the letters he sent to souls under his spiritual direction — returns again and again to the love that holds when the consolations are removed. He calls it the disinterested love of God, by which he means a love that has no interest in itself, no return it is reaching for, no felt sweetness it is trying to keep. Fénelon was not naive about how rare this love is, or how slowly it forms in a soul. He simply knew that the removal of the consolations is the school in which it forms, and that the woman in the dry season is, whether she knows it or not, sitting in the very classroom in which the love survives loss is being taught. The Everspring Dry Season Devotional was built as a daily home for that classroom — one short page per evening, one slow honest sentence, one return to the God who is still in the room when the warmth has gone. For now, the Fénelon text.
The removal, named
The removal usually does not arrive with a label. Sometimes it is a person — a child grown distant, a mother gone, a friendship that quietly ended. Sometimes it is a season of ministry that closed without warning. Sometimes it is the felt nearness of God Himself — the warmth in the chair, the verse that used to leap off the page, the sweetness that used to attend the quiet time and has, for months now, simply not been there. The woman who has been faithful for years arrives at the removal with a confused tenderness. The God she loved seems to have moved the furniture in the room while she was praying.
Fénelon’s first move is to refuse the panic. The removal is not punishment. The removal is purification. The Spirit, working in the soul that has loved God truly but with the natural admixture of attachment to His gifts, is doing the slow work of separating the love of the Giver from the love of what He gave. The dry season is not the absence of God. The dry season is the presence of God in a form the woman has not yet learned to recognise — His nearness operating underneath the felt nearness, His love operating without the consolation, His teaching her, through loss, the love that does not need anything back.
The first passage: 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
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice what Fénelon takes for granted. The uncertainties are not removed. The woman in disinterested love does not arrive at certainty as the prize. She arrives at peace though surrounded by uncertainties, which is a different and harder thing. The dry season does not lift on this side of the page. The removed consolation does not return on Tuesday. What changes is the soul’s posture inside the uncertainty — and the change is abandon ourselves to them, which is the language Fénelon uses, again and again, for the absolute surrender the disinterested love of God requires.
The line for the woman holding the loss is we abandon ourselves to them, imploring his mercy according to our attainments in confidence, sacrifice, and absolute surrender. The phrase according to our attainments is the gentle one. Fénelon is not asking for a sudden mystical capacity she does not have. He is asking for the surrender she is presently able to offer, however small, with the understanding that the capacity for surrender grows in the practice of surrendering. The woman in the dry season does not have to produce a finished disinterested love. She has to abandon herself, today, according to her present attainments, and trust the slow forming of the rest.
The second passage: lose sight of 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 this one twice.
This is the high water mark of Fénelon’s pure-love teaching, and it is the passage the woman in the season of loss is most ready to hear. The disinterested love survives loss precisely because the self has been forgotten — not despised, not erased, but lifted off the centre of the soul’s attention, so that the loss, when it comes, does not destroy the structure. The woman whose love of God was organised around her own felt comfort cannot survive the removal of the comfort without crisis. The woman whose love has been slowly re-centred — take part with Thee and shine, O God, against ourselves and ours — can survive the same removal in peace though surrounded by uncertainties, because the centre of her devotion was never her own felt warmth in the first place.
We must love Thee without loving self except in and for Thee. The phrase is the whole of Fénelon’s pastoral teaching in twelve words. The self is allowed to be loved — but only in God and for God, not in itself, not for itself, not as the secret beneficiary of the devotional life. When the self has been lowered into this in and for Thee posture, the loss of the consolation is grievous but not destabilising. The God who removed the comfort is the God whose love the soul has been learning, slowly, to want for itself.
For the daily home this slow re-centring needs, the Everspring Dry Season Devotional holds a short page for the evening turning of the heart — one honest sentence, one slow lifting toward Him without requiring the warmth back — structured for the woman whose love is being taught to survive what has been removed.
The somatic — the open hand
Pause here. Sit somewhere quiet. The woman holding a loss carries the holding in her body — the small clench in the hands, the slight tightening across the chest, the bracing in the shoulders that says I will not be moved by this, I will hold what I had.
