Songs in the Prison

And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto God: and the prisoners heard them. ACTS 16:25

Teaching is tested by trouble. It is one thing to write about abandonment to God in a comfortable house in Grenoble; it is another to live it in a cell in the Bastille. Madame Guyon wrote A Short and Easy Method of Prayer before her imprisonment. Within a few years she had the opportunity, which no one would choose, to find out whether it was true. By every account that has come down to us, she found that it was.

What she endured

The facts are sobering. From the end of 1695 she was held in confinement for most of the next seven years: at Vincennes, then in a house at Vaugirard, and from 1698 in the Bastille itself. She was questioned repeatedly by officials hostile to her. Her private life was picked over, and her enemies circulated charges of impropriety that were never proved. Her friend Fénelon was disgraced and sent away from court. And the churchman who led the case against her, Bossuet, published an account of her life designed to discredit her before all France. When she was finally released in 1703, she was in poor health and was sent to live under restriction for the rest of her days.

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. MATTHEW 5:11–12

The peace that survived

What those who knew her remembered, and what her own later writings show, is not bitterness but peace. She prayed in prison. She wrote verse in which the soul is content wherever God has placed it, because God is there. A poem long attributed to her, much loved in English, pictures the soul as a little bird shut in a cage, singing to the One who put it there. Whatever the exact history of that poem, it captures what her friends saw in her: a heart at rest in God in circumstances designed to break it.

Where did such peace come from? From exactly the teaching we have traced through this book. She had long believed that all that happens to us, except our own sin, comes to us from God’s hand. She had taught her readers to see even the commonest events in God and not in the creature. So when the creature — the jailer, the interrogator, the powerful bishop — did its worst, she looked past it to the hand that permitted it.

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. JOHN 14:27

She had written, too, that consolation is found only in the love of the cross and in complete abandonment. That had been a principle; now it became a practice. And she had written of God’s tender care for each soul, quoting the promise that though a mother might forget her nursing child, God would not forget His own. Her comment on that promise reads differently in the light of the Bastille: “Ah, words full of consolation! Who on hearing them can fear to abandon himself utterly to the guidance of God?”

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. ISAIAH 49:15

Not despair, not destroyed

Her peace was not the absence of suffering. She felt her confinement, her illness and the injustice of it. But she was, in Paul’s words, troubled but not distressed, persecuted but not forsaken.

We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:8–9

Nor did she hate her enemies. The New Testament pattern is the Lord Himself, who when He was reviled did not revile again, but committed Himself to the One who judges righteously. That was her way, as far as we can tell: not to curse, but to commit.

Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously. 1 PETER 2:23

Peace is not passivity

A careful reader will notice something else, and it guards her teaching from a misunderstanding. Peace under persecution did not mean silence about the truth. Before her arrest she had asked for her writings to be judged, and she assembled a long collection of passages from earlier spiritual writers to show that her teaching stood in an old tradition. She defended herself, sometimes at length. Paul, too, when unjustly accused, appealed to Caesar. Christians may seek justice, answer false charges and use lawful means to protect themselves and others, and still be abandoned to God.

It needs saying, too, that seeing God’s hand behind persecution never makes persecution right. Her jailers were not excused because God brought good out of what they did. Those of us who are free are commanded to remember those who are not.

Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body. HEBREWS 13:3

The test of a teaching

It is worth ending here with a simple observation. Madame Guyon’s teaching has been criticised on many grounds, some fair and some not. But it cannot be said that it failed her when it mattered. The woman who taught that God is found in the heart found Him there in a prison cell. The woman who taught abandonment was abandoned by almost everyone, and was not abandoned by God. Her little book asks what risk there can be in trusting God and abandoning ourselves to Him. Her life gives an answer.

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? ROMANS 8:35

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Think of the hardest circumstance you are in now. Try to see it, as she did, as permitted by God’s hand, while still naming any wrong in it as wrong.

2. Is there someone who has wronged you whom you are cursing in your heart? Commit them, and yourself, to Him who judges righteously.

3. Learn one hymn or psalm by heart this week, so that you have a song ready for the night.

4. Pray by name for a Christian imprisoned for their faith today, and find one practical way to support persecuted believers.

5. If you are being unjustly treated, consider what lawful means you might rightly use, and use them without bitterness.

A PRAYER

Lord, You were with Paul and Silas in the prison at midnight, and with Your servant in the Bastille.

Be with me in the places I did not choose, and give me a song there.

Keep me from bitterness against those who wrong me; let me commit myself to You who judge righteously.

Remember those in chains for Your name today, and let nothing separate them or me from Your love. Amen.