Fénelon on Trusting God With What You Cannot Fix
⏱ 11 min read
There is a situation you cannot fix and you cannot stop trying to fix it. The fixing has become its own small daily exhaustion — the running-through of the same five scenarios at four in the morning, the rehearsed conversations you will never have, the small repeated lifts of the same impossible weight. The trying is producing nothing except the trying itself, and you know it, and you cannot put it down.
François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose letters of spiritual direction were gathered after his death into Spiritual Progress, wrote across his pastoral life to women and men holding the same kind of unfixable weight. His pastoral move, gently repeated, was to reframe the question. The trouble, he said, is not that the saint has not yet found the right approach to fixing the situation. The trouble is that she has been trying to trust God on the far side of the fixing, as if trust were the consolation that would arrive once the situation eased. Fénelon’s whole correction is that trust is not the result of surrender. Trust is the ground of it. The saint who has learned to fenelon trust god with what you cant fix has discovered, in the holding of the weight, that the ground was there all along. The Everspring Prayer Journal for Women was built as the daily small home for that discovery. For now, the slow read of Fénelon.
The fixing that has become its own exhaustion
The unfixable situation has a particular weight in the saint’s day. It does not occupy the foreground — the work goes on, the household runs, the relationships continue — but it sits as a small permanent presence in the background, and every quiet moment that opens is immediately filled by the running-through of it again. The drive home becomes the fixing. The shower becomes the fixing. The first ten minutes of waking become the fixing. The mind has built, around the unfixable thing, a small ceaseless mechanism that produces no resolution but cannot, by its own efforts, stop.
The saint suspects that the way out is to try harder to trust God with the situation. She has been told, in various sermons and devotional books, that trust is the right posture. She has tried to assume it. She has knelt and said the words. The trust has not arrived as a felt reality, and she has concluded, quietly, that her faith must be too small.
Fénelon’s pastoral correction is gentle and structural. The trust is not a felt reality the saint is supposed to produce on top of her existing anxiety. The trust is the ground underneath the anxiety, which the saint has not yet learned to stand on because she has been trying to manufacture it as an emotional state. The work, in Spiritual Progress, is not to feel more trust. The work is to stop, slowly, the small daily fixing — and to discover, in the stopping, that the ground was always holding her.
The first passage: the simple view of faith
“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 phrase to sit with is the simple view of faith. Fénelon is naming a posture distinct from the strained interior effort the saint has been making. The simple view is the unstrained look — the soul’s small turn toward God that does not first work itself up into an emotional state of trust. The look is plain. The faith underneath the look is plain. The trust is not produced; it is exposed, by the simple turn, as the ground that was already there.
This is the line for the saint exhausted by the small daily fixing. The fixing is the opposite of the simple view. The fixing is the strained view, the elaborate view, the view that runs through every scenario in case the right one is the one that unlocks the situation. The simple view puts the elaborate one down. It does not ignore the unfixable thing. It looks past the unfixable thing toward God Himself — raise our hearts to God — and the looking past is the practice of trust the saint has been trying to manufacture.
Sweet and peaceful dependence. Notice that Fénelon does not write brave dependence or heroic dependence. He writes sweet and peaceful. The trust that is the ground of surrender is the restful kind, not the effortful kind. The unfixable situation is being held by the Spirit of grace, not by the saint’s small daily mechanism, and the recognition of this is what the simple view produces. The fixing eases not because the situation has changed but because the holding has, quietly, been returned to the One who was already doing it.
The second passage: courting peace among 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 twice. Notice the verb pairing in the second clause — we dwell in peace though surrounded by uncertainties.
Fénelon is naming the precise interior fact the saint holding the unfixable situation needs. Dwell in peace. Not find peace, eventually, when the uncertainties resolve. Dwell in peace though surrounded by them. The peace is available inside the uncertainties, not on the far side of them. The whole pastoral structure of trust, in Fénelon, depends on this. If peace were only available after the uncertainties cleared, the saint holding a permanently unresolved situation would have no access to it. Fénelon’s quiet insistence is that peace is the dwelling that is offered to the saint who abandons herself to the judgments of God — which is to say, who has stopped requiring the situation to resolve before she will stop holding it.
The judgments of God do not affright us. The line is gentle but exact. The saint who has been trying to fix the unfixable situation has been quietly afraid of the judgments of God on it — afraid that He will leave the situation as it is, afraid that the resolution she has been bargaining for will not arrive, afraid that the worst version of the unresolved thing is the one He has already chosen. The trust Fénelon is naming includes the recognition that even the worst version is being held by His mercy, and that the saint’s abandonment of herself into His judgments is the small interior act in which the unfixable thing is, at last, released.
