Introduction

My son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways. PROVERBS 23:26

Few writers on prayer have been so loved and so distrusted at the same time as Jeanne Guyon. In her own lifetime her little book on prayer was read in convents, drawing rooms and country parishes, and then burned, forbidden and argued over by the most powerful churchmen in France. She spent the best part of eight years in confinement, much of it in the Bastille, not for any crime but for the way she taught people to pray. Yet the book that caused the trouble has never gone away. Protestants who would have been horrified by her Catholic world have printed it, abridged it and pressed it on one another for three centuries. Quakers and Methodists, German Pietists and Chinese house-church believers have all found in it something they needed.

She was not a scholar or a nun. She was a wife married against her wishes at fifteen, a mother who buried children, a widow at twenty-eight with money and freedom, and then a travelling teacher of prayer with no office in the church at all. That is part of why she was feared. It is also part of why she was loved. She wrote for people who had been told, or had quietly concluded, that real prayer belonged to someone else.

The one thread

Her teaching can be summed up in the sentence that opens A Short and Easy Method of Prayer: “Prayer is nothing else but the application of the heart to God, and the interior exercise of love.” Everything else she wrote is that sentence worked out.

If prayer is the application of the heart, then it is not first a matter of words, techniques or learning, and it is open to everyone who has a heart — the ploughman as well as the bishop, the child as well as the theologian. If God is to be found by turning the heart towards Him, then He is near, not far; the kingdom of God is within, and the soul must learn to turn from the noise without to the presence within. If the heart is to be given, it must be given wholly: that is her abandonment. And if it is given wholly, God will take it at its word, purify it by the cross and the fire of His love, and draw it at last into a quiet and settled union with Himself.

Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. JAMES 4:8

That is the question to carry through these pages. Not, how much do I know about prayer? but, have I given God my heart, and am I learning to keep it turned towards Him?

How this book is arranged

After a chapter on her life, fifteen short chapters set out her teaching. The first group follows A Short and Easy Method of Prayer as a beginner would: what prayer is, praying the Scripture, how to begin, the prayer of simplicity and the silence in which it grows, and what to do with distraction and dryness. The second group takes up the inward life that grows from it: abandonment, the kingdom within, the death of self-will, the cross and the purifying fire, the right understanding of the Spirit’s action and our own, and pure love and union with God. The last group turns outward: guidance, prayer and the reform of life, peace under persecution, and the long reach of her books beyond the walls of her prison. A conclusion and a reader’s guide close the book.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. She would have wanted that. Her own book was written, she said, for a few Christians who wanted to love God with the whole heart, and she urged its readers not to argue about it but to make trial of it. Read a chapter at a time. Stop at the application points. Pray the prayer, or better, pray your own.

Where she must be read with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and Madame Guyon must be read with more care than most writers in this series. It is kinder to say so at the start.

First, her teaching was examined and censured by the church of her day, and the movement now called Quietism was condemned. Miguel de Molinos, the Spanish priest whose teaching gave the movement its name, was condemned at Rome in 1687; the conferences at Issy in 1694 and 1695 produced articles on the spiritual life, drawn up with her teaching in view, which Fénelon himself signed; and in 1699 the Pope censured her friend Fénelon’s defence of pure love. Some of the condemnation was political and some of it unjust. But not all of it was, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Second, her language of passivity, stillness and the ceasing of our own action can be misread — and has been — as permission to neglect Scripture, the ordinary means of grace, the fellowship of the church and plain obedience. She denied that she meant this, and her book says so more than once. But a teacher is responsible for the likely effect of her words as well as her intention, and we will mark the places where the balance tips.

Third, her doctrine of pure love, pressed to its limit, came near to saying that a soul should be indifferent even to its own salvation. Scripture never asks that of us. It commands us to seek, to hope and to lay hold of eternal life.

Fourth, much of what she wrote rests on her own experience — states of soul, inward impressions, a certainty that God was leading her in ways others could not see. Some of it is precious. Some of it cannot be tested, and she did not always welcome being tested.

Fifth, she was a devout Roman Catholic, and she lived and died one. Protestant readers who love her should not tidy her into an evangelical; Catholic readers should not forget that her own church condemned her. She deserves to be read as she was, fairly and whole.

So the counsel of this book is the counsel of Scripture:

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21

Where she is faithful — on the nearness of God, on prayer as the heart’s turning to Him, on reading slowly, on the uselessness of fighting distractions head on, on the cross as God’s workman, on loving God for Himself — receive it gladly and practise it. Where she presses beyond what is written, mark it and set it aside. You will lose nothing. She herself submitted what she wrote to the judgement of persons of experience and learning; she would not have asked you to swallow her whole.

A last word. She was not a heretic to be dismissed, nor a saint to be followed without thinking. She was a woman who loved God fiercely and suffered for it, and who said some of the most helpful things ever written about prayer alongside some that need correcting. If this companion does anything, it should send you back to her own small book, and through it to the God who, as she never tired of saying, is nearer to us than we are to ourselves.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Write down, honestly, what prayer is for you at present — a duty, a list, a habit, a delight, a struggle. Keep the page; you will return to it.

2. Ask yourself whether you have ever assumed that real prayer belongs to other, more spiritual people.

3. Decide now how you will read: one chapter a day or a week, with a Bible open beside it.

4. Get hold of A Short and Easy Method of Prayer, in the Ochorus library or elsewhere, and read it alongside this book.

5. Resolve to test what you read by Scripture, keeping what is good and setting aside what is not.

A PRAYER

Lord, You have asked for my heart, and I have offered You almost everything else.

I have said prayers without praying, and read about You without seeking You.

Teach me, through these pages and above all through Your Word, what it is to turn my heart to You and keep it there.

Keep me from swallowing any teacher whole, and keep me from refusing any truth that comes from You. Amen.