Good Solitude

I thought I would be spending last week alone, but I was wrong in so many ways. Living where we do, I am never completely alone. For one thing, the weather presses in on every side, including through the aging windows and bits of the walls where we have left the dry stone of the original lambing shed more or less as it originally was. There are, I have to admit, occasional draughts. When there are gales, as there have been this week, they bring new and exaggerated sounds, like rattling twigs on the roof, or sudden gusts caught in the eaves as the wind changes direction. But, surprisingly, it is neither cold or damp. Cold draughts and damp houses make a person naturally defensive. Not only do we put on more and more layers, usually to little effect, but the cold causes a certain tensing of mind and body against our surroundings and sometimes against other people. One cannot be pliant and receptive to what is good and beautiful in any situation when one is cold. The same goes for extreme levels of wet.

Being alone requires that we be inwardly pliant, so that we can bend to whatever nature, or life, is hitting us with, rather than put up rigid defences. We are seeing this kind of courageous pliancy towards both nature and life in the way the people of the Somerset Levels continue to endure weeks of isolation and flooding while also facing the prospect of ruined summer pasture. Their resilience is an example to all of us this winter. Fortunately, where I live, the weather does not compare with conditions on the Somerset Levels. Even so, over the past week I have found that being present to the weather as it is, rather than simply wishing it would change, requires a certain kind of emotional pliancy towards solitude itself. For this to be possible one has to be able to tell the difference between fertile solitude and barren loneliness and take appropriate action.

Engaging with solitude is an active decision to work with the present set of circumstances. The kind of vigorous weather we are currently experiencing sharpens ones perception of things. We sense a greater energy at work which can destroy or regenerate on a spiritual as well as on a physical level. It also reminds us of our connectedness to one another. This is the connectedness which shapes meaning and gives purpose to our existence. The extent to which human beings remain bound together will depend on their working together on both levels, the physical and the spiritual, within this same energy or power. 

For this to be possible, given our human tendency for disintegration and destruction, this recreative energy, or power, became as we are – but without our will to destroy and murder. It was ‘made flesh’, made human. It assumed a name, Jesus, Emanuel, God with us, life giver and saviour. The Christian understanding of the word ‘salvation’ is rooted in the word ‘life’.  In Jesus, the Word, or the power, reveals a will, a desire to go on recreating in and through humanity wherever human beings are willing to let the Word become flesh again in their own hearts and lives. 

Life in its fullest sense begins in the minds and hearts of those who are vulnerable to God. The will to know God requires a certain kind of solitude, but solitude is not a matter of separating oneself from others, but of allowing oneself to be more closely connected to them. Extreme weather conditions can focus the mind in a new direction, by reminding us of the way we are bound together within the myriad connections which hold the created world together. So our understanding of where we are in our lives and of how the world may yet survive in the face of wholesale environmental destruction depends on the deep connectedness which exists between the Word, the creative activity of God holding us and all things together. 

For this to make sense, we have to recognise our own inner need to be ‘held together’. We get a glimpse of this need in times of depression. Depression often feels like ‘falling apart’. But inner falling apart, or disintegration, can also lead to inner wholeness. By this I do not mean simply feeling good about oneself, or being in a generally happier frame of mind, but recognising and owning our need for healing, the healing of the person and of the earth as they are profoundly connected in God.