By Lawrence
S. Cunningham
There is something magical about how the mind works. Not only
can I recall the opening refrain of Duke Ellington's moving song
"In My Solitude" at will, but I can hear it in my head in the
haunting vocal version of Billie Holiday. When recalling that
music I often simultaneously think of a scene from a long-forgotten
movie in which a man sits alone in a bedroom of a cheap hotel
in the evening, smoking a cigarette near an open window while,
across the street, a red neon sign announces a "café."
The café, I am sure, would look exactly the way Edward
Hopper would paint it (as in his famous "Night Hawks").
This complex mental picture, complete with specific music, works
of art and lyrics, does conjure up aloneness and longing and interminable
times of waiting. What is implied in this solitude is the yearning
for another -- a lost or not yet found lover. My mind goes back
to a poignant line from Genesis: "It is not good for the man to
be alone." For many, solitude turns into loneliness.
Since solitude and loneliness are often confused, it would be
useful to disentangle the terms. My inspiration for thinking about
this subject is Jesus. Jesus was a man for others, whether it
was the crowds upon whom he had compassion or the sick and the
lame who crowded around to see him or the audiences to whom he
addressed his words. That same Jesus, however, as the Gospels
frequently note, also went off alone to a solitary place to pray
before the dawn broke. Jesus lived for others, but in that living
he also sought solitude.
Loneliness is a great cross to bear. "All the lonely people!"
the Beatles sang of that quintessentially lonely woman, Eleanor
Rigby -- another song I can hear in my head. As a kid growing
up in Saint Petersburg, Florida, it was always a treat to go to
the downtown cafeterias for dinner. Our family would pack into
the old Plymouth and try to catch the early bird specials so as
not to strain the tight budget of my school teacher father. I
do not know when it first struck me that many of the tables were
occupied by one person (usually a woman) who ate alone while sometimes
slipping a packets of crackers in a purse for a later snack. Widows
and widowers, hanging on to life with tiny pensions and social
security checks, headed back to tiny efficiency apartments for
evenings of listening to the radio or just looking out into the
Florida dusk, thinking of families up north and children who called
too infrequently. Solitude may be something desired, but loneliness
is a soul destroyer.
After three decades working on university campuses I can sometimes
spot the lonely student on campus. Overwhelmed by a large institution,
they are the ones who seem not to have made a friend or who are
awkward in social settings or seem not to fit in. The youngest
of them pine for the shelter of home; others are tortured by the
pain of the casual, often unthinking, cruelty of their classmates
or the seeming indifference of the group. Unlike those who thirst
for a solitary walk around the lake, these lonely students burn
for a friendly face or a casual exchange in the dining hall. What
they need is a friend or, to use that other rich word, a companion
-- one with whom to "share bread."
It is difficult to teach young people that solitude is a valuable
thing. It is especially difficult if they experience pangs of
loneliness. They are gregarious by culture and instinct. Young
people want to belong; they most definitely do not want to stand
out from the crowd in a negative way. They follow fashions in
clothing, music and movies not because they are shallow but because
they do not want to be excluded. They confuse solitude with loneliness,
and they dread loneliness.
While loneliness is a curse; solitude can be a gift. The curse
of loneliness is that it militates against something that is basic
to humanity, namely, the instinctive desire of everyone to be
in communion with others. To rupture human community is such a
blow to human contentment that we use it as a punishment. We condemn
people to solitary confinement or shun or ex-communicate. Dante,
condemned to death in absentia by his beloved city of Florence,
laments his self-imposed exile in Paradiso: "Thou shall
prove how tearful is another man's bread/ how hard is the way
up and down another man's stairs." That kind of loneliness is
both intensely personal and patently social. It is the loneliness
of those who are refugees or exiles or prisoners who pine for
home.
Loneliness may be understood as being a prisoner of one's self
without the comfort of others, whereas solitude is better conceived
of as a healthy possession of the self. Loneliness is the self
in exile from others while solitude, to borrow a phrase from the
great mystic Meister Eckhart is "living in the desert in the middle
of the market place." Loneliness is to be assuaged, but solitude
is to be cultivated.
At its most fundamental and attractive level, to be solitary
is to allow oneself a walk around a lake, an hour in the quiet
of one's room, a moment sitting in the pew of a church, a gentle
slipping away from an overly noisy party. At that somewhat superficial
level, solitude is nothing more than regaining possession of one's
own self. At a deeper level, to be solitary is to take the first
step towards the contemplative life.
For a few years I have been teaching a course on prayer on Sunday
evenings. One thing I have learned from the paper students write
for me is that many of them experience God at a deep level. If
they knew the vocabulary they could begin to call themselves contemplatives.
The trick is to show them that if they become contemplative enough
not only will their prayer be enriched but they will see the world
with fresh eyes, they will read more deeply and they will love
more fully. To accomplish that they need to savor some solitude.
