Thoughts on solitude
Marc Chagall, Elijah Touched by an Angel, from the Bible suite, 1958. Image source: The Jewish Museum, New York
Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, ‘So may the gods do to me, and more also, if I do not make your life like the life of one of them by this time tomorrow.’ Then he was afraid; he got up and fled for his life, and came to Beer-sheba, which belongs to Judah; he left his servant there. But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: ‘It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.’ Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, ‘Get up and eat.’ He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, ‘Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.’ He got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food for forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God. At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there.
– 1 Kings 19.1-9, NRSV
Elijah lived his life mostly in solitude, marginal to the popular religion of the day, marginal to the power politics of the day. It was from the solitary margins that Elijah recentered the life of Israel. For people schooled in a biblical imagination, the [modern-day] fascination with numbers and goals as a sign of efficacy is strange indeed. Virtually all the men and women who prepared the way of the Lord, which became the way of Jesus, worked at the margins of their societies and cultures. Elijah is conspicuous but is in no way unique. The story of Elijah is told from nine site locations. Only one, Mt. Carmel, provided a public stage for a crowd of people. All the others were out-of-the-way and marginal.
This is important. Elijah appeared from time to time without fanfare and then disappeared from public life without notice. Basically, he lived a solitary life in obscurity, but his formative impact on how we as a people of God understand responsibility and witness in society is inescapable and irreversible. It never goes out of style and by God’s grace is replicated in every generation. The essence of the way of solitude is that it counters the world’s way, the culture’s way. What Elijah did, and what his contemporary progeny does, is purge our imaginations of this world’s assumptions on how life is lived, on what counts in life, and on where power comes from.
– Eugene H. Peterson, from his introduction to Annemarie S. Kidder‘s book The Power of Solitude: Discovering Your True Self in a World of Nonsense and Noise
In my last post I talked a bit about why the church is a good and necessary thing, why the community found there is different from other communities, and why, though tempted, I have not left the church. And in that post I mentioned that I valued the emphasis on solitude and silence found within Christianity. This is an aspect of the Christian tradition that is not well-known or understood today. In particular, very few — at least outside of the Catholic and Eastern churches — know about monasticism past or present. This is unfortunate. When monks or monasteries are brought up they are often regarded by many as curios, as oddball holdovers from the medieval past. The monastic life is often seen as a means of escaping “real life.” Having known several monks and having visited several monasteries, I have found that monasticism is none of these, and it seems to me that we need to hear monastic voices today more than ever.
We need to listen to the words of our monastic brothers and sisters — all of whom regularly practice the disciplines of solitude and silence — precisely because of the essential banality and hyperactivity of our modern lives. Large-scale consumerism and high-speed communication networks (yes, including blogs) encourage groupthink over creativity, narcissism over true individuality, and trivia over depth. We are blinded by our constant exposure to nonsense and bullshit. And we have no idea what we would see if we could just get rid of it for awhile. Most of us — myself included — don’t want to see what we would see in the absence of all the noise. That’s why we love the noise; it covers up what truly frightens us: solitude and silence. Yet sustained exposure to the solitude and silence that we fear can renew our minds and clear our vision and reconnect us to ourselves and God. It worked for Elijah, it works for monastics, and it can work for us too.
It’s good to listen to voices from the margins, voices purified in the flame of solitude and silence. Here is a sample of such voices. Not all the people quoted here are monastics, but all have something to tell us about solitude and the interior life. And not all of these will speak to you; some may even come across as so much nonsense. But perhaps there is at least one good word here for each reader.
1. DROWNING IN COMMUNITY, Annemarie S. Kidder, from The Power of Solitude: Discovering Your True Self in a World of Nonsense and Noise (2007). Building connection, maintaining friendship, nurturing fellowship — all are considered building blocks in the emergence of a healthy self. But the popular emphasis on community and relationship has blurred the boundaries between a personality that is self-differentiated and interdependent and one that is dependent on others for self-definition. Often the participation in and belonging to a certain community covers up and overshadows the soul’s need to develop an autonomous self. By over-identifying with the community, the soul is drowned by external demands and unable to hear its own pulse and life. Stepping back from these external demands, taking stock of where community ends and the “I” begins will require solitude. Reflection, soul-searching, self-examination are needed for the autonomous self to emerge that is aware of veiled projections, irrational expectations, and blurred boundaries. When the need to belong overpowers our need to become and simply be, we give greater importance to externals than internals, to public image than to personal growth, to others’ voices than God’s voice whispering in the soul.
