solitude

My wife got me an iPod for my birthday! They are wonderful tools; I have a bunch of songs, some books (I've been listening to "The Dark Night of the Soul"), and even movies!

This IPod is perfect for listening to while I wait for the 3 hours of IV chemo drips to finish. I can be mentally and spiritually refreshed while sitting still in a chair; just me and John of the Cross.

There are drawbacks to this quasi solitude. The obvious one is that while I am listening to John of the Cross I am not necessarily interacting with my world. A pair of earphones plugged into overly loud music is an easy way to seclude myself.

Although it would be a fascinating study to examine the impact of iPod isolation on society, that is not what I intend to explore. One of the reasons the isolation phenomena is so widespread is, I think, that it conveniently remedies the unfortunate fear of one of humankind's most valuable activities.

Being truly alone, in solitude is a frightening event for most people. I am not thinking, by the way, of this solitude occurring in the middle of the Gobi desert or the Alaskan interior. I am pondering being alone at home or at the grocery store etc. Its so compellingly dreadful that people will fill up their solitude with noise (enter the iPod) or television or reading or the internet... you get the idea.

The source of this fear of being alone is the expectation of what, or who, might show up to break the solitude. Like a good Hitchcock movie, this unseen but anticipated dread is lurking around every corner. The two most terrifying horrors are oneself and God.

The problem is you don't really know what you might discover about yourself in the harsh light of solitude. Chances are that it does not reconcile with your imagined self. Thus the distractions of noise and activity to scare away the terrors.

These times of solitude are really a normal part of God's structure of the universe so trying to avoid them or mask them out is akin to trying to postpone sunrise. The Mosaic law included a reminder of this regular time of solitude in the Sabbath.

By the way, when I refer to a time of solitude I don't mean a time of reading the scriptures and prayer or even of meditation. Don't get me wrong, those activities are vital to our well being. But they are times we have set aside. All those useful disciplines start with an effort on our part...

I am referring to the quiet times that God himself schedules into our lives. The mystics called it a time of contemplation as opposed to a time of meditation. When we meditate, we use our minds to study and ponder. In contemplation God instructs us. He speaks to our soul to our mind our emotions. He tells us what He wants us to know just at the time we need it. These God initiated times of solitude be they 5 minutes or 5 months are probably the most significant in our lives if we respond to Him with a eager listening soul. It is when we are to "be still and know that I am God".

God knows how greatly we need to shut up, sit down and listen so he sets apart times for that to happen. Times of solitude.

"When you said to me 'Seek my face' my heart said to you 'Your face, oh Lord, I shall seek' " Psalm 27:8