A Contemplative Moment: Interior Solitude

 There is no true solitude except interior solitude: 'The truest solitude is not something outside you, not an absence of men or of sound around you: it is an abyss opening up in the center of your own soul.' (Merton, Seeds of Contemplation) The person who has discovered that solitude and been discovered by it, is always solitary, that is, he is always alone with God, even in the midst of a crowd and the rush of a city. Place and circumstance are less important to the person who dwells in peace at the center of his being. It is, however, difficult to imagine how a man could develop a deep interior solitude without a certain amount of stepping back from the crowd in order to glimpse its illusions and diversions, and without some silent time in which to get in touch with himself.

"Not all men are called to be hermits, but all men need enough silence and solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally. When the inner voice is not heard, when man cannot attain to the spiritual peace that comes from being perfectly at one with his own inner self, his life is always miserable and exhausting. For he cannot go on happily for long unless he is in contact with the springs of spiritual life which are hidden in the depths of his own soul.

Richard Anthony Cashen, Solitude in the Thought of Thomas Merton quoting Merton, The Silent Life

A Contemplative Moment: Interior or Existential Solitude

"Man the Solitary" from

Solitude in the Thought of Thomas Merton

by

Richard Anthony Cashen

Important as is the category of physical solitude, interior solitude, is more important, more fundamental than physical solitude. "There is no true solitude except interior solitude", Merton states bluntly. Physical solitude helps foster interior solitude, it is true, but it is interior solitude which gives physical solitude its validity. Without interior solitude, physical solitude might be a false or dangerous solitude, full of life denial and self-hatred, a flight from responsibility or spiteful separation from one's fellow man. . . .Solitude becomes for Merton, as Jean LeClercq has pointed out, the symbol of the 'absolute, ultimate and inexhaustible encounter with God and with humanity'. Merton's concept of interior solitude resembles the biblical concept of 'heart'. In fact, one of the finest summations of Merton's thought on interior solitude can be found in his own description of the scriptural 'heart'. One need only substitute the words interior solitude in place of 'heart':

heart (interior solitude) refers to the deepest psychological ground of one's personality, the inner sanctuary where self-awareness goes beyond analytical reflection and opens out into metaphysical and theological confrontation with the Abyss of the unknown yet present --- one who is 'more intimate to us than we are to ourselves'.

While physical solitude removes us from our fellow man, interior solitude unites us with him. It is communion with our fellow man on a much deeper level than the social fictions of life in a large city or a technological world allow. Physical solitude is not absolutely necessary for the process of interior solitude.

. . . a (person) becomes a solitary at the moment when, no matter what may be his external surroundings, he is suddenly aware of his own inalienable solitude and sees that he will never be anything but solitary.