solitude

solitude can seem frightening and overwhelming. we do so much in the modern world to stay so connected to others. it seems to me that solitude can be a spiritually potent state if one allows oneself to embrace it. it is so tempting to try to escape it. to fill it with activities and thoughts and longings and imaginations. if one can submit to it entirely perhaps one will be able to experience the all-encompassing ecstasy of prayer. perhaps if one stays with it one will arrive at a place of peace and calm and clarity.

embracing true solitude seems to require complete severance from the world...

a baha'i year of patience is a beautiful opportunity to practice such solitude, detachment and severance. it strikes me that it is very similar to the practice of fasting. i am delighted at the thought of a year. the part that I find more difficult is to embrace the possibility of a life time of solitude. of course, it will not be constant solitude--there will be plenty of room for all manner of new friends and joys and activities and more purposeful and pure hearted service. but, in all, perhaps the opportunity that a single celibate life affords for solitude must needs be treasured and utilized to its fullest potential. activities and friends should never be used as a means to simply fill up a void.

Cousin Dave has chosen a life of solitude in his work as a missionary in the Ukraine. I asked him recently if he had any suggestions about achieving a state of true prayer and acquiring spiritual discipline and I found his simple answer to be so powerful. . Part of what he said was...

"It seems to me that being disciplined in spiritual activities like prayer and reading and meditating on passages from the Bible, and keeping one day a week set aside for resting and focusing on God etc. will not in themselves bring me into a close relationship with the Lord, but on the other hand, you can't have a close relationship with the Lord without them... I know in my life, and I see it in most other people, getting too busy with lots of good things prevents me from focusing on the best thing - my relationship with the Lord. That is why a day of rest is really important, as I see it. Not just that we need physical rest, but we need to stop the rat race and have some time to consider the spiritual. That runs counter to society around us as you well know."

I say it is simple...because really it is so obvious and yet how many of us really do make this time for our own concentrated spiritual growth and development? It is only now in my new life of solitude that I have been really endeavoring to make real time every morning and evening for my prayers, readings and meditations.

A couple quotes on solitude from here...

"Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than the suns and the stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning - solitude;" said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may take acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude." -- from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Conduct of Life"

"Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius."Sir Edward Gibbon