What inner prayer is, and what false emptiness is, or is not.

The Eleventh Letter.

What inner prayer is, and what false emptiness is, or is not.

Dear brother!

I have not been able to answer sooner than now. You desire to know the difference between inner prayer and the false emptiness, or nature-stillness. I ask, and have asked God, that He would instruct you in this — keeping you from the latter, and leading you into the former through the Spirit of Jesus, as the true Master of prayer. Do you only enroll yourself with this Master as a true child of the heart, and trust Him that He will not let you go astray, since you would follow Him from the heart.

As for me, I grow ever more unwise, and have myself ever less in my own power, to be able to say and write how and what and when I would; so my answer, too, may perhaps content you little.

Inner prayer is the drawing-near to God as present in our heart, through inward devotion and the heart's inclinings, and a remaining before Him, with Him, in Him, according as the soul stands. In this the soul is more or less active, according to her state, and as God prevents her; and so she has at one time relish, at another time dryness and suffering, as is well known. In the beginning her activities are throughout more vehement, coarser, more various and manifold, and are often repeated. Gradually (if the soul endures) the activities of her devotion and heart-inclinings become gentler, more inward, more general and more uniform, till at last they seem to need no repetition — indeed, to lose themselves altogether — because God becomes ever more the chief Worker in the soul, until she lives no more, but only Christ in her. The Spirit of Jesus is the Teacher and Guide in inner prayer, to whose leading one must entrust oneself childlike, and follow Him without looking about. He touches our love and our heart's inclinings, and gives us His drawing to experience, through a secret, tender inclining or stretching-out of our longing toward the ground — that is, toward God our origin. Had we not this drawing, and did we not follow it, we should never come to God; we cannot give it to ourselves — it is grace; but we can very much cover it, hinder it, and resist it, when we scatter ourselves too much and needlessly from devotion, or even let our love and heart's inclinings be held and dragged away by other objects. It is perhaps not needful for you now that I should touch on hiddener hindrances.

From this you presumably grasp what the false emptiness is. He, namely, is in a false emptiness who either at prayer lets his devotion and heart's inclinings flutter about, knowingly and willingly, and go out to other objects; or else, secondly, sets his thoughts indeed in a certain kind of withdrawal and forgetting of other objects, but leaves heart and will cleaving to the created, and does not really give himself over to God, and turn himself to Him — in which case (because of a certain natural dullness or sluggishness into which one sinks) one does not always notice that one has other things for one's object; yet neither has one God and the divine for one's object, which one does not particularly desire or await either. Yet a third kind of false emptiness is when one abandons prayer altogether, and under a deceiving pretext of passivity, or God-resignedness, or abandonment, lives confidently on into the day, letting both heart and senses go out into the creature and into multiplicity, wherever they will. Such kinds of emptiness and stillness must and can very easily be avoided by a soul that gives ear to the voice of grace and of the Spirit within her.

But when the dear God will make us His friends and heart-children, then He spoils for us all multiplicity of meditations, or intelligible reflections, especially at prayer. Nor can one any longer say to the Lord, and desire of Him, so many and various things after one's own devising. Everything unites and turns itself to one general and love-full devotion to the inward nearness of God, before whom one must keep holiday and be silent. One finds nothing to say, or only, perhaps, a brief word of love. In this unfeigned being-still one finds a hidden well-being, without comprehending its cause. One has been nourished without knowing how one came by the food, and so forth. Now when the like takes place in you, dear brother, do not let the temptation confuse you, as though you stood in a false emptiness — as happens to many souls. It is a way that leads the docile soul to contemplation, to God's indwelling, yes to oneness with Him, and brings unspeakable goods with it.

