Quiet Down - Madame Guyon

1648–1717

Spirituality is dangerous. At least it seemed that way to church leaders in the late 1600s. Religion was about power and ritual. When writers and teachers promoted a personal experience of God’s presence, that could only spell trouble.

Jeanne-Marie Guyon was a French mystic, one of several proponents of practices that became known as Quietism. As you might expect, Quietism involved getting quiet before God, praying silently, listening to him, and communing with him in the stillness. Though Madame Guyon’s writings seem rather tame today, at that time the Catholic church was cracking down on some other Quietist teachers with unorthodox teachings, so Guyon suffered as well. In order to stay in the good graces of the church, she signed several retractions of her teachings, but she also kept sharing the insights that God was giving her. As a result, she was frequently chastised, confined to a convent for several years, and even locked up in the Bastille.

Several of her writings are still leading Christians into deeper devotional lives. A Short and Easy Method of Prayer is an unassuming guide to Christian contemplation. Her commentary on the Song of Songs explores what it means to be the bride of Christ. She also wrote a number of devotional poems, some translated by the hymn writer William Cowper, including one that starts like this:

My Lord, how full of sweet content; I pass my years of banishment!

Where’er I dwell, I dwell with Thee, in Heav’n, in earth, or on the sea.

“We should live in prayer,” she wrote, “as we do live through love.” For Guyon, prayer was not an activity, but a continual openness to God. God’s grace and sovereignty were important elements of Guyon’s teaching. We cannot hope to reach God with our own religious efforts; we can only receive what he gives us. This takes a quieting of the spirit and a submissive will. As she put it, “We should forget ourselves, and all self-interest, and listen and be attentive to the voice of God.”

Have your devotional times become a chore? Are you just trying to “be a good Christian” by going through your assigned prayer and reading? Then take Madame Guyon’s advice and quiet down, slow down, and just listen for what God gives you.

In him we live and move and have our being.

Acts 17:28, NIV