From loneliness to solitude

The conventional and dictionary understandings of solitude often emphasize being alone, even being lonely. Possibly being apart from society.

In the Christian spiritual life, solitude has its own meaning. Really two meanings. It is used to describe an inner state of harmony and grace. And we also speak of it as a way to move toward that state; practices often involving reflection, silence and stillness.

A time with God, and only God. God brings us into solitude so the Holy Spirit may be our spiritual guide; may form us into maturity.

An important dimension of solitude is its relationship with loneliness.

Solitude as a faithful way out of our loneliness

For the Christian solitude is the way out of loneliness.

Alice Koller wrote two books on solitude in the 80s and 90s from a humanist and feminist perspective. Her thinking aligns with what we see in writings on the spiritual life.  She once said that “the process of becoming a human being begins with confronting aloneness.” And “Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement. ““My urgent need was to find out what I believed and wanted and felt independently of what anyone else believed or felt or wanted me to believe or feel.”

In his little booklet, “From Loneliness to Solitude, Roland Walls offers an interesting definition of loneliness, “It’s being on your own and disliking it.” He’s take on it rises from his own experience of a period in his lifewhen he was spending a lot of time on his own. He also took note of how loneliness was a significant personal problem for many people in the cities. An observation supported by research and by all accounts worse now, 20 years after his writing the booklet.

“I believe that loneliness can be turned into a marvelous thing called solitude.” In his thinking that’s because, “We are built around an empty space.” “We are made for infinite possibility.” “We are literally made for God.” He quotes St. Augustine of Hippo, “God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till we rest in you.” 

Henri Nouwen wrote, “It is in solitude that we discover that being is more important than having and that we are worth more than the results of our efforts. In solitude we discover that our life is not a possession to be defended but a gift to be shared.” (“You are the Beloved: Daily Meditations for Spiritual Living”) In Reaching Out he noted that solitude wasn’t just about aloneness, “The solitude that really counts is the solitude of heart; it is an inner quality or attitude that does not depend on physical isolation…It seems more important than ever to stress that solitude is one of the human capacities that can exist, be maintained and developed in the center of a big city, in the middle of a large crowd and in the context of a very active and productive life. A man or woman who has developed this solitude of heart is no longer pulled apart by the most divergent stimuli of the surrounding world but is able to perceive and understand this world from a quiet inner center.

The pathway from loneliness to solitude has a variety of possible roads

For Alice Koller it wasn’t a religious quest though it had some of the same experiences known to practitioners. Penelope Green writing an obituary in the New York Times, “as her life was reduced to small essential tasks—making coffee, walking on the beach and caring for her puppy—she found that they were enough to sustain her.” She quotes Koller, “I know who I am a little bit more each day." Reminds me of  John Keble’s poem, 

The trivial round, the common task,
Would furnish all we ought to ask;
Room to deny ourselves; a road
To bring us, daily, nearer God.

Fr. Walls wrote of allowing ourselves to “experience the painfulness of the empty nothing deep down in all our lives, sometimes waking at three in the morning, sometimes at the first anticipation of death or disease. I suppose everyone does at the moment of death, unless we have made the discovery that ‘underneath are the everlasting arms.’ “ He thought that the change from loneliness to solitude was possible for everyone. “I believe, from experience, that this change can happen to the most complaining, self preoccupied, frustrated person. I believe that if anyone faces up to the negative nonsense that forced isolation can bring, he or she can make the discovery that the ‘Kingdom of God is within’, that God's own solitude can be met, in fact, just where the pain is, in the empty aching.

Walls saw spiritual reading as a useful method, “Take one of those unfilled 15 minutes, half an hour, fill the room, your heart, with expectancy and read slowly a page of any Gospel--Slowly, as if it was all addressed to you. Let each word sink into the depth of your heart. You will find, perhaps for the first time, that you have heard them where they were meant to be heard, in the silence and the void, the waste and void where God is waiting to enter, where the Spirit hovers over the waters of the well of loneliness.”

For Henri Nouwen the way required some grit and daring, “To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.”

“The contemporary society in which we find ourselves makes us acutely aware of our loneliness. We become increasingly aware that we are living in a world where even the most intimate relationships have become part of competition and rivalry. …When our loneliness drives us away from ourselves into the arms of our companions in life, we are, in fact, driving ourselves into excruciating relationships, tiring friendships and suffocating embraces. To wait for moments or places where no pain exists, no separation is felt and where all human restlessness has turned into inner peace is waiting for a dreamworld. No friend or lover, no husband or wife, no community or commune will be able to put to rest our deepest cravings for unity and wholeness.”

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