Alone: Solitude and Silence for Exhausted People ~ Psalm 62:1-8

 

Last week at Trinity Covenant we learned that all of the spiritual disciplines, the practices that anchor and shape our Christian life, are rooted in a spirituality that is saturated with Sabbath. We discovered that a Sabbath spirituality reminds us that we were made and rescued for rest and liberation and that God is the source of our transformation. And this week – we’re going to look at a discipline that, to be honest, is probably the hardest and most challenging, not because it asks us to do anything, but because it seemingly asks us for nothing. I’m talking about the Spiritual twins: solitude and silence.

In solitude and silence, I am alone with those who want to assault me. (vss. 1-4)

It starts restfully enough, “For God alone . . .” I image that many of us might think of a cozy worship service or some sort of spiritual hammock.

But in solitude and silence I get rid of my outer shell: no friends to talk to, no telephone calls to make, no meetings to attend, no music to entertain, no phone to distract, just me – naked, vulnerable, weak, sinful, deprived, broken. It is this nothingness that I face in my solitude. This is the dying to self of which Jesus speaks that so many of us are so deathly afraid of. And it is this nothingness, the desert, where the real spiritual fight is to be had.

If Jesus teaches us anything, solitude is not spa space, not nap time, it is the place where we fight with enemies (Satan means Accuser). As soon as I decide to stay in solitude and silence, confusing ideas, disturbing images, wild fantasies, weird associations, jump about in my mind. When we enter into that space of aloneness and silence is when vss. 3-4 literally come to mind: fragility, fear, anger, and self-importance. One of the reasons we engage in spiritual disciplines like solitude and silence is that they reveal what often hides beneath the busyness, bravado, and banality of our lives. They expose how fragile we truly are – “this leaning wall, this tottering fence.” Solitude and silence remind us that sin wishes us to think that “that we are a person of prominence.” When I first began to practice solitude and silence I was horrified by what I encountered. After a few short days of thinking I was on a mini-vacation I soon began to experience a constant, cacophony of voices like a classroom of 3-year-olds on a sugar rampage. And as I sat with those voices and faces (always my own) they essentially boiled down to two messages with the exact same point: “You are the best. You’re the greatest,” and, “You are a loser. You’re the worst.” Both, of course, want me to believe that I am the center. These voices form the inward prison that traps our life. The Augustinian monk Martin Laird, one of my favorite authors, tells a story about frequent visits to a local park to walk and enjoy creation. He would often see a man with four dogs who would run and bound through the park with joy and abandon except one. One dog would not join the others but run in tight little circles. At some point, Martin got up the courage to ask why the dog did that. The owner responded that before he acquired the dog it had lived its life in a very small cage and could only exercise by running in tight circles. The sadness of that shaping reality is that the dog couldn’t ever imagine that he was actually free.

The insight of solitude and silence is that it makes us aware of this inner prison, that the real fight for our soul is not actually with others but ourselves, not outside but inside, not with fists or bombs or guns but in letting go, staying still, and remaining open. But what key is there for bars that don’t exist and locks that have no keyhole? Solitude and silence do more than reveal our dilemma but also help us do two things that are both critical for a healthy Spirituality. First, it becomes a place where we can practice enemy love and forgiveness on ourselves. It’s very important to remember that you are the battered and you are the batterer. If you seek to fight those voices, you are simply fighting yourself. So rather than fight, offer hospitality and be kind. The goal is integration and wholeness and not further fragmentation or repression. It’s not a solution, in other words, to repress or kill parts of yourself just as it would be silly to cut off your hand because it hurts. So when you encounter these voices – lovingly, silently, kindly, welcome them to have a seat. Be reconciled, love your enemies, and you will find wholiness. Second, solitude and silence help us surrender to the God who alone loves us, the God who alone made us, the God who alone at every moment is present to us. It's where we discover that God isn’t out there but in here deeper than our own sin and as close as our breath. Friends, the good news is that solitude and silence reveal to us that God doesn’t know how to be absent.

1 min. - silence

In solitude and silence, I practice surrendering to God alone. (vss. 1-2, 5-7)

Once we encounter the forces that want to steal, kill and destroy, we recognize that the struggle is to let go of our belief that we can save ourselves or that others can save us. The rest and liberation of the practice is that it helps orient us toward who truly does the work, the saving, the transforming. Look at all the prepositional phrases from our passage: “from him comes my salvation,” “my hope is from him,” “on God rests my deliverance,” “my refuge is in God.”

Solitude is a place where we recognize that one human being cannot fix or fill another, nor can we fix or fill ourselves. It is a place where we recognize that only God will do. It’s a spirituality like the game Operation. It’s practicing over and over again, “I give up.”

Friends, anchor this truth deep within yourselves – your body, your mind, your heart - God alone is our goal, God alone is our salvation, God alone is our transformation, God alone is our purpose. The goal of your life is not people nor great things nor spiritual fame. Our goal is simply, only, gracefully, achingly, God.

And we don’t acquire God, impress God, or even direct God. Solitude and silence help us discover the God who is already present, already at work, always giving us life. We discover what Saint Augustine discovered that this God we seek has already found us, is already “closer to me than I am to myself.” And “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Our help is from, on, in, God alone.

1 min. of silence

In solitude and silence, the psalmist reminds me that I am part of a people, an “our,” an “us.” (vs. 8)

It’s interesting and perhaps counter-intuitive to recognize that one of the real fruits of solitude and silence is not merely self-help but compassion for others. It’s the discovery that God is not simply for me but for us. It’s after the Psalmist faces his enemies and surrenders to God that he speaks to people and declares, “God is a refuge for us.”

How is it that solitude and silence free us to be compassionate? Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or fixing it. Solitude and silence show us a third way – solidarity. In solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us, that the roots of all conflict, war, injustice, cruelty, hatred, greed, envy are deeply anchored in our heart. In that place, I recognize that I am always an us. So solitude and silence help us establish “with-ness” to our witness. The definition of compassion is “to suffer with.”

Through solitude and silence something indeed dies so that compassion can flourish. What dies is our need to judge and control others. Abba Moses a Christian hermit seasoned by solitude and silence from the fourth century once said: “To die to one’s neighbor is this. To bear your own faults and not to pay attention to anyone else wondering whether they are good or bad. Do no harm to anyone, do not scorn the man who does evil, do not put confidence in him who does wrong to his neighbor, do not rejoice with him who injures his neighbor . . . Do not have hostile feelings towards anyone do not let dislike dominate your heart.”

Here is a Sabbath-spirituality story – the liberation that solitude and silence bring:

“A brother . . . committed a fault. A council was called to which Abba Moses was invited, but he refused to go. Then the priest sent someone to say to him, ‘Come, for everyone is waiting for you.’ So he got up and went. He took a leaking jug, filled it with water, and carried it with him. The others came out to meet him and said to him, ‘What is this, Father?’ The old man said to them, ‘My sins run out behind me, and I do not see them, and today I am coming to judge the error of another.’ When they heard that they said no more to the brother but forgave him.”

A practice – orient yourself toward being present to your thoughts and feelings, recognizing that God is ever-present by putting away the circus in your pocket – your cell phone. Feel free to experiment – turn it off, remove all of the games that perhaps distract you. Distraction literally means “to pull apart.”

1 min. silence