Neither is this a false emptiness: when one senses nothing at all agreeable in the devotion of faith and inclination toward the inwardly-near God, but in its stead only dryness and bareness; or when, besides, the intelligible and sensible part presses and covers the mind with a thousand scattered fantasies and other uproars. One despises this, and bears it with quiet resignedness: the spirit — the mind — which has nothing to do with all that, remains in its place and at its work, as undisturbed as may be; it does as a little child does which, disturbed in its sweet sleep at its mother's breasts by pain or by tumult, begins again to move its lips to suck, that sucking it may sink back into its former rest. I mean: the soul renews herself, in a true but quiet manner, in her faith in the inward nearness of her God, in love-full devotion to Him, in the whole giving of herself to Him. She testifies to Him by an act of love, or a love-word, that she would have nothing but Him alone; or else she puts forth an act of adoration, of glorifying, of good pleasure in this most perfect Good, and so forth — or whatever the mind is first turned to and finds itself best in: all, however, as said, in an unfeigned, quiet, unconfused manner, to see whether the soul might find her former rest and nourishment again. If God is not pleased to grant this after some attempt, then one must know and believe that the quiet suffering of dryness and uproars, and the sweet union with God's will, is a very good prayer. One must indeed take great care not to give knowing occasion to any such dryness by needless distractions through the day, or by actual unfaithfulness; but should even this have happened, the soul must simply confess it with humiliation, and for the rest conduct herself exactly as if she had not occasioned it.

Here I will let the matter rest, without touching on various other kinds of prayer, or leadings, which to the unpracticed might have the look of a false stillness or emptiness; since, as I said at the outset, the soul's own repeated workings lose themselves more and more with faithful progress, and are as it were overcome by the working of God and changed into His uniform life. For either the workings of God in the soul are perceptible — and then she has no scruple in yielding herself passively to them, and in not hindering Him by her own doing; or God has the soul already so firmly in His hand that she gladly lets Him be Master over her workings. And as for the states of purification and inner suffering: there the soul adapts herself as well as she can; she has patience, she suffers, she loves, and does on the whole as has already been said above.

In short: will you practice the inward prayer with me, and be secured against all false emptiness? Then let your prayer go paired with a constant denial of the created and of all your self, according to the direction of the Spirit and of providence, that you may love God purely and be given up to Him alone. Avoid also all diffuseness and needless distraction in the senses, thoughts, business, company, and conversations, that you may not be mis-formed and drawn off, but may walk with God and His presence, and become perfect after His heart, as a true child of Abraham — whereto I wish you and myself all grace out of the fullness of Jesus, and His precious Spirit for an undeceiving Guide.

Dear brother! I write much more, and otherwise, than I had intended. You have cause to wonder at my boldness, that I, in my great unwisdom and littleness, write of things which you can find described, with much light and unction, by many enlightened souls. Trust me and my writing no further than you find it agreeing with them. Yet I believe, for all that, that I was meant to write you this. Pray for me! I wish to do the like. May Jesus live in your soul! — in whom, greeting and kissing you, I remain

Your bound fellow-brother.

Mülheim, the 1st of July 1740.

P. S. There comes to mind, on this matter of the false emptiness, that Madame Guyon in her writings made an edifying verse on a certain emblem, in which among other things the soul is pictured lying on its back and wanting, at the same time, to pray. Her little rhyme upon it, faithfully turned into German, runs thus:

So lukewarm in the faith, so sluggish toward prayer, Can never please my Lord and Master. Learn wiser conduct of thy days, And serve with better earnest the most high Majesty! This is the false repose; this being-still deceives. Far otherwise go God's own ways. One runs after the Bridegroom; the heart is fresh and light. One follows Him unturning on the thorn-filled path. On love, and on the cross, we lean, on these alone; For such are the ways God strikes out. The other is devotion's mask, no more — A dead image and show of piety, In truth mere self-deceit and dullness. So serves one not God; one follows nature.

German

Der elfte Brief.

Was das innere Gebet, und was falsche Ledigkeit oder keine falsche Ledigkeit sey.

Lieber Bruder!

Ich habe nicht eher können antworten, als jetzt. Du verlangst den Unterscheid zu wissen, zwischen dem inneren Gebet und der falschen Ledigkeit oder Natur-Stille: Ich bitte und habe GOtt gebeten, daß Er dich darin unterweise, dich bewahrende vor dem Letzteren, und dich einführende in das Erstere durch den Geist JEsu …

— Opening lines of the original German. The complete transcription of all 605 letters appears in the forthcoming Encounter Press critical edition; Brief 1 is shown in full as a sample.

German text: public domain (1773–75 first edition / 1845 Gesammelte Schriften).