On Sharing Experiences of Mystical Prayer

[[Sister, is it common for hermits to have mystical prayer experiences? I read about one of these that you wrote about but I couldn't find others. I have had a couple of very intense and amazing prayer experiences, but I am finding it hard to share these with others! Is that why you don't write about these very much or do you not have them?]]

I don't know how common mystical prayer experiences are among hermits. Still, given the fact that hermits are contemplatives and contemplatives pray regularly, intensely, and even in a relatively pervasive way where every activity is marked by openness, attentiveness, and responsiveness to God, I would expect to see mystical prayer experiences with some regularity. This regularity is not the same as frequency, though. Because I accept that mysticism is a function of openness and attentiveness to Divine Mystery (the source of the term mystical), I also believe that those who pray regularly and seriously will have mystical experiences, though they may well be few and far between. As I understand matters, authentic mystical prayer experiences are a part or subset of contemplative prayer and associated experiences. This means that ordinarily, they come only with consistent and persistent practice, and even then, they are gratuitous --- a free gift of Godself.

I don't speak much about mystical prayer experiences because these are, 1) a very personal and intimate part of my life, 2) a gift of God who chooses to come to me in this way in specific circumstances, and 3) these are only helpful to share in limited situations. I also 4) never want to give the impression that God has created me differently from others or that God loves me more or even particularly differently than God loves others. For this reason, I cannot accept that some people are born mystics or that they have mystical experiences because God loves them in a vastly different way than he loves everyone else. Thus, I believe that God wills to give himself to every person in this way and that one needs to develop one's openness, attentiveness, and responsiveness to God in the persevering practices of prayer and penance. This also means that I believe God's truly remarkable gifts must be matched by patience, authentic humility, and discretion.

Your questions about my not speaking about mystical experiences point directly to the demand for humility and discretion.  I believe without these two qualities in particular, speaking about such experiences can morph into bragging, arrogance, and the subtle or not-so-subtle denigration of "ordinary" spirituality and "ordinary" prayer experiences or those who have not had and may not believe they are meant to have such experiences. In some people, these kinds of experiences are reported with what seems to approach a sense of entitlement! I say this because the sense of awe for such experiences, if it ever truly existed, slips away. At least it is not expressed when these experiences are spoken of by some. What comes across, unfortunately, is a privileged mindset where the entirely gratuitous ways God comes to any human person are rendered either routine or elitist.

One of the greatest gifts God gave me years ago, is the sense that I am the same as everyone else. At the same time, and paradoxically, this does not conflict with personal limitations or giftedness; instead, it contextualizes these and provides a perspective from which I can regard and either deal with or, perhaps, use them for the sake of others. This awareness of my sameness, along with my sense that it is a real grace of God, colors both my systematic and mystical theologies. It helps me to appreciate what God wills for every person; it also sensitizes me to those persons whose "prayer" experiences are (purportedly at least) always larger than life and peopled with characters and events drawn from dated hagiographies that in significant respects, and for entirely valid reasons, are less than edifying today. 

In other words, we can't blame an "increasingly secular" culture for the fact that these accounts strike others as irrelevant at best and destructive of genuine faith or even pathological at worst. Rather than being a reverent reminiscence of an intimate encounter with God that is usually most properly discussed with one's spiritual director, a very good friend, or one's confessor, this sometimes-seen practice of announcing one's mystical experiences far and wide reminds me more of a carnival barker calling attention to circus acts. Such "barking" can cause even the most genuine of experiences to seem "inauthentic" and be off-putting. In the case of mystical prayer experiences, less is definitely more. Thus, though you have certainly not described anything excessive in your own situation, I would still encourage you not to share these experiences with just anyone and everyone, tempting though that will sometimes be; when the right person, place, and time comes to share, you will recognize it. Just remember, patience, humility, and discretion!! This is the way we truly praise God and thank him for loving us so well.

"Waiting in the Tabernacle of the Hermitage" by Sister Rachel Denton, Er Dio

I am pleased to be able to post the following article from Sister Rachel Denton, Er Dio. Rachel is a good friend who also "does Christology from below;" her life is focused on Jesus in the extraordinary ordinariness of hermitage life. It was a blessing to have discovered this article in The Merton Journal last night after I posted Why I do Christology from Below. Rachel gave her permission to use this article, and I am ecstatic to share it with readers here!

