Solitude: Finding a Desert in the Oasis

Solitude: Finding a Desert in the Oasis
Scott Lyons
6/21/2013
Our great need as human beings is communion. We need and ought to desire communion with people. And this need is perfectly fulfilled in our encounters with a person, Jesus Christ, and in the communion with God (who is himself perfect communion) that flows through that encounter. We can meet Christ in many places, but one place we must purposely seek him is in solitude. Solitude leads to communion, to that encounter with Christ, and away from isolation and hell.

Most of us do not stumble into the discipline of solitude. While many of us have grown up with quiet times, or devotions, which can be moments of solitude, they sometimes are not enough. Often they are so filled with our speaking, with sound, or with distraction that they cease to be solitude at all. When this happens the purpose of our quiet time is undercut; we miss the encounter with Christ for which we set aside the time in the first place.

Solitude is increasingly hard to come by. We live in an age of distraction. Distraction is constantly available to us, often no farther away than our smartphones. We have integrated technology into nearly every aspect of our lives. And we want (and are getting) more and more of it. In a way, we eliminate the opportunities we formerly had for encountering Christ. We interiorize our anger and our greed; we are deluded with a false sense of ourselves. We possess Huxley’s soma; we call it technology.

Now, we have been distracting ourselves forever. It is certainly not new with smartphones, but these devices help us to realize the prize of constant distractibility. We used to complain of people walking around with headphones over their ears. Now we have also covered our eyes with our smartphones.

I like technology. I find it terribly useful and even enjoy its distractibility. I’m not a Luddite. But we must seek out periods of downtime, of solitude, by unplugging (not necessarily in order to recharge or to smell the roses, though both of these activities are good). We unplug and seek out solitude in order to come face-to-face with ourselves, to lose the facade of virtue with which we walk around. As we come to terms with ourselves, we understand our need for Christ. And when we call out to Christ, he is near.

In Henri J. M. Nouwen’s The Way of the Heart, he writes of how our great danger is “living the whole of our life as one long defense against the reality of our condition, one restless effort to convince ourselves of our virtuousness.” That’s really the crisis of our lives, our self-justification: That we simply are not that bad. God loves us, after all, so what is so great about solitude? The short answer is that it is the place of our salvation—we are deluding ourselves about death, distracting ourselves to death. We cannot be saved if we do not know we need saving. We cannot be healed if we do not know that we are wounded. We will not be fed if we do not know our hunger. Christ does not call the virtuous, but the sinner (Matthew 9:13). Solitude shows us who we are—sinners. When we come to this realization, we are free to see Christ waiting to save us, bind up our wounds, take us to the inn, and entrust us to the innkeeper.

Solitude is, at first, neither pleasant nor pretty because we are not. “As soon as I decide to stay in my solitude, confusing ideas, disturbing images, wild fantasies, and weird associations jump about in my mind like monkeys in a banana tree. Anger and greed begin to show their ugly faces. I give long, hostile speeches to my enemies and dream lustful dreams in which I am wealthy, influential, and very attractive—or poor, ugly, and in need of immediate consolation. Thus I try again to run from the dark abyss of my nothingness and restore my false self in all its vainglory” (Nouwen, p. 18). But solitude opens our eyes “to the truth of ourselves as well as to the truth of God” (Nouwen, p. 76). The place of solitude is the place of prayer—prayer from the heart. Stop running, put away your distractions, and seek out solitude in order to be healed and made whole in that encounter with Christ.