Surrender · “Let Go to Receive”
Abandonment
To make a wholehearted gift of oneself to God and then keep renewing it — letting go of self-will and anxious self-care moment by moment, accepting each event as within God’s will, and not ‘snatching back’ the gift once given.
In 5 lines: Make a real, whole gift of yourself and your concerns to God — then don’t snatch it back. Receive each moment as within His will. All day, the instant self-will or anxious grasping flares, let it go — “lose your own will in His.” Cast off the load of selfish care, outer affairs included. Renew the surrender continually; it’s a disposition, not a one-time act — and an inner release of control, never an excuse for passivity.
What it is
For Madame Guyon, abandonment (self-surrender) is the heart of the whole way — “the key to the inner court,” she says: whoever truly knows how to abandon himself “soon becomes perfect.” It is the continual giving-up of self-will and anxious self-management into the hands of God. You make a real, wholehearted donation of your whole existence to God; then — crucially — you do not snatch it back. From there it becomes a moment-by-moment disposition: receiving each event, inner and outer, as falling within God’s will and permission, “continually losing our own will in the will of God,” renouncing each self-centred inclination “as soon as it arises,” and “casting off all selfish care” so as to be wholly at the Divine disposal.
Where the Prayer of Simplicity is what you rest in, abandonment is what you do with your will — all day, in everything. (All Is One: it is surrender as a practice; Everything Happens in the Now: enacted in this present moment; The Inner Creates the Outer: attention is repeatedly turned off grasping and onto release.)
The Method
From A Short and Easy Method of Prayer (faithfully described, not reproduced):
- Make the donation — once, wholeheartedly. Deliberately give your whole existence to God: your concerns, your will, your future. Guyon treats this as a genuine act, not a vague wish — a gift actually presented.
- Don’t take it back. Her central, vivid warning: “a gift once presented is no longer at the disposal of the donor.” Having handed yourself over, refuse to snatch yourself back when fear or self-will flares. This single instruction is the practical core.
- Receive each moment as God’s will. Adopt the settled conviction that “the occurrence of every moment is agreeable to His immediate will and permission.” Meet what arrives — duties, setbacks, inner states — as given, not as something to fight or resent.
- Renounce self-will as it arises. Throughout the day, the instant a self-centred inclination, grasping, or anxious clutch appears, let it go — “continually losing our own will in the will of God.” This is the repeated micro-action of the practice.
- Cast off selfish care. Drop the load of anxious self-management — “the casting off of all selfish care, that we may be altogether at the Divine disposal.” Hand the worry over rather than carrying it.
- Apply it to outer things as much as inner. Guyon is explicit that abandonment covers external affairs too: “giving up all our concerns into the hands of God, forgetting ourselves, and thinking only of Him.” It is a whole-life disposition, not a prayer-time mood.
- Re-affirm continually. Because self-will keeps reasserting, the gift is renewed again and again — a brief inward “I give this, and myself, to You” whenever you notice you’ve grabbed control back. (Sourcing note: “the key to the inner court,” the “gift once presented” warning, “the occurrence of every moment,” “continually losing our own will in the will of God,” and “casting off all selfish care” are Guyon’s, attributed. Short fair-use phrasing only; the rest is faithful paraphrase.)
Source & Lineage
Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon (1648–1717), the foremost popularizer of Quietism, made abandonment the centre of her “way of pure love.” In A Short and Easy Method of Prayer (1685) self-surrender is the hinge between method and union: the soul gives itself wholly to God and lets His will, expressed in each moment, carry it.
Her teaching drew on the older mysticism of abandonment and fed directly into Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s “sacrament of the present moment” and later devotional traditions.
The radical passivity of her version provoked the Quietist controversy and her imprisonment (Bastille, 1695–1703).
The Traditions' versions
The sacrament of the present moment (Caussade) — abandonment to divine providence event by event; the closest descendant.
- The Serenity Prayer / 12-Step “turn it over” — handing what you can’t control to a higher power; the same release move, secularized in fellowship practice.
- Acceptance & defusion (ACT) — dropping the struggle to control inner experience and accepting what is; the clinical structural cousin of “casting off selfish care.”
- Islamic tawakkul (trust in God) & rida (contentment with the decree) — accepting each moment as God’s will while still acting.
- Taoist wu wei / Stoic “what is up to me” — releasing the grip on outcomes outside one’s control.
- The Surrender Experiment (Michael Singer) — modern practice of saying yes to what life presents.
Common refinements
Snatching the gift back. Guyon’s own headline error: surrendering, then grabbing control again at the first fear. The practice is the repeated refusal to take it back.
- Confusing surrender with passivity. Abandonment is an inner releasing of self-will and anxious control — not neglect of duties, prudence, or discernment. Guyon expects it carried into active life; “forgetting ourselves” means dropping ego-grasping, not dropping responsibility.
- Making it a one-time act. Self-will keeps reasserting; the donation must be renewed continually, in small moments, all day.
- Using it to tolerate harm. Accepting “each moment as God’s will” must never become passivity toward abuse, injustice, exploitation, or danger that calls for action. Acceptance of what is does not forbid changing what should be changed.
- Striving to feel surrendered. It’s a decision and a release, not a feeling to manufacture; dryness or residual fear doesn’t void the act.