Waiting in the Tabernacle of the Hermitage

I am a canonical hermit, originally of the diocese of Nottingham UK (professed 2006), currently of the diocese of Hallam UK: Hermits are eclectic and catholic in nature – we each do our own thing! I write from my own experience of hermitage, though I hope there may be common themes here which will resonate more widely.

Some questions from the beginning of the penny catechism:
1. Who made you?
God made me.
2. Why did God make you?
God made me to know God, love God and serve God in this world, and to be happy with God for ever in the next.
3. To whose image and likeness did God make you?
God made me to God’s own image and likeness. 1

As we draw towards the end of this Year-of-Covid, I have been curious to notice the priorities of the Church in supporting her members and the wider populace. Within local parish communities there has been much evidence of ongoing support for each other and for the most needy, finding innovative ways to celebrate and to support. But the ecclesial headlines appear to have focused quite specifically on the re-opening of church buildings for private prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, and thenceforward for the physical participation of the faithful in the celebration of the Eucharist.

When I was consecrated as a canonical hermit, I was offered the privilege of having the Blessed Sacrament reserved within my hermitage. I gave the invitation much prayerful consideration, but eventually decided against it. My understanding and experience of hermitage is that the whole of the hermitage is sacred space; the whole of the hermitage is tabernacle, the place where the hermit meets Christ. Hermitage is, for the hermit, the sacred space of God-with-us. This understanding and experience is a step beyond the foothills of the God-is-everywhere theme of childhood lessons. This is the confidence that, by God’s grace, simply to embrace and live out my humanity in the place and circumstance I find myself, is the fullest possible expression of my relationship with God during my life on this earth.

Deep within the paragraphs of Vita Consecrata (an encyclical on the consecrated life which is adopted by canonical hermits on their profession) there is hidden a quite audacious phrase. It describes Jesus’ life on earth, his humanity, as the expression of his relationship as the Only-Begotten Son with the Father and with the Holy Spirit 2 .

Being human is 'the expression' of Christ's love within the Trinity. 

We have been taught, perhaps too often, that Jesus’s humanity is a belittling, a humbling of his deity, as if it were second-best, dragging him down to our own “wretched” state. But if we ponder the statement above prayerfully, we can perhaps begin to trust that being human is, in and from the beginning, the most perfect way that Christ participates in being God – that Christ being the Word, Christ being human is the event of God speaking; as the encyclical states, it is “the expression” of Christ’s love within the Trinity. In the desire to most fully express the love of the Trinitarian Godhead, in the Word being spoken, Christ wondrously brought about, for Christ-self, the state of being human. Christ is human first, before anybody else was even imagined, right from the beginning!

And for ourselves, being human is Christ creating us upwards into the ecstasy of the Trinity. Christ’s undiminished humanity is the ecstatic love that we, and all of creation (because it is all spoken), are invited to share in our living today. Each one of us is created in the image of Christ’s humanity – in the image of the fullness of this unbounded expression of Trinitarian love. As a hermit, I witness that I am called to make manifest Trinitarian love, through my own humanity – of Christ – in my daily life; that the call to being human in Christ, and in imitation of Jesus, makes manifest in me, too, the fullness of our relationship, in Christ, in the Trinity.

So how does that work in practice? The heartbeat of my hermitage is its sacred ordinariness. It is an experience, in silence and solitude, of total immersion in the humdrum of daily life. A hermit is one who has, perhaps, become so overwhelmed by the immensity of the privilege of sharing Jesus’ humanity that she chooses to spend her whole life contemplating the mystery and manifestation of that gift in the most simple and ordinary form of living. A hermit lives out the mystery of the Incarnation in her own body, her own blood. A hermit says, “Christ, from the beginning of time, and in the fullness of time, chose being Jesus, being human, as the best way of expressing the love of the Trinity. Living in Christ, under the action of the Holy Spirit, and totally dedicated to God who is supremely loved 3, I will now do likewise”.

Because of the relentless ordinariness of her life, there is very little of worth that can be written about a hermit and her hermitage which cannot be written about every individual and community on the earth. That participation in the mystery of Christ’s humanity in Jesus is the focused privilege of the hermitage, but it is the lodestone of every human life. The hermit inhabits the tabernacle of her hermitage, but all people wait and attend in the tabernacle of the world. Christ is close to us when we are kneeling directly in front of the Blessed Sacrament in a church, but just as close when we are sitting in the pews at the back, or standing at the boundary wall outside locked doors, or at any moment in any place when we attend inwardly to the presence of God.

