Solitude: Domesticate Me Scott Lyons 7/21/2013 Society is shipwrecked. This is not something new from the last 50 years, however; it has always been so. Most of us are caught up in that shipwreck. Salvation is the escape from it, and this escape is solitude. The Desert Fathers understood this. In The Wisdom of the Desert, Thomas Merton says: Society . . . was regarded by [the Desert Fathers] as a shipwreck from which each single individual man had to swim for his life. . . . These were men who believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster. . . . What the Fathers sought most of all was their own true self, in Christ. And in order to do this they had to reject completely the false, formal self, fabricated under social compulsion in “the world.” . . . They knew that they were helpless to do any good for others as long as they floundered about in the wreckage. But once they got a foothold on solid ground, things were different. Then they had not only the power but even the obligation to pull the whole world to safety after them. This is the power of solitude, of separating oneself from society. It is in this separation that one confronts oneself and one’s sins. After dealing with one’s own sins, one can aid others in dealing with theirs. There are different kinds of solitude. Some solitude is voluntary, some involuntary. Most of us don’t live lives of voluntary solitude. And while it is our responsibility to receive our involuntary solitude as a grace, that we might be shaped by it and saved through it, it is also our responsibility to seek out solitude so that we might find Christ and be shaped by him in the desert. In The Way of the Heart Henri M. Nouwen says, “Solitude molds self-righteous people into gentle, caring, forgiving persons who are so deeply convinced of their own great sinfulness and so fully aware of God’s even greater mercy that their life itself becomes ministry.” In other words, it is in solitude that we begin to truly discover others. There, we truly can begin to love others. And love excludes judgment. Love enables us to minister to others. We cannot rightly minister to those we are judging. Solitude is an often neglected discipline for many of us; our lives thrust us into society. Others of us, however, experience the strange reality of solitude as part of our lifestyles. I immediately think of farming and writing as solitary professions. There are many others. Stay-at-home mothers have known the discipline of solitude intimately throughout human history. Perhaps it is this domestic monasticism—those long periods of solitude during which they have sacrificed themselves for the sake of their families—that helps shape mothers into who they are. Being at home is solitude with children, which is never a quiet endeavor but is often lonely. It can feel forgotten because it is taken for granted by men and women alike and looked down on. There is little or no praise in it. There is no pay. Therefore, it enables those within it to discover humility through their occupation. Though rarer nowadays, it is still common. “Domestication,” if I can use the word, is solitude. It can be terrible, and it can be beautiful. The difference depends on whether this grace is welcomed into our lives. And, of course, it can be welcomed or refused every day. Solitude quiets us, humbles us, and, yes, domesticates us, in the beautiful sense of the word. It is cultivation by the Gardener. In it we recognize our littleness and our lowness. We come face to face with ourselves and with our sin. We learn to be men and women. We learn to live in the present. We learn to be Christ’s.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 09:11:47 +0000
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