Silence and Solitude
I find that when I am alone I think clearly. Jesus had solitude quite a bit. He had “multitudes” chasing him and he tried to get away and find times to recharge. If the incarnate creator of the universe needed some time to get away and think, I believe I probably need the same thing.
The best writing on solitude I have read so far is from the book The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard (page 357 if you’re wondering). What Willard means by Solitude is being out of human contact, being alone, and being so for some lengthy periods of time. He says we have something called “epidermal responses”. These are the first level of response to things, Our automatic responses, things like anger, scorn, sarcasm, payback, stewing on how we’ve been mistreated, that kind of thing. He says that these responses live in this first level, this “epidermal level”. They aren’t deep. They are just there and are where we live most of our lives. Unfortunately, they have the power to draw our whole being into them and make us think our whole lives should be effected by them. Say a parent wrongs us somehow when we are young, or we get fired unfairly. Our responses are anger, resentment, we want revenge immediately. That is our immediate response, but Solitude and silence allow us to escape the patterns of the epidermal responses and their consequences.
5 or 6 years ago I was in a pretty rough spot. Lots of things going on. A lot of bad habits to break. I had no idea how to break any of it. I would cry out to God, please take this stuff away. But I don’t think he works like that. Does a good parent just fix the child’s problem or does he help the child learn to solve their own problem? If my son can’t read a word, do I just tell him what it is or do I make him sound it out and figure it out? I make him figure it out…well most of the time anyways. As I was crying out to God, I started a pattern of getting up early before my kids woke up, before emails started coming in, before I started letting what other people want dictate my day and I read 1 chapter of the new testament. I started in Matthew. Then I wrote what I thought about it. It took 20 minutes. I would allow no judgement. I just wrote exactly what I thought about the scripture. I also started running a couple times a week. Which led me to start training for a half marathon. Those 2 things, unknown to me gave me a lot of silence and solitude.
That happens a lot in my life, I will be crying out to God to do something over here on the right and meanwhile he is transforming my life over here on the left and I don’t see how it all worked until years later. Richard Rhor has a phrase that says something like, “One day we will see what we have been doing while we have been doing what we’ve been doing”. I love that.
Make some time in your life for Silence and Solitude. It will transform your life.