Lockdown in the hermitage was not a time of greater separation, but a time of dwelling deeper within the mystery. Now, as the churches tentatively regroup and are re-inhabited, as people kneel directly in front of the tabernacle, and celebrate Eucharist together in each other’s company, we are able to express more publicly again the community which is Christ’s self-manifestation and revelation to the world. In this time of Advent, of waiting, of expectation, and from the solitude and silence of my hermitage, I like to stand with the Church and the whole of humanity, bereaved, grieving and masked, together-yet-apart before the altar of God.

God is with us.

1. Opening phrases of the penny catechism.
2. Pope John Paul II, 1996, Vita Consecrata. 18
3. Code of Canon Law: Part III Institutes of consecrated life.

 Canon 573 i

Sister Rachel's website is found at, St Cuthbert's House.

Why I do Christology "From Below"

[[Dear Sister, I have read some of this blog and I wonder when you write about the hiddenness of eremitical life if you don't disparage Jesus by referring so strongly to his humanity. Jesus was God, a Divine person, so to speak of his "ordinariness" or even his faith in God demeans him. How would you respond to that objection?]]

Great question. Thanks. I suppose my response goes back to one of the first theology classes I ever had. This was an undergraduate Introduction to New Testament and made an impression I have never left behind. The professor asked us who Jesus was or is and he let us answer in all of the ways we thought not just described, and identified Jesus,  but also how we most honored him. I said something about Jesus being the Son of God and John (Dwyer) smiled, nodded, and said, "Okay, bearing that in mind, tell me who God is!"( After all, if the best, truest, or even the highest thing we can say about Jesus is that he is the Son of God, we really should be able to say who God is apart from Jesus.)  But of course, Jesus is the One who reveals God exhaustively to us; he shows us who God is in ways that transcend any of the partial revelations we have in the Hebrew Scriptures or in other religions. Moreover, he makes the Creating, Saving God present in space and time in ways not achieved except fragmentarily in the Law, Prophets, Judges, and others. (Remember to reveal in this usage means not only making visible and making known, but also to make real in space and time.)

So, the question, I think, is really how does Jesus do that, and then, what does this mean about his humanity? First, I believe Jesus reveals both who God is and what it means to be truly human. He does both in exhaustive and definitive ways and paradoxically, he does both at the very same time. I believe that this is a major part what the Christological Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, for instance, were trying to say in the categories of that day and age. Secondly, I recognize that Christology can be done either "from above" or from below"; one (as in the Gospel of John) starts with Jesus' divinity, the other (as in the Gospel of Mark or the Letters of Paul) with Jesus' humanity. Each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses, and each must address these if people are truly to understand who Jesus and the One he called Abba are for us. One of the weaknesses, I believe, in all Christology from above is that in starting with Jesus as God, it fails to truly "get to" much less adequately esteem Jesus' humanity; nor does it really see Jesus' humanity as a true model for our own.  I believe it also may prevent us from treating our earth with the reverence and responsible stewardship we are called to, but I will wait to make that argument.

Doing Christology (and all theology in light of this) "from below" not only shows us the depth of God's kenotic (self-emptying) love, it also reveals how truly we who are called to authentic human life fall short of or "miss the mark" of that very goal. When we do theology beginning with Jesus' humanity it is very much easier to see that to be truly human means to live in an indescribably intimate relationship with God (we cannot be truly human alone!!) and it means to become entirely transparent to the Love-in-Act of the God who wills to be Emmanuel, God-With-Us. What I have said about eremitical hiddenness and extraordinary ordinariness (cf Hiddenness and Extraordinary Ordinariness, and Essential Hiddenness) is meant to indicate that whenever our reality is allowed to become all that it is created to be, meaning whenever God is allowed to be God-With-Us in and through us, nothing at all is "ordinary", or, maybe better, the extraordinary everyday reality we so easily denigrate, demean, and diminish, is really and truly extraordinary, even sacramental. We, like Jesus, are called to make God really and truly present in this world. Jesus reveals this is the very nature of what it means to be human just as he reveals God as Emmanuel!

