Conclusion

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

Fifteen chapters can make it look as though Madame Guyon taught a great many things. She taught one thing, and she taught it all her life: give God your heart. Prayer is the heart applied to Him. Praying the Scripture is the heart fed by His Word. The prayer of simplicity is the heart resting in His presence. Abandonment is the heart handed over and not taken back. The inward kingdom is the heart where He reigns. Silence is the heart listening. The death of self-will, the cross and the refining fire are God’s ways of making the heart wholly His. Pure love is the heart loving Him for Himself, and union is the heart one spirit with Him. Everything else in her writings — the images of rivers and ships, of gold and fire, of the bride and the Bridegroom — is that single appeal worked out.

It is an old appeal. Wisdom said it long before she did.

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

The danger of this book

A book about prayer carries a particular risk. The reader may enjoy reading about prayer and never pray. She saw this danger clearly. Again and again in her little book she breaks off her argument to say, in effect: stop reading and try it. Make trial of it, she urges; those who experience it will be the most certain of its truth.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. JAMES 1:22

So the plainest counsel is the one given in the other volumes of this series. Go back to the chapter that made you least comfortable, not the one you liked best. Take its application points and live with them for a month. Then take another. Above all, pray. Choose a time and a place. Open the Bible. Read slowly. Stop when a word touches you. Turn to God when your mind wanders. Keep coming when it is dry.

Two things to carry

First, turn your heart to God, and keep turning it. You will wander a thousand times. That does not matter nearly as much as returning a thousand and one. She said that as repeated acts form a habit, the soul learns to be turned to God as its settled condition. Begin with the acts. The habit will follow.

Second, give yourself to God wholly, and do not take yourself back. You have probably given yourself to Him before. Do it again, and when the next trouble comes, remember that you are no longer your own.

What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? 1 CORINTHIANS 6:19

A last word about her

We have been honest about the places where she must be read with care. Her language of passivity can be — and was — taken to excuse the neglect of Scripture, of the church’s worship and of plain obedience; the New Testament joins God’s working and ours, and never sets them against each other. Her doctrine of pure love, pressed to its limit, spoke of indifference even to one’s own salvation; Scripture calls us to seek it and lay hold of it with joy. Her claims about spiritual states rested heavily on her own experience, which cannot always be tested, and she trusted inward impressions further than is safe. Some of her language about the soul’s annihilation and union says more than Scripture says. And she was a devout Catholic whom Protestants must not remake in their own image, and whom Catholics must not forget their church once condemned.

The church of her day condemned Quietism, and not without reason: Molinos in 1687, the articles of Issy in 1695, the censure of Fénelon’s book in 1699 all addressed real dangers. But the same proceedings were bound up with jealousy, politics and cruelty, and she paid for them with years of her life. She was not a heretic to be dismissed. Nor was she a saint to be followed without thinking. She was a woman who loved God with a rare intensity, who taught ordinary people to pray when few would, and who was faithful in prison.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:7

None of these cautions has been raised to diminish her. They have been raised because her own teaching requires it. A message whose whole point is that God is all and we are nothing cannot be commended by pretending its messenger was without fault. She submitted her writings to the judgement of others. We have tried to do that, as fairly as we can.

What remains, when all the cautions are made, is a small book that has taught millions to pray. That is not a small thing. It may be that, as you close this companion and open her own pages, it will teach you too.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Return to the page you wrote at the start of this book about what prayer is for you. What would you write now?

2. Choose the one chapter that made you least comfortable, and work its application points for a month.

3. Set a daily time of prayer for the next forty days, and keep it whether it is sweet or dry.

4. Give yourself to God again, in plain words, and write the date somewhere you will see it.

5. Read A Short and Easy Method of Prayer through slowly, with the Bible open, weighing what she says.

A PRAYER

Lord, I have read about prayer, and I am capable of making even that a substitute for praying.

Keep me from it. I do not want to know about You; I want to know You.

Here is my heart. Take it, turn it to You, and keep it turned, in dryness and in sweetness, in freedom and in trouble.

Draw me, and I will run after You, until at last I see You face to face. Amen.