Becoming a Hermit: Why not just go and do it?

[[Dear Sister, I saw this first question online, but I think it is a good one. "How does one know if they are a religious hermit or just antisocial and rationalizing their aversion to others through a religious lens??" I also wondered why the Church feels that such a simple vocation requires such significant discernment. Can't one just "go and do it?"]]

Thanks for the questions. I don't hear you asking whether you could become a religious hermit, but rather, how can one tell if one is the real deal, or is just unloving, antisocial, and using a religious mask to obscure the truth, no? This is a real problem. After all, it is Jesus who said, "Not everyone who says to me Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." As you apparently well know, then, your question is one of discernment. It is also very clear that it comes from your own recognition that some persons throughout history have validated their misanthropy with the name "hermit".

To answer you, I need to begin with our fundamental vocation and the way being a hermit relates to that. Becoming a hermit should be a pathway to becoming truly or fully human. The human person is so precious to God, and the task to become fully human such an important goal or telos, that he guides us into pathways that allow us to become human beings who are not only imago Dei, but over time become imago Christi. This is our foundational vocation, the call to let God be God with us, in us, and through us so that we might be entirely transparent to God. This transparency is another way of saying love fills us; love has touched us so profoundly that it works in and through us. In real transparency here, nothing in our lives remains an obstacle to that love that is really God being God in our world (the deep meaning of Emmanuel). Of course, this is something we grow in, just as Jesus grew in grace and stature, and the vocational pathway we embrace, if it is of and from God, will help us in this. It will give evidence of this growing transparency or human maturity to those discerning this vocation with us.

So, in dioceses dealing with applications to admit persons to profession and consecration under c 603, the Church looks carefully at the way the silence of solitude and a life of assiduous prayer and penance transform the person. Remember that a person seriously set on petitioning a diocese in this way will need to have lived as a lay or non-canonical hermit for some time before being allowed to submit such a petition. This preparatory period will need to show some redemptive fruit. If the person was misanthropic, there should be evidence that this is being tempered and what led to it is being healed in the silence of solitude. Over the years of mutual discernment with the diocese (because it does take years), the diocesan team, which can include a consecrated diocesan hermit, will watch carefully for further tempering and healing. One's spiritual director will do the same. All of this is meant to assist the person in discovering and embracing their God-given vocation to authentic humanity. In genuine vocations this fruit will become evident.

Over time, one might find the candidate wanting to do some limited active ministry. This can actually be a fruit of their solitude as well and lead to its deepening. It does not automatically mean the person is not called to eremitical solitude, for instance. In my experience, this is more usually a sign that the person is alive with God and the love in them needs to spill out; one wants to love others in very concrete ways. One needs to do so. Since one needs to learn not only to love but to be loved, it is entirely appropriate to allow a hermit to pursue some limited ministry in this way and at this time in their vocational journey. However, what one will also find is that, to the extent it is a healthy part of an eremitical vocation, the ministry depends upon and calls the candidate back into the silence of solitude and to its deepening into a stronger, more conscious sense of ecclesiality and that of the canonical eremitical life.

At the same time, then, one will also find that the very nature of solitude itself will begin to change for this candidate and become more and more alive with one's love for others as well as for God. (Remember that solitude means not only being alone, but also wholeness!) One person I know, eventually (after @ 5 years in her hermitage) described the silence of solitude as having become a sacrament, and her hermitage as a tabernacle. Notice how profoundly ecclesial these images are and how well they reflect the sensibilities of a hermit called to an ecclesial vocation --- not a vocation pitted against the Church, but one that is part of, and which reveals the Church's very heart. These kinds of things are some of the signs I would expect to see developing in an authentic eremitical vocation (particularly a canonical one) --- even if the person began their journey as a misanthrope!

