Do All Hermits Struggle Against Individualism?

[[Sister Laurel, do all hermits struggle against individualism? When you write about this are you speaking of all hermits or only one or two?]]

Thanks for the questions. Generally speaking, I don't know what constitutes an actual "struggle" for other hermits. What I do know is that every hermit I have spoken to or otherwise heard from deals with the tension between being a true individual following one's own path empowered by the Holy Spirit, and developing the truly compassionate heart that not only reflects the contemplative heart of the Church but also the anguished heart of "the world".  The first seems easier to me in the silence of solitude than the second. The second depends more on inner solitude that is sustained, and sustains the hermit, even while she is engaged with others outside the hermitage.

I also speak of tension here because the tasks being completed by the hermit in their vocation include 1) personal individuation in Christ within the context of genuine faithfulness to the constituent elements of c 603 (here one grows in one's own capacity to love via assiduous prayer, and inner work in the silence of solitude), 2) a deepening and paradoxical attentiveness to the world and to the pain and yearning of the world (here one grows in genuine compassion as one's capacity to love others grows, again while maintaining and growing toward the silence of solitude), and 3) doing all of this while maintaining one's faithfulness to the Gospel and the Church's own challenging vocation to be the community of "the called ones" (the ecclesia) who live within the world but not of it. All of these pull the hermit in different directions, though all of them are (eventually) achieved by learning to abide in God's own heart and to allow God to fill and transfigure their own.

To summarize all of this in another way we can say that the challenge to the hermit is to, 1) become her truest self in and with God (her primary vocation), 2) fulfill her further vocation (her specific pathway to true humanity) to become part of the intercessory heart of the Church, 3) witnessing to the truth of the Church's Gospel, while 4) becoming a compassionate presence in, to, and for the world and its salvation, and  5) doing all of this in the presence and power of God while living in and, when this applies,  toward the silence of solitude embraced under c 603. All of this locates the hermit living in solitude and silence in the very center of reality as she also pays loving attention to the anguished world that lives far outside that center and in significant estrangement from it. Since these things are ordinarily accomplished in society, it is relatively rare to achieve them in solitude, and imperative to do so in the heart of God. All of this creates tensions and sources of potential struggle for hermits --- all genuine hermits.

Presently, when I write against individualism, I rarely have any one hermit (or would-be hermit) in mind. Instead, I am mindful that each of us, given c 603's flexibility and need for significant formation (this does not need to be identical to that of cenobites), is working with God to allow him to love us into wholeness without our falling into individualism in the process. In this way, God fits us for the uniquely eremitical ministry we are called to in solitude. God fits us, in Christ, to be a place of intercession for both the Church and the world. This is a demanding vocation requiring significant lived experience of God's presence in Love -- of the Church, of others, and of the larger world. For this reason, any of us is actually likely to find ourselves temporarily veering off into individualism as we negotiate the various tensions of the life and the various ways in which human beings are called to love in achieving human wholeness and holiness. This is especially true before we are well-established in the silence of solitude and the heart of the Church, something that takes real time to develop. 

At the same time, there are a small number of would-be hermits out there who are (or have been) incredibly vocal and sometimes seem to have lacked personal boundaries; their lives are (or at least have been) illustrative of more than a temporary tendency toward individualism. Though I no longer pay much attention to their online presence, it is hard not to speak of an important topic like individualism in the eremitic life without alluding to the examples these folks represent(ed) and provide(d). The examples of individualism they at least once provided remain helpful in illustrating important caveats for those turning to eremitical life, particularly under c 603. That was true recently when I wrote about the would-be hermit who once claimed not to need to attend Mass because of being more spiritually advanced than her "temporal" hermit counterparts.