Madame Guyon's Testimony of the Exchanged Life

In 1688, after leaving the Convent of Visitation of Saint Marie after eight solitary months of confinement for the testimony of Jesus, Madame Jeanne Guyon wrote a letter to her younger brother, Gregoire Boivieres de La Mothe in which she describes her experience of the exchanged life:

"I speak to you, my dear brother, without any reserve whatsoever. And, in the first place, my soul, as it seems to me, is united to God in such a manner that my own will is entirely lost in the Divine Will. I live, therefore, as well as I can express it, out of myself . . . in union with God. . . . It is thus that God, by His sanctifying, all-knowing grace, has become to me ALL in ALL . . . And thus, God being made known in things or events--which is the only way in which that 'I Am' or Infinite Existence can be made known--everything becomes, in a certain sense, God to me. I find God in everything which is, and in everything which comes to pass. The creature is nothing: God is ALL.

"And if you ask why it is that the Lord has seen fit to bless me in my labors, it is because He was first; and by taking away my own will He made me a nothing in the void. And in recognizing the hand of the Lord, I think I may well speak of God's agency physically as well as mentally, since He has sustained me in my poor state of health and in my trying physical weakness. Weak as I have been, He has consistently enabled me to talk in the day and to write in the night, over a long period of my life. . . .

"I am willing, in this as in all things, to commit all to God, both in doing and suffering. To my mind, it is the height of blessedness to cease from our own action in order that God may act in us.

"And this statement, my dear brother, expresses my own particular condition, as it is my prayer that it may express yours. In such a state, riches and poverty, and sorrow and joy, and life and death are all the same--transient before the Infinite God. In such a state is the true heavenly rest, the true Paradise of the Spirit. . . ."