I realize this is not a complete answer to the implications of your questions, and certainly it is no Christological treatise, but to be honest, I just don't have the energy or the motivation to even try to write such a thing, and certainly not on this blog! I do not deny the aim of what the Christological Councils wanted to affirm about Christ and his relationship to the One he called Abba, Father; certainly I have studied these Councils (and the language they used!) but even so, I neither speak, live, nor understand reality in terms of the language (words and categories of thought and understanding) that were used in those Councils. Further, I believe that that language itself, despite the brilliance of those wielding it, fell far short ("missed the mark") and could only have fallen far short of capturing or expressing the paradoxes of the Christ Event fully and definitively revealed on the Cross! 

Now, I completely agree that all human language falls short of the heart of our faith, that Mystery that is ineffable, but in some important ways, the Greek categories of the Christological Councils made faith harder rather than easier and introduced obstacles into the way we see ourselves and the world God entrusted to us. (cf for instance, "Pebble, Peach, Pooch, Person," pp 159-168 as a critique of "the so-called "hierarchy of being" or cf.,"Nature, a Neighbor" (pp 153-158) in Elizabeth Johnson's Come Have Breakfast. Other essays in this book are also pertinent.) Semitic thought, and certainly Christianity itself, is profoundly paradoxical whereas Greek thought has a similarly profound difficulty in dealing with paradox. This means that being people of faith in God and his revelation in Jesus the Christ, sometimes calls for us to let go of certain categories of thought, and often to learn new ones** if we really want to hear and understand what the Christ Event and the NT reveals to us.

** it is not easy for those of us raised in 20-21st C Western ways of thinking to deal with paradox. To understand that Jesus' humanity best reveals the nature of transcendent Divinity, or that our God is one whose power is most perfectly revealed in weakness (2 Cor 12:9), or even that in emptying himself of his prerogatives as God, the One Jesus called Abba is most fully and perfectly Godself, all demand the ability to perceive and reflect on the paradoxical nature of ultimate reality. If you have ever tried to teach people to think in terms of paradox, you'll know how difficult this is. But consider the Beatitudes, for example, and try to make sense of them via non-paradoxical categories of thought. In this way they will tend to simply seem absurd, the foolishness of those "who cannot think rationally".

Again, Hiddenness and a Vocation to Extraordinary Ordinariness

[[ Hi Sister Laurel, does the hiddenness of the hermit say anything to the average person? I don't mean is hiddenness important to the hermit or even what is it, but rather does it speak to the average person and if so, what should they be hearing? Also, is the difference between the way you understand hiddenness and other hermits do, the difference between inner hiddenness and outer hiddenness? I don't necessarily mean is it only one vs only the other, but more about which has priority. Thank you.]]

That's a really great couple of questions, so thanks!! One of the things recent posts have focused on has been accountability and the public nature of this vocation; it is important that diocesan hermits reflect on what their life says to others. It is meant to be a proclamation of the Gospel, of course, but how does one do this when one is largely hidden from the life of the parish community and diocese? And why, then, is hiddenness important? I continue to believe that hiddenness is a derivative value that is rooted in the more primary elements of the life, namely, stricter separation from the world, persevering prayer, and the silence of solitude --- all values that say God must come first in our lives. At the same time this does not mean hiddenness is unimportant, nor that it does not have something to say to the average person. So what is it? what about it resonates or could well resonate with most people?

I wrote a piece some years ago (2008) about hiddenness and extraordinary ordinariness. Hiddenness and living an Extraordinary Ordinariness. The essential idea there was that hermits live very ordinary lives but the reason we do that is extraordinary and further, the grace of God transfigures the ordinary into something truly extraordinary. In other words, we live what every other person lives when at home, but we do so in order that God might be allowed to be God-With-Us. Yes, the focus of our days is likely different than it is for most people (prayer, lectio, study, writing or other activities, work) but the whole of the day is pretty normal and pretty typical of living one's life alone. One cooks and cleans for oneself, does the chores necessary, sleeps, eats, recreates, all the things most people do daily. I live in a complex with seniors and I suspect that my days generally look like the days of many of those living here -- though, again, my focus is different and that transfigures the whole.

What I think the hiddenness of my own life says to others is that in their own life, as they go about the ordinary things of the day, those things can also be transfigured if we learn to "pray the day". I don't mean one needs to spend hours in prayer as a separate activity (though some formal prayer will help with the rest), but instead, practice being present to whatever it is you are doing and let God be God-With-You in that. Each of us lives a pretty ordinary life, but especially those who live alone at home. If we can let God accompany us and be open to God's presence in everything we are and do what is ordinary becomes extraordinary. The way some say this is to do everything with love. We do the ordinary with an extraordinary intention. The essence of loving God, of course, is to let God be God, and in doing so, to become truly human, so we are saying essentially the same thing. 

