"I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
Php 3:10-14
"a prayer of the heart, which everyone is capable of, and not of reasonings which are the fruits of study, or exercise of the imagination, which, in filling the mind with wandering objects, rarely settle it; instead of warming the heart with love to God." [1]
In this practice she found grace to overcome certain aspects of her sinful nature, but the strength of vanity coupled with the distractions of the age in which she lived drew her away from prayer at which point she fell into a morass of indifference and indevotion. She testified later that:
"I left the fountain of living water when I left off prayer...I began to seek in the creature what I had found in God. He left me to myself, because I first left Him. It was His will by permitting me to sink into the horrible pit, to make me feel the necessity I was in of approaching Him in prayer." [2]
In this state at the age of 16 she entered into what was essentially an arranged marriage to Jacques Guyon, lord du Chesnoy - a man 22 years her senior. She found her marriage to be a place of extreme persecution and humiliation, due to the contrary temper of her mother-in-law, and the somewhat melancholy and volatile nature of her husband. Despite her best attempts at devotion to her husband and her own parents, she found herself a subject of criticism and persecution from all sides. She tells that the Lord used this experience to crush her pride and turn her back to Himself as a source of refuge and strength. Finding nothing of value in the world, and despairing of herself, she returned to her earlier pursuit of God.
She was encouraged in this pursuit by the example of an exile who came to live at her father's house. She describes her as a woman of true piety and inward devotion, who spoke to her about the simplicity of inward prayer. Although Guyon did not understand much of what she was told, she found the woman's life to be a compelling example:
"I observed on her countenance something which marked a great enjoyment of the presence of God. By the exertion of studied reflection and thoughts I tried to attain it, but to little purpose. I wanted to have, by my own efforts, what I could not acquire except by ceasing from all my efforts." [3]
Encouraged by this woman's example and the exhortation of one of her cousins - a missionary to Cochin China - she spoke to her father of her desire to love God and her inability to do so. In response, her father arranged a meeting between her and a Franciscian friar whom God had called to that part of France for the purpose (so he believed) of accomplishing to conversion of some nobleman in the area. She related to him the difficulties she was suffering in prayer and her desire to love God, and he replied by telling her that her difficulties arose from seeking outside of herself what she already had within; that if she turned to seek God within her heart, she would find Him there. Those words were like a dart penetrating her soul. She writes:
"I felt a very deep wound, a wound so delightful that I desired not to be cured. These words brought into my heart what I had been seeking so many years. Rather, they discovered to me what was there, and which I had not enjoyed for want of knowing it...He had given me an experience of His presence in my soul; not by thought or any application of the mind, but as a thing really possessed after the sweetest manner...Thy love, O my God, flowed in me like a delicious oil, and burned as a fire which was going to devour all that was left of self. I was suddenly so altered that I was hardly to be known either by myself or others...those faults...disappeared, being consumed like chaff in a great fire.
...My love became a prayer of rejoicing and possessing, devoid of all busy imaginations and forced reflections; it was a prayer of the will, and not of the head. The taste of God was so great, so pure, unblended and uninterrupted, that it drew and absorbed the power of my soul into a profound recollection [4] without act or discourse. I had now no sight but of Jesus Christ alone. All else was excluded, in order to love with the greater extent, without any selfish motives or reasons for loving." [5]This state is one which Guyon describes as "the union of the powers." In it, the union of the will with God causes self-will gradually to die, leaving the soul emptied of everything of its own - understanding, emotion, or intent - in order to subject itself to the purifying work of the cross administered by the Holy Spirit. The submission and love of the soul for God causes the senses to literally 'starve to death'[6] because the spirit, being constrained by love from within, is unable to indulge them, much like the state of detachment which Teresa de Avila wrote about a century earlier. Guyon describes this state of recollection in terms of Paul's experiences in 2 Cor 4:10 and Gal 2:20 of bearing around in his body the dying of the Lord Jesus and of living no longer, but letting Christ live through him. The ultimate end of it is the actual experience in the soul of being dead and hidden with Christ in God; this is her description of the state of divine union.
The profound manifestation in her life of the loving presence of God lasted for approximately eight years. She reports a twofold crucifixion which took place in her over that period of time. The first ocurred through the redoubled scorn, persecution, and ridicule of her family and friends, unable to understand her rapt attention to God and withdrawal from the pleasures of the world on the one hand and the external devotional practices of the church on the other. Whereas the combination of these things had previously driven her to bitterness and despair, the power of the inward attraction to the Lord made these persecutions easy to bear. During this period of time she was also afflicted with smallpox which, brutally disfiguring her appearance, became a source of rejoicing to her, for, as she put it, "the hopes of [the soul's] liberty, by the loss of that beauty, which had so frequently brought me under bondage [to vanity]...this total deprivation of what had been a snare to my pride and to the passions of men...rendered me so satisfied, and so united to God, that I would not have changed my condition for that of the most happy prince in the world." By the end of those eight years, this and other exterior trials, rendered her entirely indifferent to the opinions of men, and the desires of her fleshly nature. Through this period God granted her such a peace and purity of soul that even her detractors confessed that it was apparent that she never left the presence of God.
