solitude

 

Reflections on Isaiah 6.1-13 and Luke 5.1-11 and on the spiritual practice of solitude (for more on solitude, see the Practicing the Way course).

The role of the prophet has been described as to hold together fearless truth-telling and fierce hope, naming social realities as they are and helping a society reimagine what life together could look like instead. And it is a matter of record in the Bible that every culture and context need such voices, calling us to turn away from death and embrace life.

The book of the prophet Isaiah records his call to just such a role, in an intense vision experienced at a time of transition. Uzziah, the king, had died. His reign had brought stability and security, but he had grown proud, had sought to be high priest as well as king — two roles that had always been kept apart — and had been humbled by God, forced to live in quarantine outside the city walls as a leper. As a leper, in death he cannot even be laid to rest with his ancestors in the royal tombs. His house is without him.

This is the backdrop against which Isaiah sees and hears the Lord of angel armies filling the temple, and the Master sends him to bear a message to the people. Our English translation — “Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.” — doesn’t quite convey it. The Hebrew repeats the words to hear, and to see, in a different form (the same consonants, different vowels) to give us something like ‘hearing piled up on hearing’ and ‘seeing piled up on seeing’ as activities that result in a dulling of awareness.

I don’t know what that looked like for Iron Age people. But I do know what it looks like for the first people to live in the Digital Age. I carry in my pocket a computer far more powerful than the computers that put men on the moon. The last time men walked on the moon was in the month after I was born, and in my lifetime the Digital Age has changed the face of the earth and has shaped us powerfully. Indeed, this has accelerated rapidly in my adult years.

When I was a child, if you wanted to contact me, you might call a phone physically connected to a wall in my home, and someone might be there to take a message. Now we carry our phones with us. We are on call on demand all of the time. Or you might have written a letter, and you might expect a reply within a week (or longer, if overseas). But now we have texts and email and are shaped to seek an immediate response. There is a lifetime of difference between waiting each day for the postman in anticipation of a letter from a sweetheart and checking our smartphone compulsively for work related emails or a ‘like’ on social media. The desire for connection has become oppressive.

When I was a child, there were three television channels. Now there are hundreds, if not thousands. You could do nothing but watch tv and you would not scratch the surface. When I was a child, we watched Newsround and the Six O’clock News. Now there is a constant cycle of breaking news, designed to grip you with anxiety from the moment you open your eyes in the morning until you lie awake worrying at night. You can have podcasts coming out of your ears. You can have a presence on multiple social media platforms, and stay up playing online multiplayer video games, hunting and hiding, shooting and running too fast to be shot.

It isn’t just Digital. We are shaped by other forms of technology too. I live on the intersection of three roads, and with the constant noise of traffic. And that noise, and that speed, shapes us in a particular way, over time. It shapes us into more anxious and more impatient people.

I’m not anti-technology, not by any means. But we need to be reminded that it isn’t neutral, that it shapes us, that it deforms us in many ways, and that we need a counter movement in our lives.

Isaiah wants to know, how long will this flood of sights and sounds, these distractions that dull our senses, last? And the Lord replies, until the land is utterly desolate and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.

And for Isaiah’s first Iron Age audience this pointed to exile, as an event in which the land would be liberated from human folly and allowed to rest and recover for seventy years. Perhaps that is what the earth needs again now.

But for those who, down the centuries, have been known by their contemporaries and by generations who came after as teachers of life, as saints, as women and men of noteworthy wisdom and holiness, as role models in the spiritual life, all recognise this empty place as an invitation to experience intimacy with God.

Because we are all deformed by the sights and sounds that fill the world, by the constant attrition that dulls us so that the beauty and wonder of the world becomes passé, and that is only getting more and more relentless. And if, instead, we are to be formed into more peaceful, more loving, more secure and whole people, we need to counteract those forces by embracing the practice of solitude.

Solitude is not the same thing as being alone. Some of us spend much of our week alone, and community is an essential human need. But so is solitude, which is the intentional choice of being alone with God. Of getting away from distractions, to spend time with God. Of getting away from distractions, to come face to face with ourselves, and to see ourselves not as something we deep down dislike but through God’s eyes, the eyes of the loving creator, redeemer and sustainer of our being, our body and soul.

In the Digital Age, this is an act of resistance. An act of holy rebellion. And it is hard, especially if you aren’t aware of other people doing likewise.

In Luke 6 we read an account of the call of Simon Peter to follow Jesus. To be with Jesus and become like Jesus, and — in a mystery we cannot fathom but can only enter into or resist — to become more fully the person the Lord had created Simon Peter to be. That is always the invitation: to be with Jesus, and in being with Jesus, in becoming more like him, to become, over time, more fully us. To be set free from all that deforms the glory of God in us.

And Jesus, as Simon Peter will soon discover, made a habit of retreating to quiet places to be with God. A daily habit, that sustained him in being present for others without being consumed by their demands.

Luke’s account begins with Simon and Jesus in the boat, together. Jesus tells Simon to head out into the deep, away from the crowd. Simon had been out there all night and found it empty. But this time, he heads out with Jesus, and discovers that it is full, full of fish, so full he can hardly contain it, and this draws him back into community, at a deeper level. This is how solitude differs from loneliness — which is desolate — or isolation — which is cut off from community.

But first, this solitude, this being alone with God — with Jesus — in the quiet place, provokes a necessary crisis. Simon is confronted with his sinfulness, his awareness of his inadequacy in the presence of God — and it is terrifying. Yet it is precisely here that Jesus speaks peace to his deepest fears and extends an invitation to follow him. Jesus extends the same invitation to us today. How will we respond?

One of the things I try to do is keep my phone on silent, and left on the side, on my day off. One day a week when I resist the distractions it offers. No social media — though it is desperately addictive, and I often fall to the temptation. And there are other times during the week that I turn it off and put it away.

It is worth working through your day, and noting where the noise comes from, externally — the radio, the television, the traffic — and internally — the repetitive anxieties or rehearsed arguments — and also the empty places where you go looking for God — a favourite chair in the house, a favourite walk. The point is not to eliminate sights and sounds and lay our lives to waste, but to identify quiet space in our days where we might simply be with God, not filling the emptiness with our prayers but simple being in one another’s presence, God and you, and resting in love.

The more sights and sounds there are in our lives, the greater our need for such counter-formational solitude.

And this is something where the older generations, who grew up before the Digital Age began, may have something deeply important to offer the younger generations, the digital natives. But only if we ourselves have become at home in the empty spaces and not just left behind by the centres of civilisation.

So, what have you learnt about meeting God in stillness and silence? What patterns have you build into your daily routine to seek God? These are not rhetorical questions. We need to pool our wisdom, for the sake of our community, for the people of this parish.

If you have found patterns or practices that help you meet God in this way, do share them. If you have found them helpful, there’s a good chance that others would too. And if you struggle to find God in the busyness and distractions of life, know that you are not alone.

May we know grace to seek and find the Lord in solitude and find healing and wholeness in him. Amen.