One dimension of the Gospel is the way God values us and our lives, the way God delights in everything about us (except perhaps our sin). Most of us would like our lives to be meaningful (significant) and even important (of import). What hermits say in their hiddenness, their embrace of extraordinary ordinariness is that living our day well and allowing God to accompany us in that is significant and possibly, it is the most significant thing we may ever do. Hermits live an ordinariness made extraordinary by the grace of God. I believe that is possible for all of us, though most will accomplish it in a non-eremitical context. All of this is a way of honoring hiddenness.

Regarding your second question, if you mean by outer things the focus on clothes, anonymity, "blending in", no public presence, and things like that, then yes, I definitely see the hiddenness of eremitical life as less about those things than it is about the dimensions of the life no one ever sees, namely, our focus on letting God be God in the every-day stuff, and thus, becoming fully human in the silence of solitude. This latter has priority for me, and I think, for any hermit. But my life, with its title, habit, cowl, and post-nominal initials also witnesses to the fact that I live this life in the name of the Church and in fact, in the heart of the Church. 

Some speak of struggling to blend or "fit in" as part of their hiddenness. I do not because I don't think I need to do that. Instead, I see myself already belonging deeply and truly to the Church and to all that is precious to God. When one belongs in this way, when one is open to all God loves, "blending in" or even acting to "fit in" is unnecessary and even counterproductive. Eremitical hiddenness involves the "outer" hiddenness you refer to, yes. Still, that is secondary; our life project, the thing we live for and from, the truly critical dynamic that defines our lives and marks our success at that life is truly hidden from the eyes of others --- except, perhaps, when grace spills over in a holiness that will help change the face of creation. 

Essential Hiddenness and the Vocation to Extraordinary Ordinariness (Reprise)

Image from Saturday Evening Post article

In the current (May/June 2013) issue of The Saturday Evening Post there is an article on "The New Urban Hermits" for which Jack El-Hai interviewed Karen Fredette (former hermit and, with her husband Paul, editor of Raven's Bread), Roger Cunningham (former Buddhist hermit), and myself. There are a couple of factual inaccuracies which make me sound like a vowed Camaldolese rather than a vowed diocesan hermit and Camaldolese Oblate but generally I think the article is really well done and that Jack El-Hai got his head and heart around something few people really understand. He deserves real credit for that.

One of the fine points Karen Fredette  makes is that hermits are about doing ordinary things with an extraordinary motivation.  I made a similar point used later in the article which, when taken with Karen's comment, suggests hermits experience this as the sustaining "glue" and heart of a vocation to contemplative life including eremitical solitude. It is certainly fundamental to Benedictinism and Camaldolese Benedictinism. I can't post the article here (I don't have a copy to do that with anyway) but I can reprise a post I put up here five years ago on living "an extraordinary ordinariness." Notes From Stillsong Hermitage: Essential Hiddenness and the Vocation to Extraordinary Ordinariness (05. June.2008) Too often people think of hermits or their essential hiddenness as abnormal. This blog post spoke to these things; for those who are coming to this blog because of the SEP article, Welcome! I think you will find this post is a good introduction to the heart of eremitical faitfulness.

On Essential Hiddenness and the Vocation to Extraordinary Ordinariness

[[Thank you for answering my questions about the hiddenness of the hermit life. What you write about its "essential hiddenness" sounds like the same "hiddenness" which is true of the lives of many people living in the world. You and other hermits seem to make a virtue of this, but isn't it pretty ordinary?]]

Yes, it is very ordinary, and in fact, that is precisely its virtue. As I mentioned in my earlier post, the hermit is meant to witness to those whose lives are ordinary in ways which may cause them to question the meaning and value or significance of  those lives. I have written about those in unusual circumstances (chronic illness, disability, etc) who are called upon to witness to the Gospel in vivid and poignant ways, but I have not really said much about those who work day in and day out at menial jobs and who see their lives as essentially meaningless or unimportant. I think the hermit can remind us each that every life, no matter how apparently unproductive or ordinary, is really (or is certainly meant to be!) part of a profound dynamic where the Kingdom of God comes to be realized more and more fully in our world. That happens, for the most part and for most persons, in the perseverance and day by day faithfulnesses exercised in ordinary life.