2. THE VEIL OF WORDS, Thomas Merton (Cistercian, 1915-1968), from Thoughts in Solitude. The solitary life, being silent, clears away the smoke-screen of words that man has laid down between his mind and things. In solitude we remain face to face with the naked being of things. And yet we find that the nakedness of reality which we have feared, is neither a matter of terror or of shame. It is clothed in the friendly communion of silence, and this silence is related to love. The world our words have attempted to classify, to control and even to despise (because they could not contain it) comes close to us, for silence teaches us to know reality by respecting it where words have defiled it.
3. SOLITUDE IN THE CITY, anonymous Desert Father (5th century), from Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Amma Matrona said, “There are many in the mountains [in solitude] who behave as if they were in the town, and they are wasting their time. It is better to have many people around you and to live the solitary life in your will than to be alone and always longing to be in a crowd.”
4. COMPANY WITH GOD, William of St. Thierry (Benedictine, ~1077-1148), from The Golden Epistle. The man who has God with him is never less alone than when he is alone.
5. THE NOISE AMONG OTHERS, Thomas à Kempis (Brethren of the Common Life, ~1380-1471), from The Imitation of Christ. The greatest saints guarded their time alone and chose to serve God in solitude. Someone has said, “As often as I went out among men, I returned less of a man.” We often experience this when we have spent a long time in idle chatter. It is easier to be completely silent than not to be long-winded; it is easier to stay at home than to be properly on guard outside the monastery. A person whose goal is the inward, spiritual life must cast his lot with Jesus and not follow the crowd.
6. WHAT ONE MAY FIND IN SOLITUDE, Guigo I (Carthusian, d. 1136), from Carthusian Customs. Jacob, having sent ahead everything over the ford of Jaboc, remained alone and saw God face-to-face (Gen. 32.23-30). He was rewarded by a blessing and by a change of name [and by a lifelong limp! -pw]. He gained more in one moment alone than a whole lifetime in the company of others.
7. THE NEED FOR BALANCE, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Lutheran, 1906-1945), from Life Together. Let him who cannot be alone beware of community… let him who is not in community beware of being alone… each by itself has profound pitfalls and perils. One who wants fellowship without solitude plunges into the void of words and feelings, and the one who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-infatuation, and despair.
8. THE PORTABILITY OF SOLITUDE, Richard Foster (Quaker), from Celebration of Discipline (1978). Solitude is more a state of mind and heart than it is a place. There is a solitude of the heart that can be maintained at all times. Crowds, or the lack of them, have little to do with this inward attentiveness. It is quite possible to be a desert hermit and never experience solitude. But if we possess inward solitude we do not fear being alone, or we know we are not alone. Neither do we fear being alone, for they do not control us. In the midst of noise and confusion we are settled into a deep inner silence. Whether alone or among people, we always carry with us a portable sanctuary of the heart.
9. EACH OF US HAS BEEN ALONE WITH GOD OUR WHOLE LIVES, Thomas Merton (Cistercian, 1915-1968), from No Man is an Island. Secrecy and solitude are values that belong to the very essence of personality. A person is a person insofar as he has a secret and is a solitude of his own that cannot be communicated to anyone else. If I love a person, I will love that which makes him most a person: the secrecy, the hiddenness, the solitude of his own individual being, which God alone can penetrate and understand. A love that breaks into the spiritual privacy of another in order to lay open all his secrets and besiege his solitude with importunity does not love him; it seeks to destroy what is best in him, and what is most intimately his… If I cannot distinguish myself from the mass of other men, I will never be able to love and respect other men as I ought. If I do not separate myself from them enough to know what is mine and what is theirs, I will never discover what I have to give them, and never allow them the opportunity to give me what they ought.
10. THE INNER AND OUTER LIVES, Meister Eckhart (Dominican, ~1260-1327), from On Detachment. Now you must know that the outer man may be active while the inner man remains wholly free and immovable.
11. ON LIMITS, Marie of the Incarnation (Carmelite, 1566-1618), from The Relation of 1654. There is no limit to the interior life.
