What Fénelon Said About the Christian Who Wants to Want God More
⏱ 9 min read
You do not desire God the way you used to, and what unsettles you most is that you no longer even desire that desire. The longing has not just cooled — it has slipped out of view, the way a small lamp burns down so gradually that you only notice the dimness on the evening you reach for the book and find you cannot read by it.
François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose Spiritual Progress still circulates in small editions for the kind of reader who needs a spiritual director rather than a preacher, wrote whole letters to souls in exactly this condition. He understood that the Christian life, after the first warm years, often arrives at a long stretch in which the fenelon wanting to want god problem becomes the central interior question — the wanting is gone, the wanting to want is gone, and the soul has begun to wonder, quietly, whether anything has been lost beyond noticing. Fénelon’s answer to that soul is the gentlest correction in the contemplative library: the very unease you feel about the missing desire is itself the desire, faintly registering. The Everspring Dry Season Devotional was built as the daily small home for that faint registering — one short page per evening, one quiet sentence, one slow return — so the soul has a place to sit while the desire is rebuilt under the dryness. For now, the Fénelon text.
The shape of the cooling
The cooling is rarely dramatic. There is no decisive evening on which you stop loving God. There is, instead, a long slow drift in which the small daily attachments of the soul — to comfort, to opinion, to the next small approval, to a habit that has become a quiet companion — begin, by their accumulation, to dim the lamp Fénelon was writing about. He named this drift in Spiritual Progress with the precision of a man who had directed hundreds of souls through it:
“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, more slowly, with attention to the verbs.
Obscures. Weighs down. Hinders. Become lukewarm. Forget. Grow in attachment. Fénelon is not describing a single moral failure. He is describing the slow gradient by which the soul that was once warm settles, over years, into a low-temperature Christianity it never chose. The small unconfessed fault, the small held opinion, the small bit of self-regard kept in a drawer — each on its own seems too modest to matter. Their accumulated effect, Fénelon says, is the lukewarmness you are now sitting inside.
This matters, for the fenelon wanting to want god question, because it locates the cooling somewhere the soul can actually reach. The desire has not disappeared into a metaphysical fog. The desire has been gradually dimmed by a hundred small things, and the small things can be — one at a time, slowly — returned to. The recovery is not a single grand re-conversion. It is the patient daily clearing of the small interior weights Fénelon was naming.
The line that meets the soul where it is
Here is the Fénelon move that distinguishes him from the preachers of the same century. He does not tell the cooled soul to whip up emotion. He tells her to come back, gently, to a simpler posture than the one she has been trying to perform:
“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. The simple view of faith. Sweet and peaceful dependence.
The soul that has lost the warm desire often tries to recover it by adding spiritual content — more reading, more disciplines, more attempted intensities of prayer. Fénelon’s counsel is the opposite. The warm desire returns first as a simple view, not as a recovered feeling. The Christian who wants to want God more is asked to drop, for now, the project of producing the feeling, and instead to raise the heart in the small, plain, unfeeling act of looking toward Him — and to dwell there, in peaceful dependence, without insisting that the warmth come back on a timetable.
This is the line for the lukewarm soul. The wanting to want is rebuilt not by force but by the quiet daily return of the eyes — a small upward look, undramatic, unaccompanied by any felt emotion, sustained over weeks. The desire is being rebuilt under the dryness while you are doing this. You will not feel it being rebuilt. You will only, some months later, notice that the lamp is burning more steadily than it was.
For the daily home that this kind of quiet rebuilding needs, the Everspring Dry Season Devotional holds a short page for the evening simple view and the morning return, structured for the soul whose desire has cooled and who needs a written room to sit in while the lamp re-lights. Not a programme. A page, on a chair, in a quiet hour, daily.
The somatic — the un-clenched chest
Pause here. Sit somewhere quiet for a moment. Notice the small clench the chest has been carrying — the held, slightly tight place under the breastbone that the cooled soul develops over months of low-grade self-rebuke. The clench is the body’s way of carrying the I should want God more sentence the mind has been repeating quietly all year.