There is nothing spectacular or even very remarkable about the hermit's life in the ordinary sense of those words. It is very much a life of day to day faithfulness to the call of God and that call summons the hermit to prayer, work, study, and (sometimes) even some degree of outreach or evangelization every day in a way which repeats again and again. No one much recognizes what happens here in the hermitage as special, and from one perspective, there is nothing special about it. It is completely ordinary whether one is writing an article, doing the laundry or cleaning the bathroom, praying Office, doing personal work, studying, or meeting with occasional direction clients. Even contemplative or quiet prayer is pretty ordinary stuff from one perspective. From another perspective, of course, it is all very special, because it is all done in and with God, and in order to foster the coming of his Kingdom. When the ordinary is undertaken with and in the grace or presence of God it always becomes extraordinary, and yet, no one is likely to see that really. When I wrote in my earlier response that even my telling you what I do during the day would leave the essential mystery of the life intact, that is what I meant.

The challenge to each of us is to undertake the ordinary in a way which is attentive and sensitive to the presence of God. It is the challenge to undertake these things with a care and even love which, through the grace of God, transforms them into something extraordinary. This is basic spirituality and it is this which the hermit's day to day life accepts and affirms as infinitely valuable. I can say without question that although I do not know how it happens, I know without a doubt that my life in this hermitage, my daily perseverance in cell, my faithfulness to prayer, work, study, and the ordinariness of life, allows for God's Kingdom to be more fully realized right here and right now. I know without question that Stillsong Hermitage is a small bit of leaven in the loaf that is my community and the world, and that it contributes to the transformation of that whole even though I may never really understand that or see it realized in my lifetime.

Personally, I believe that every person is challenged to embrace his or her life in this way, especially in its ordinariness. God transforms everything he is allowed to touch with his hallowing love, and our job is to let that happen in all the ways day to day living puts before us. If we can do that, and to the extent we do it, again, the ordinary will be transformed into something extraordinary because each task and moment becomes the occasion where God's grace is allowed to enter in and to triumph. That is the very essence of affirming the goodness and sacramental nature of all reality. So, in each and everything we undertake, we strive to be attentive, aware, care-full, loving, and (describing all of these together) truly present. Nothing in this life is really ordinary unless we allow it to remain that by foreclosing it to our own conscious presence and the effect of God's grace. On the other hand, the really extraordinary in our daily lives is likely to remain hidden from most people for the whole of our lives.

I am thinking of the husband or wife who cares for his or her sick spouse day in and day out for weeks, months, or years, for instance. The most mundane act is transformed when carried out with loving awareness, attentiveness, and openness to God's grace, and yet no one sees this or thinks much to remark on it. It is unspectacular in many ways, but clearly extraordinary at the same time. And yet it is essentially hidden from the eyes of the world. So much of our lives really is hidden in this way.

It takes the eyes of faith to see as the hermit or other contemplative sees! I think the hermit witnesses not only to this essential hiddenness, but to the humility and faithfulness that is so necessary in a world where everyone seems to need to make a name for him or herself --- even if the only name they can claim is that of victim --- a thriving category of dubious "achievement" in the contemporary world! The hermit witnesses to how truly extraordinary is the life of "ordinary" faithfulness, "ordinary" perseverance, ordinary "heroism," and "ordinary" love undertaken in God. After all, this is precisely what Jesus' life was about; it is precisely who Jesus was and what Jesus revealed true humanity to be. It is therefore unsurprising that Jesus' miracles were, in the end, insufficient to really reveal the Kingdom of God except as a testimony to the fact that that reign comes to us and is made manifest in ordinary faith! The hermit witnesses to how infinitely meaningful is the life that our contemporary world dismisses as trivial and insignificant -- if it is lived in and through the grace of God.

Addendum, July 2013: The article is now available on the Saturday Evening Post website:  May/June 2013 | The Saturday Evening Post

Essential hiddenness and the Vocation to an Extraordinary Ordinariness

[[Thank you for answering my questions about the hiddenness of the hermit life. What you write about its "essential hiddenness" sounds like the same "hiddenness" which is true of the lives of many people living in the world. You and other hermits seem to make a virtue of this, but isn't it pretty ordinary?]]