Let the hands fall open in your lap, palms upward. Let the chest soften. Let one slow inhale come in, and one slow exhale go out. The body of disinterested love is the open-handed body, not the closed-fisted one. You are not letting go of the love. You are letting go of the felt sweetness as the proof of the love.
Stay there for thirty seconds. Then continue reading.
The open hand does not solve the grief. It does, quietly, signal to the soul that the grief is being held in surrender rather than in clenching. The Spirit can work in an open hand more easily than in a closed one. The disinterested love forms, in part, through the small daily un-clenching the woman in the dry season practices at the chair.
The third passage: the disinterested vigilance
“If, then, we never lost sight of the presence of God, we should never cease to watch, and always with a simple, lovely, quiet and disinterested vigilance; while, on the other hand, the watchfulness which is the result of a desire to be assured of our state, is harsh, restless, and full of self.”
— François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
The third passage names the quality of the love that survives loss. Simple, lovely, quiet and disinterested vigilance. Each word is doing work. Simple — not elaborate, not constructed, not held up by spiritual technique. Lovely — gentle, gracious, full of beauty rather than effort. Quiet — not striving, not arguing with the dryness, not demanding the consolation back. Disinterested — without interest in its own state, without the constant self-checking that asks am I close to Him, am I far from Him, am I doing this right.
Fénelon contrasts it sharply with the watchfulness that is the result of a desire to be assured of our state, is harsh, restless, and full of self. This is the watchfulness the woman in the dry season is most tempted toward — the harsh inward inspection, the restless checking of her own warmth, the anxious counting of the consolations she does and does not have. Fénelon, with the patience of the spiritual director he was, refuses her this watchfulness. The disinterested love does not check itself. It looks at Him. The looking is the love. The state of the looking is His to attend to. The woman is freed from the exhausting work of monitoring her own devotion, and the freedom is itself a piece of the disinterested love of God forming in her.
Three small returns
If you take nothing else from Spiritual Progress, these three returns are the spine of the love-that-survives-loss posture.
The first return is the open-handed sit — five minutes in the chair with the palms open, not asking the consolation back, not demanding the warmth, simply abandoning yourself to whatever the day’s surrender is.
The second return is the one honest evening sentence — written by hand, naming the loss without dressing it up. Today He felt far. Today the verse did not lift. Today I miss what was given. The honesty is itself a small surrender.
The third return is the one slow petition — Lord, let me love Thee without needing the warmth back today. Said once, in the morning. The disinterested love forms by the small daily repetition of this petition, not by sudden mystical breakthrough.
(For the sibling readings in the Pure Love cluster, what Fénelon meant by Pure Love of God walks the foundational distinction between loving God for who He is and for what He gives, Fénelon on Loving God Without Feeling It walks the will-led love that holds when the warmth withdraws, and Why Fénelon Said Most Christian Devotion Is Self-Love walks the secret seam of self-interest that the removal of the consolations is, in part, sent to dissolve. If the language of abiding has been the way you have framed this season, what Andrew Murray meant by abide in Christ and Andrew Murray on Christ as the indwelling life walk the parallel teaching from the South African pastoral tradition.)
What changes, slowly
The loss does not become less. The consolation does not necessarily return. What changes is the soul’s relationship to what was removed. The woman who has lived for some months in the slow practice of abandoning herself, according to her present attainments finds, in time, that the love she was afraid she did not have was being formed in her precisely through the loss. The disinterested love of God is not a love she manufactured. It is a love the Spirit worked into her, under the silence, while she was learning to dwell in peace though surrounded by uncertainties. The woman comes out of the dry season — eventually, in His timing — with a love that is no longer dependent on what He gives. The next removal, when it comes, does not destabilise her in the same way. The love has been taught to survive loss.
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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This article continues the Fénelon reading library on Everspring Press — slow contemplative readings of the French spiritual director’s letters, with the matched journals at the centre of the practice. Everspring is preparing reprints of Fénelon’s letters, including Spiritual Progress, for the woman whose consolations have been removed and whose love is, slowly, being taught to hold.
