SOLITUDE

ONE of the highlights of my week is a prayer group I attend. Over the eleven years I have been part of it, we have declined in members until there are only three of us left–Trish, Father George, and myself. They are both wonderful people from whom I have learned a great deal. We always read from a spiritual book as part of our meeting. I should mention that we are technically a Centering Prayer group, but we were long ago banished from the ranks of official Centering Prayer groups. It was a control issue. The officials didn’t know exactly what we were doing and were rather disturbed to find we were reading from a book which isn’t part of the approved program. As a result we were taken off the list of groups to prevent anyone else from finding us. We don’t care. We’re going to continue praying without official sanction. So there. Bzzzzpt!

We are reading Seeds a topical collection of excepts from the writings of Thomas Merton. Here’s a quote on Solitude, “Ours is certainly a time for solitaries and hermits. But merely to reduce the simplicity, austerity, and prayer of these primitive souls is not a complete or satisfactory answer. We must transcend them, and . . . liberate ourselves, in our own way, from involvement in a world that is plunging to disaster” (pp. 65-66). That’s Merton describing the situation in 1960. If the world was plunging toward disaster 50 years ago, we must buried in disaster by now. Just look at how some people call the president a Nazi because he is trying to provide health care for millions of people.

Merton was a strange bird, though. A Cistercian monk, Merton lived in a community of silence, but that was never enough for him. For years he badgered his abbot to allow him to live as a hermit apart from the community. And yet when he was allowed to do that, he disturbed his own solitude by writing books, carrying correspondence, and receiving visitor. And increasingly he involved himself in the struggles of the world, especially race, the nuclear threat and war in Vietnam. And as soon as he had the opportunity to travel outside the monastery, the solitude-loving Merton was off the Alaska and the Asia. And the final irony, Merton died not in his monastery, but in a hotel in Thailand. Well, Merton had to work out his own version of solitude.

And so I have to work out my own version of solitude. There is something I lack and have lacked for sometime. It’s something Merton misunderstands completely. He writes: “But if you have to live in a city and work among machines and ride in the subways and eat in a place where the radio makes you deaf with spurious news and where the food destroys your life and the sentiments of those around you poison your heart with boredom, do not be impatient, but accept it as the love of God and as a seed of solitude planted in your soul” (p. 67). The thing that Merton misses has to do with subways: they are actually wonderful places to be alone.

I rode the elevated and subway trains in Chicago for years. When they are packed like sardine cans, they are generally unpleasant, but when the number of available seats equals or exceeds the number of passengers they are perfect places for reading, study, or just staring. People on the trains do not acknowledge the existence of one another. It is the height of rudeness to speak to a stranger on a train except to say, “excuse me” when having to climb over them to get out.

I got a lot of reading done traveling on trains. Driving doesn’t provide the same opportunities. You may be alone in your car, but you’d better pay attention to what you’re doing, where you’re going, what the clowns in the other cars are doing, to say nothing of what the friendly officer with the radar gun is up to.

I understand solitude and am quite comfortable with it. Strange that I pursued careers which always puts me out in public in front of people. I manage it by performing. And then I go home to collapse. Alone. In solitude.

Alone or together, may the Lord bless you on your journey and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne





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