Yes, it is very ordinary, and in fact, that is precisely its virtue. As I mentioned in my earlier post, the hermit is meant to witness to those whose lives are ordinary in ways which may cause them to question the meaning and value or significance of their lives. I have written about those in unusual circumstances (chronic illness, disability, etc) who are called upon to witness to the Gospel in vivid and poignant ways, but I have not really said much about those who work day in and day out at menial jobs and who see their lives as essentially meaningless or unimportant. I think the hermit can remind us each that every life, no matter how apparently unproductive or ordinary, is really (or is certainly meant to be!) part of a profound dynamic where the Kingdom of God comes to be realized more and more fully in our world. That happens, for the most part and for most persons, in the daily perseverance and day by day faithfulnesses exercised in ordinary life.

There is nothing spectacular or even very remarkable in the ordinary sense of that word about the hermit's life. It is very much a life of day to day faithfulness to the call of God, and that call summons the hermit to prayer, work, study, and some degree of outreach or evangelization every day in a way which repeats again and again. No one much recognizes what happens here in the hermitage as special, and from one perspective, there is nothing special about it. It is completely ordinary whether one is writing an article, doing the laundry or cleaning the bathroom, praying Office, doing personal work, studying, or meeting with occasional direction clients. Even contemplative or quiet prayer is pretty ordinary stuff from one perspective. From another perspective, of course, it is all very special, because it is all done in and with God, and in order to foster the coming of his Kingdom. When the ordinary is undertaken with and in the grace or presence of God it always becomes extraordinary, and yet, no one is likely to see that really. When I wrote in my earlier response that even my telling you what I do during the day would leave the essential mystery of the life intact, that is what I meant.


The challenge to each of us is to undertake the ordinary in a way which is attentive and sensitive to the presence of God. It is the challenge to undertake these things with a care and even love which, through the grace of God, transforms them into something extraordinary. This is basic spirituality and it is this which the hermit's day to day life accepts and affirms as infinitely valuable. I can say without question that although I do not know how it happens, I know without a doubt that my life in this hermitage, my daily perseverance in cell, my faithfulness to prayer, work, study, and the ordinariness of life, allows for God's Kingdom to be more fully realized right here and right now. I know without question that Stillsong Hermitage is a small bit of leaven in the loaf of my community and the world, and that it contributes to the transformation of that whole eventhough I may never see that in my lifetime.


Personally, I believe that every person is challenged to embrace his or her life in this way, especially in its ordinariness. God transforms everything he is allowed to touch with his hallowing love, and our job is to let that happen in all the ways day to day living puts before us. If we can do that, and to the extent we do it, again, the ordinary will be transformed into something extraordinary because each task and moment becomes the occasion where God's grace is allowed to enter in and to triumph. So, in each and everything we undertake, we strive to be attentive, aware, care-full, loving, and (describing all of these together) truly present. Nothing in this life is really ordinary unless we allow it to remain that by foreclosing it to our own conscious presence and the effect of God's grace. On the other hand, the really extraordinary in our daily lives is likely to remain hidden from most people for the whole of our lives.


I am thinking of the husband or wife who cares for his or her sick spouse day in and day out for weeks, months, or years, for instance. The most mundane act is transformed when carried out with loving awareness and openness to God's grace, and yet no one sees this or thinks much to remark on it. It is unspectacular in many ways, but clearly extraordinary at the same time. And yet it is essentially hidden from the eyes of the world.

It takes the eyes of faith to see as the hermit or other contemplative sees! I think the hermit witnesses not only to this essential hiddenness, but to the humility and faithfulness that is so necessary in a world where everyone seems to need to make a name for him or herself --- even if the only name they can claim is that of victim --- a thriving category of dubious "achievement" in the contemporary world! The hermit witnesses to how truly extraordinary is the life of "ordinary" faithfulness, "ordinary" perseverance, ordinary "heroism," and "ordinary" love undertaken in God. After all, this is precisely what Jesus' life was about; it is precisely who Jesus was and what Jesus revealed true humanity to be. It is therefore unsurprising that Jesus' miracles were, in the end, insufficient to really reveal the Kingdom of God except as a testimony to the fact that that reign comes to us and is made manifest in ordinary faith! The hermit witnesses to how infinitely meaningful is the life that our contemporary world dismisses as trivial and insignificant -- if it is lived in and through the grace of God.