Silence of Solitude and Community in Eremitical Life

[[Hi Sister Laurel, good to see you writing here again. Have you been okay? I had a question about what you wrote on the Feast of the Holy Family. You said, [[It took and still takes the focused work I associate with spiritual direction, the deep and intense silence of prayer, and the community in all its forms that grounds and renders meaningful and coherent the eremitical solitude that represents the context, charism, and goal of my own life with God.]] When you write about community in all of its forms rendering eremitical solitude meaningful and coherent, what do you mean? I guess I still see community and eremitical solitude as opposed to one another. I am not sure I understand the use of the word coherent here either.]]

Hi there yourself, and thanks for the questions! Yes, in the main I have been okay. There have been struggles with health that are ongoing -- these are sometimes worse and sometimes better --- and difficulties in our parish community that are relatively new; all have taken a lot of energy, including emotional and intellectual energy. Also, I haven't received many questions recently so thinking up posts was just too hard for me. However, I am getting back on track and discerning what I will do in the midst of all of this so I am feeling better. Not least, I am beginning Bible study again for the parish (and others joining us by ZOOM) with the Gospel of John on the 19th of January, and as always, Scripture and the challenge of teaching it are incredibly life-giving for me. 

I am also recommitting to this blog. I continue to believe it is important and touches more people than I can ever know. The week after Christmas I wrote to a monastery in a neighboring state whose Christmas Mass was live-streamed. (I attended Mass in person in my own area, but I wanted to share this community's celebration as well.) Unfortunately, there was no audio! Later that day they put up the homily as a separate video. Fortunately, the audio worked fine! When I wrote, I thanked them for posting the separate video and made a few comments about the homily. It had spoken to me "with God's own voice" and was simply a gift I will carry with me as I move into the future. Not least, to underscore the substance of the homily, the presider included a litany-like song with Celtic harp accompaniment about each of us being the beauty of God incarnated in our world. 

Later that afternoon I received an email from the priest whose homily I had noted. He introduced himself as "the guy playing the harp" and thanked me for the kind words. Further, he explained that he was glad to make contact with me because he was discerning contemplative and/or eremitical life and when he began doing so a few years ago had first read my blog. He has read it many times over the past several years. Our connection was a reminder of how small our world really is, and how God works to weave threads together in some of the most surprising ways as he summons everything to fullness in himself. All of this also ties into and prepares the way for my answer to your question about the relation of solitude to community.

So, on to that question! I spoke of community in all of its forms as providing a way for eremitical solitude to be meaningful and coherent and there I was thinking there of several things. The first is that no Christian hermit lives solitude purely alone. That may be isolation;  it may be some form of personal death (that is, death in a less definitive sense), but it is not solitude. Eremitical solitude as I live and know it is inherently communal --- though that may certainly seem an unusual claim. I do not live alone, ever. I live with God and God is real to me most all the time. Secondly, however, because I am a Catholic hermit, my solitude is rooted in the community of the universal Church, especially as it is localized in my diocese and parish. 

This is not an abstract or merely notional or pro forma rootedness; it involves me with people in concrete ways; they are fed by and feed me and my solitude (communion with God) even when I am not with them physically. I work regularly with a spiritual director who either comes here to the hermitage or meets with me via ZOOM. I am dependent on other people in a number of different ways, from doctors and nurse practitioners to folks who deliver my groceries, those who give me rides to liturgy, et al. And of course, as noted above, I both touch and am touched by people who read this blog and have done for some part of the past 16 or so years. Most of these I will never meet or even speak to. Some write me and a few I will meet face to face --- especially those living in solitude themselves.

In other words, in my solitude, there is a complex and deep web of people whose love and prayers sustain and challenge me to be myself precisely in the silence of solitude even as my life does the same for them. Though it is not always done directly, they subtly influence all of the elements of my vocation; they give that call a certain significance and are part of shaping it in ways that are both meaningful and help it to hang together (cohere) so that it constitutes a meaningful whole. I have often written of the vocation to eremitical solitude as an ecclesial vocation --- meaning first of all that this vocation belongs to the church before it belongs to the hermit herself. (God gives it to the Church who mediates it to me and to other hermits on God's behalf. 

That mediation is not a one-time act, but an ongoing reality I continue to receive and embrace.) I believe profoundly that this ecclesial context is a large part of what allows an eremitical vocation to speak in the way any true vocation must. Among other things, it helps clarify at every point that one's solitude is not about escapism but encounter and engagement, not individualism but individuality and being the whole person one is called by God to be. The silence of solitude points to being committed and whole enough to listen and respond --- to God, to one's deepest self, and to others who might come into one's ambit in any way at all including their need for prayer. It is also a fruit of such attentive or obedient listening, living, and loving.

Consider the following in identifying eremitical solitude as a unique form of community. One's vocation is mutually discerned with representatives of the church; one is called forth by the community to make one's profession and to receive consecration; one is similarly sent into the hermitage to embrace a life of assiduous prayer with and for God's own sake and the sake of all of God's creation, and is supported in one's solitude and anachoresis by the prayer and the assistance of many others. 

The hermit is aware of all of this throughout her life in the hermitage. To forget it is to forget who she is and how she has been and is called every day of her life. At the same time, if one takes any part of this communal dimension away, solitude begins to look very different. It ceases to be eremitical solitude as the church and canon 603 understand it, and can gradually slide into alienation and individualism while the silence of solitude may modulate into the muteness of an uncommitted and personally empty withdrawal from life. It may become a silence we struggle to fill with "noise" --- the noise of various forms of activity and distraction, for example. 

Because of the difficulties recently associated with my parish and the way it has affected my own life, I am clearer than ever that community underlies, pervades, and even characterizes the hermit's solitude in a unique way --- though of course, one can and does move more deeply into the solitude of one's hermitage and the arms of God one finds there for strength and comfort at such times. But even at such times, one's "greater" turn to the silence of solitude of the hermitage is strongly marked by one's existence as part of a community of faith. Nor does deepening or more intense communion with God allow one to forget this. The suffering one brings to prayer at times like this is the suffering of life in a faith community and the strength and healing one finds in one's solitude is the healing one brings in some way to one's faith community. I remember a Trappistine Sister explaining in a video once a while ago that "our life is about 100% community and 100% solitude; it is not 50/50 because the heart of both of these is communion with others" -- and though hermits approach this truth from a different perspective than Trappists, so it is with eremitical life and its communion, first with God, then ourselves, and also with others. 

I hope this is helpful. An older post covers some of this and may do a better job of it in some ways. You can find it here: Silence of Solitude as Charism