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Quote on Inner Solitude
Do you wish to know how to turn your mind toward God? Follow my words. When you pray gather up your whole self, enter with your Beloved into the chamber of your heart, and there remain alone with him, forgetting all exterior concerns; and so rise aloft with all your love and all your mind, your affections, your desires, and devotion. ... rise again and again in the fervor of your piety until you enter into the place of the wonderful tabernacle, even the house of God. There your heart will be delighted at the sight of your Beloved, and you will taste and see how good the Lord is, and how great is his goodness.
*St. Bonaventure (1221-1274), Italian theologian, philosopher, and Christian mystic
Inner Solitude is the entering into the mind and heart, choosing to remain there in loving silence with the Beloved, or Christ, and thereby to enter more deeply into the heart of God, Who is one with your deepest heart in Eternity.
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The author Michelle McKinney Hammond refers, in the film "Be Still and Know that I am God," to the tyranny of the urgent. We might assume we are not captive to any tyrant. Yet, freedom is more a matter of the inner person than the outer circumstances. A politically free democracy can be full of captives to a tyrant that has chained the soul to necessity.
Here is a test of freedom. Try to sit daily for twenty minutes in inner Solitude. This is not that much, really. Generally, even to begin learning contemplative prayer a person needs to be prepared to commit within a short time, if not right away, to two prayer times daily of at least twenty minutes.
The typical person living in the United States today, while free to move about and enjoying many social liberties, is captive to the noise of his or her own mind and the passions of the heart~including that tyrant my schedule.
There is no way that I know to live a deeply spiritual life, truly knowing God intimately on a daily basis, apart from adequate daily, contemplative Solitude. Yes, the teaching on the necessity of such prayerful, inner Quiet goes back thousands of years, long before the Judeo-Christian tradition, and has been taught in all the great religions up to the present.
Then, why do we avoid inner Solitude? I confess: Being a contemplative does not mean I do not struggle to be faithful to the daily practice of inner Solitude. I find myself at times seeking to sabotage the vow. To be committed to the spiritual discipline of inner Solitude provides a context to observe my resistances to fulfill the commitment and to ask "Why am I avoiding intimacy with Christ?"
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So, why avoidance of inner Solitude?
1) Fear of facing our own complex shadow selves.
Contemplative teacher and philosopher Dallas Willard writes, "In solitude, we confront our own soul with its obscure forces and conflicts that escape our attention when we are interacting with others." Psychology informs us that by constant brain stimulation, wherein we keep consciousness on high alert, we keep a tight lid on the unconscious, which contains our shadow selves.
By constant stimulation we can hide from the real state of hidden aspects of ourselves, wearing a facade of social and religious respectability, diligence, and busyness, fooling others and ourselves. So, we can live on the front porch and invite Christ to sit with us there, and dare not quiet down long enough to actually go inside the house and find out what is inside~and certainly not invite Him to see what is inside all the rooms within.
2) Fear of losing control.
Why do we turn to the cell phone ... telephone ... television ... the book ... the computer ... the favorite hobby ... the talk and talk some more ... to keep ourselves occupied? Why do many churches never spend even a single minute seeking to be silent before God? We feel safe with the illusion of control and we pridefully like that illusion~though actually, when we are honest, it is a heavy and merciless burden.
One thing we know about inner Solitude is it is a simple practice with profound, sometimes disturbing consequence. How can it not be such to many who have not truly been quiet long enough to really consider who they are apart from what they have been told they are? And, the same applies to our knowing God. Many persons have never come to know God for themselves. God is to many Christians an inherited patchwork from the past, not a living, ever-evolving Reality in the present.
We cannot truly practice prayerful Solitude without giving up control, even of our ideas about and expectations of God.
We cannot practice inner Solitude and not face parts of ourselves kept in the cellar of unconsciousness~we might discover we are not as good or as bad as we thought.
However, the result of prayerful and loving openness to the Holy Spirit in inner Solitude is worth facing the challenges. By practicing honestly coming to know ourselves in Christ and God in an evolving, intimate way, and daily practicing letting go~which is really a letting-God~, we discover a depth to our being, living, and relationships we had not found any other way. We become amazed at and overjoyed about a growing richness to everyday living we did not know was possible for us.
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