The second crucifixion she experienced was an interior one in which the Lord mercilessly purified the inner desires and motives of her soul. Whereas before her sanctification had proceeded by means of her own self-examination and external self-denial, now she found herself in the midst of a literal fulfillment of the prayer in Psalm 139:33-34. As she put it:
"Divine love so enlightened my heart, and so scrutinized into its secret springs, that the smallest defects became exposed...It was not that I was particularly attentive over myself, for it was with [difficulty] that I could look at all at myself. My attention toward God was without intermission...The manner in which God corrects His chosen...is an internal burning, a secret fire sent from God to purge away the fault...it is impossible to conceive how dreadful it is. Bear it passively, nor seek to satisfy God by anything we can do ourselves...this requires great firmness and courage." [7]
It was in this season of internal purification, initiated, conducted, and consummated by the grace and sovereign operation of God, that the sins of her youth were gradually consumed and her soul gradually transformed in the likeness of Christ. Then, in 1673, this period of purgation having run its course, the Lord plunged her for into an experience classically referred to as the Night of the Spirit.
"is woven of the fine threads of the self-life, the hyphenated sins of the human spirit. They are not something we do, the are something we are, and therein lies both their subtlety and their power...it seems actually to feed upon orthodoxy and is more at home in a Bible conference than in a tavern. Our very state of longing after God may afford it an excellent condition under which to thrive and grow....In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed...Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus, and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free." [8]
Guyon, in her book "Union with God", describes this experience in a similar manner:
"A man's will is still very much part of the man himself, however good and however honorable. These, too must be destroyed that the will of God alone may remain. Everything born of the will of the flesh, everything that comes out of even the good will of man needs to be brought into complete death. When this happens, nothing but the will of God is left. When the old will has been completely extinguished, then God's will begins to take its place. Gradually, the Lord's will changes the human will into faith itself...The soul is in union with God when the life of the soul is vanished." [9]
The mystic theologians liken the dark night of the soul to the experience of Jesus on the cross when He suffered utter abandonment by the Father. In His incarnation, Jesus acted as a will subject to and in concert with the Father; perfectly submitted, but retaining a degree of separation due to the fallen Adamic nature endemic to the incarnation. The crucifixion destroyed the nature which was separated from God, and in His resurrection, He returned to His eternal position of unbroken union with God. The crucifixion and resurrection of our spirits with Jesus by which we are born again begins the process of sanctification - the crucifixion of our souls - which, when consummated, leads us to a similar state of unbroken communion with God. It is the difference between possessing God and being possessed by Him.
During this dark night, Guyon found herself completely alienated from the God from whom she had formerly derived her sustenance. Heaven seemed to be shut to her, and she reports that she lost all ability to pray or practice any virtue, be it internal or external. This apparent coldness of heart and inability to do anything pleasing to the Lord or to men filled her with misery. Though she never ceased to desire to see and know nothing except Jesus Christ alone, her apparent inability to pursue and encounter God added to the pain of that separation. During that time her husband passed away and she received a letter from her spiritual director - Father Pre La Combe - telling her that the Lord had called her to Geneva (at that time the stronghold of Protestant Calvinism). Following eight years of desolation, on Magdalene's day, 1680, the Lord delivered her from the dark night and into the first stages of unbroken divine union. She says,
"I found myself as much raised above nature as before I had been depressed under its burden. I was inexpressibly overjoyed to find Him, who I thought I had lost forever, returned to me again with unspeakable magnificence and purity. It was then, O God, that I found again in Thee with new advantages, in an ineffable manner, all I had been deprived of; the peace I now possessed was all holy, heavenly, and inexpressible. All I Had enjoyed before was only a peace, a gift of God, but now I received and possessed the God of Peace...the apostle Paul tells us, that 'the sufferings of this life are not to be compared with the glory that is prepared for us.' How true is that of this life! One day of this happiness was worth more than years of suffering." [10]
Shortly after this she received permission from the Bishop of Geneva to join a convent of the New Catholic[11] order where she was joined by Father La Come. Her going there, however, around a great outcry in France, led by Father de la Mothe - her elder brother. This, in conjunction with resentment of the interior piety which Guyon practiced and taught to the other nuns at the convent led the Bishop of Geneva to expel her from that city. She returned to the city of Turin in France where the Lord used her to mentor a large number of people in the inward walk with the Lord. Her autobiography reports a wide range of miraculous healings, verdicts, and insights into the scripture which the Lord was pleased to accomplish through her in that time.
Shortly thereafter, in 1685, she wrote an exposition on the internal sense of the scriptures, and a book entitled "A Short and Easy Method of Prayer". This book was an expansion of an earlier tract which she had written on internal prayer, dedicated to "those dear, simple followers of Jesus Christ who are not qualified for intensive research but who, nonetheless, desire to be wholly given to God." Drawn from the experiences of her own life, it presented (as it's title implies) a simple way by which even the most common Christian could move from a life of formalism to an experience of the inward presence of Jesus Christ. This book became wildly popular within France, passing through six editions in 20 years. Unfortunately, the revolutionary view it expressed [recall that for the past 400 years, that kind of experience had been progressively restricted to only the most pious monastics] aroused a great deal of opposition, which ended in her leaving Grenoble for Paris in 1686.
I welcome, then, with heart sincere,
The cross my Saviour bids me take:
That's borne or suffered for His sake:
Guyon's autobiography is published by Moody Press (1-800-678-6928).