Let the breath come a little lower than the clench. One slow inhale, drawn down past the held place. One slow exhale, released without effort. Sweet and peaceful dependence. The chest does not need to enforce the wanting. The wanting is being rebuilt elsewhere, in a quieter room than the chest can reach. Let the held place soften by a small amount. The somatic does not produce desire; it makes a body the desire is welcome to return to.
Stay there for thirty seconds. Then continue reading.
The line about the absence of feeling
The third Fénelon passage names, with unusual directness, the very thing the lukewarm soul is most afraid of — that the absence of emotional warmth is the proof of her cooling. Fénelon flatly disagrees:
“God does not call you by any lively emotions, and I heartily rejoice at it, if you will but remain faithful; for a fidelity, unsustained by delights, is far purer, and safer from danger, than one accompanied by those tender feelings, which may be seated too exclusively in the imagination.”
— François Fénelon, Spiritual Progress
This is the line to keep near the page. Fidelity, unsustained by delights, is far purer.
The soul that wants to want God more usually believes that the missing warmth is the missing faith — that the cooled feeling means the cooled relationship. Fénelon, with the experience of a spiritual director who watched many seasons in many souls, reframes the absence. The dry stretch in which faith is sustained without felt warmth is not a lesser faith. It is, in his quiet judgement, a purer one — because the soul is holding to God for who He is, rather than for the felt sweetness He sometimes gives. The wanting to want, persisted in across the dry stretch, is itself the faith Fénelon is calling purer.
This reframes the whole problem. The Christian who feels she has stopped wanting God is, at the very moment of the worry, wanting Him — because the worry itself is the soul’s protest against the cooling. The desire has not gone. The desire is registering as the unease. Fénelon’s pastoral move is to call that unease what it is — the beginning of the love returning — and to ask the soul not to despise the small unfelt fidelity that is, right now, the actual shape of her faith.
The slow companion to this same posture in the Reformed tradition is Andrew Murray, whose what Andrew Murray meant by abide in Christ walks the abiding-without-strain theme from a different angle, and Andrew Murray on Christ as the indwelling life holds the indwelling reality the cooled soul is still inside even when she does not feel it.
Three small returns
If you take nothing else from Spiritual Progress on this question, these three returns are the spine of the fenelon wanting to want god recovery:
The first return is the daily clearing minute — a small evening pause in which the soul, without dramatic self-examination, lets the day’s small weights be named and released. The lamp dims by accumulation. It re-brightens the same way.
The second return is the simple view in the morning — a single slow upward look toward Him, without feeling required, sustained for one minute before the day begins. The wanting is rebuilt by the small daily looking, not by produced emotion.
The third return is the honest fidelity sentence at the close of the day — I am still here. I am still holding on, however faintly. The faint holding is the faith. Fénelon would not have you call it anything smaller than that.
(For the sibling readings in this cluster: what Fénelon meant by pure love of God walks the love-for-who-He-is theme this article sits next to, Fénelon on loving God without feeling it walks the unfelt-fidelity question at greater length, and why Fénelon said most Christian devotion is self-love walks the gentle Fénelon correction to the self-regarding piety the cooled soul sometimes mistakes for warm faith.)
What changes, slowly
The lamp re-brightens by the small daily clearing and the small daily looking. The wanting comes back first as the steadied unfeeling fidelity, then as a small returning sweetness, then — in some seasons, after long patience — as the warm desire of the early years restored in a more grounded form. Fénelon does not promise a date. He only promises that the fenelon wanting to want god posture, persisted in across the dryness, is already the love returning, and that the soul who holds gently and faithfully through the unfelt stretch will find, in time, that the lamp was being trimmed the whole season she thought it was going out.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Dry Season Devotional.
Get Seven Days of Stillness — free
A free gift from Hayley Louisa Mark. A short devotional companion drawn from the 140-Day series — seven passages, seven contemplative practices, sent to your inbox over the coming week.
No noise. No spam. Unsubscribe whenever you wish.
This article sits inside the Fénelon reading library on Everspring Press — slow readings of the seventeenth-century French archbishop’s letters on the inner life, with the matched journals at the centre of the practice. Everspring is preparing reprints of Fénelon’s letters, including Spiritual Progress, for the soul whose desire is ready, slowly, to be rebuilt under the dryness.