The genuine eremitical vocation is rare. Few people, relatively speaking, are called to achieve authentic humanity this way. After all, we are social creatures right to the core of our being, and most of us require a different kind of community than a life of the silence of solitude involves!! I believe that today, the majority of those who call themselves or are self-identified "hermits" are attempting to validate failure, self-centeredness, dishonesty (beginning with dishonesty with oneself and going forward from there), the tendency to misanthropy, and unhealed trauma by calling themselves "hermits". To the extent one deals with such people, there will also be recognizable signs. One sign, or set of signs, I have become aware of over the years is a florid religiosity, full of visions, etc., but only very occasionally showing something that looks like real faith, reverence for the ordinary ways God reveals Godself to most of us, deep prayer, genuine stillness, a commitment to truth, and selfless love.

Such persons' lives may suggest there is a river of anger that flows through everything they say and do even when this is obscured by pious language and superficial praxis; they may live from a sense of victimhood, and a resentment that colors every relationship while giving rise to a sense of competition with the world around them (often including the Church). This too might be masked (and also revealed!!) in a flawed theology of "divine election" and theodicy. I have told the story here before of "Tom Leppard" who looked around and found that whenever there was a problem or difficulty in his life, other people were present and/or involved. The not-so-self-aware solution? Leppard decided not to deal with the problems within himself, but to cut himself off from others and become a hermit! For me, though he was not a religious person, Leppard is a vivid paradigm or symbol of the inauthentic "hermit".

Yes, anyone can go into the desert and try to become an authentic hermit. Some relatively few may actually achieve this goal. These successful seekers will tend already to be asking anguished existential questions that open them to God in a profound way, and their sojourn in the desert will sharpen this situation. Most, however, will find themselves starving, thirsting, freezing, and broiling to death in the wilderness --- or very quickly returning to a world in which their difficulties can be dealt with less openly than the desert demands. Remember that in the days of the Desert Abbas and Ammas, thousands and thousands of people went to the desert for many reasons. Today, when we read the sayings of the desert Fathers and Mothers, fewer than ten names stand out as true elders in this way of life. (There are 27 men and 3 women named in the apothegmata, and the Eastern Church regards 6 men and all 3 women especially.) Many of those who came to the desert were part of a developing monastic system; many others returned to the cities or simply died. The sense, however, is that of the thousands and thousands of people making a city of the desert; only a relatively small handful (hundreds) became true hermits.

Today, our world knows what has become an epidemic of individualism. It should not surprise us that at least some of these individualists would like to have their cake and eat it too by validating their autonomous identities as eremitical. I think they misunderstand eremitical solitude as a form of acceptable individualism, often with a veneer of recognizable piety. Your "borrowed" first question is really an excellent one; it points to a perennial problem, and apparently one Jesus himself was well aware of. To complete Jesus' saying: [[On that day many will say to me, Lord, Lord, did not we prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name? Then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness,' --- because individualism, marked by the unsound fruit mentioned above, really is a form of lawlessness, especially God's law of Love.

Thus, the Church that took a great deal of time before truly recognizing solitary eremitical life as a gift to the universal Church requires hermits and candidates for profession as hermits to work regularly with competent spiritual directors, and to move through a mutual process of discernment with diocesan staff and mentors familiar with eremitical life. Dioceses ordinarily admit such persons to temporary vows and only after several more years, to perpetual profession and consecration. They do so not only because the eremitical vocation is rare, nor even because it is precious to the Church and to God -- all of which reasons are certainly true. Above all, perhaps, they do so because the person's own fundamental vocation to true humanity, itself an inviolable treasure and gift of God within and to creation, is at stake (and possibly at risk!). This gift is the real reason any vocational path exists, and it is likewise the reason serious processes of discernment are both important and demanding in this particular one.

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P.S., For all readers: I just became aware that the first question above was taken from the Joyful Christian Hermit vlog. It remains a really excellent question, and I am grateful it was asked here. While this situation struck me as wonderfully ironic and caused me to laugh a bit upon discovering it, a sort of caveat is needed here. For future reference, please don't borrow questions from Joyful's site to bring here --- at least not without waiting some time before sending them on to me, and/or elaborating on them to explain why you have done so!! Thanks!!