The release is not the same as resignation. The saint is not consenting to a worst outcome. She is consenting to the holding of the situation by the One whose judgments she has, until now, been trying to manage. The fixing was an attempt to pre-empt His judgments. The trust is the small daily decision to let His judgments stand, and to dwell in peace inside whatever they turn out to be.
For the daily home this slow release needs, the Everspring Prayer Journal for Women holds a short evening page — a place for the saint to write the unfixable thing, hand it across, and return tomorrow to the same small handing without the production of any new resolution.
The somatic — the un-clenched hands
Pause here. Sit somewhere quiet. Notice your hands. The saint holding an unfixable situation almost always carries it in the hands — the small chronic curl of the fingers, the half-closed fists in the lap, the grip on something invisible.
Let the hands open. Palms upward, on the lap, on a table, on the arms of a chair. Let the fingers be entirely uncurled. Let one slow inhale come in, and one slow exhale go out. Notice that nothing has been lost. The unfixable situation is still unfixable. The hands have simply stopped holding it for sixty seconds, and the situation has not deteriorated in that minute. It is being held by the One who has been holding it the whole time.
Stay there for half a minute. Then continue reading.
The un-clenched hands are the smallest physical version of the trust Fénelon is naming. The saint who cannot un-clench her hands cannot, at the interior level, release the situation either. The two are the same posture. The daily small practice of palms-upward teaches the body what the soul is being asked to learn — that the holding can be given back, repeatedly, throughout the day, and that the situation continues to be held without the saint’s small ongoing effort.
The third passage: calm before action
“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
The third passage names the order of operations. When you shall have become calm, then do.
The fixing-saint has had the order backwards. She has been trying to do the right thing in order to become calm — believing that the moment the situation eases, the peace will arrive. Fénelon reverses the order. Calm first, then action. The action that flows out of the recollected soul is the action nearest the will of God; the action that flows out of the agitated soul is, almost always, the small fixing-mechanism that has been producing nothing.
This is the line for the saint who is afraid that releasing the situation means doing nothing about it. Fénelon does not ask her to do nothing. He asks her to wait until the agitation has eased, until the soul has recollected itself into its proper peaceful dependence, and then to take only the small step that is nearest the will of God respecting her. The step may be a phone call. The step may be a refusal. The step may be a simple unhurried letter. But it is taken from the calm rather than from the agitation, and the difference is the whole pastoral point.
The saint who learns to fenelon trust god with what you cant fix is not the saint who has stopped acting on the situation. She is the saint whose action, when it comes, comes from the recollected ground rather than from the small daily mechanism. The acting is occasional. The trusting is constant. The constant trusting is the substrate the occasional acting flows out of.
Three small returns
If you take nothing else from Spiritual Progress, these three returns are the spine of the trust-as-ground posture:
The first return is the un-clenched hands — the small body practice of palms-upward, once or twice a day, until the body has learned that the situation can be released without it deteriorating in the minute of release.
The second return is the simple view of faith — the daily plain turn toward God that does not require the saint to first manufacture an emotional state of trust. The look is unstrained. The ground is already there.
The third return is the calm before action — the slow refusal to take the next step until the soul has recollected itself, and the willingness, then, to take only the step nearest the will of God respecting you.
(For the sibling readings in the surrender cluster: what Fénelon meant by abandonment to God’s will walks the foundational concept of abandonment as the disposition of the surrendered soul, Fénelon on the difference between abandonment and resignation names the loving release that is not grim, and why Fénelon said self-will hides in the holiest things walks the harder pastoral question of where the fixing-will quietly reasserts itself. If the bridge to the Reformed surrender tradition is the question, what Andrew Murray meant by absolute surrender and Andrew Murray on the surrendered will walk the same release from a different pastoral angle.)
What changes, slowly
The unfixable situation does not have to become fixable. Fénelon was not promising the saint that her trust would unlock a resolution. What changes is the substrate the saint stands on inside the unresolved thing. The trust that is the ground of surrender is the sweet and peaceful dependence that allows the saint to dwell in peace though surrounded by uncertainties — and the same situation, held by a soul whose hands are un-clenched and whose action flows from the recollected calm, stops producing the small daily exhaustion.
By month three of daily palms-upward and simple view, the four-in-the-morning running-through has eased, the fixing-mechanism has loosened, and the saint has begun to recognise that the situation is being held by the One whose holding does not require her small daily effort. To fenelon trust god with what you cant fix is, finally, this — the slow daily discovery that the ground was always under you, and the small interior decision to stand on it rather than on the fixing.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women.
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Everspring Press is preparing slow reprints of François Fénelon’s letters, including Spiritual Progress, for the contemporary reader holding an unfixable weight that the French archbishop, three centuries ago, knew exactly how to direct.