That turning aside which is solitude has been held up as a spiritual
value in the Catholic tradition of spirituality. Over the gates
of some Carthusian monasteries one finds the Latin tag Beata
Solitudo/ Beatitudo Sola (Blessed solitude is blessedness
alone). But is there not something contrary to the Catholic ethos
when we hold up solitude as a spiritual ideal? Does not solitude
cut across the Christian ideal of the community of the faithful?
Is it not common for people to grouse that monks would be better
off serving the poor than leading solitary lives? What is the
rich potential of solitude?
As solitude became institutionalized in the monastic way of
life in early Christianity, a curious paradox emerged. As men
and women fled into the desert to live a life of solitude they
found that people were attracted to them. In other words, when
solitude is held up as a value people find it engagingly attractive.
That curious fact helps explain why people have to reserve well
in advance to stay at the guest hostels of monasteries today.
Solitude, paradoxically, creates community.
At another, more personal level, solitude is attractive because
sometimes we need a bit of time to be alone. What mother has not
complained that she cannot even go to the bathroom without a child
banging at the door? What person in business does not need a time
to get away from it all? Who does not look forward to a quiet
walk along the shore? In our frenetic lives, some solitude is
desirable. Beyond that, however, what is the spiritual value of
solitude? How does it help cultivate the Christian life?
People, if they are fortunate enough, can go on holiday to "get
away from it all," but such holidays frequently become frenetic
chases after activities unless one has a spirit of solitude that
allows for self-possession. That kind of interior solitude is
authentic leisure as opposed to "leisure activities" (an oxymoronic
phrase). Years ago, Josef Pieper wrote Leisure, the Basis
of Culture. In this classic little book he drew on a tradition
that goes back as far as Aristotle and argued that some leisure
is the necessary re-condition for serious thought and for that
kind of making which we call art. Students who have not cultivated
the spirit of solitude may complete homework; real students possess
the gift of solitude.
Nearly a half century ago, Thomas Merton wrote "Notes on a Philosophy
of Solitude," an extended essay in which he pointed out that a
person who enjoys solitude, by which he meant the quiet possession
of the self, is the one less likely to be beguiled by mass movements,
collective passions, the false siren of advertising and the lust
for the ephemerally fashionable. True solitude (as opposed to
individualism or "going it alone") is the cultivation of the sense
of the self that permits us to adjudicate the cry of the mob and
resist the lure of the moment.
Such self-possession is both a gift and a risk. It is most often
a risk when acting against the consensus; such acts can earn scorn
or, at worst, actual physical harm. Decades ago Ignazio Silone,
the Italian political novelist, said that the first lethal blow
against fascism came when the first brave person in a village
chalked a large NO on the wall of the town square. Interior solitude
has always been the mark of the true revolutionary. It was the
inner force of Gandhi's resistance; it was the inner strength
of a Solzhenitsyn whose inner life could not be broken by the
horrors of the Gulag.
At a deeper spiritual level the cultivation of solitude is a
necessary matrix out of which comes authentic prayer. By that
is not meant that one must seek a solitary place (even though
that may be a good thing to do on occasion) or go to a monastery
for a retreat (also a good thing) or give up one's ordinary pattern
of living. What it does mean is that if we are to pray, as opposed
to saying prayers, we need the capacity to slow down, get in focus
and become re-collected, albeit for a short period of time. The
Bible describes that capacity as watchfulness, the alertness that
brings our interior attention toward a single One. God says, through
the psalmist, that we are "to be still and know that I am God"
(Psalms 46:11). That stillness is the defining element of solitude.
The philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead once
said that religion is what a person does in his solitude. That
is both true and misleading. Christianity, after all, is constituted
a community of believers. We use all kinds of community language
to describe being a Christian: the Body of Christ, Pilgrim People,
Community. When the celebrant prays the eucharistic canon he does
so with the plural "we." We say "Our Father," not "My Father."
To say that we belong to a believing community, however, does
not mean that we are mindless cogs in a vast machinery (even if
we are treated as such at times) since everyone must take possession
of faith as a separate conscious person. It is in community that
we say the Credo -- I believe. In the final analysis we all must
take responsibility of that which makes us responsible persons,
namely, our capacity to utter "I."
That tension between community and solitude must be just that:
a tension. To be totally solitary, accepting no responsibility
for others or for the Other who is God, is solipsistic. To submerge
oneself in the community without responsibility is conformism.
The first attitude produces selfishness; the second is irresponsible.
Christianity offers a great paradox: To know oneself in the
depth of one's solitude is a path to discover the reality of the
other who is God. "I would know myself," Augustine writes tellingly
in the Confessions, that "I might know Thee." What do
we know in the depths of our solitude? We learn that we are made
in the image and likeness of God. When we grasp that fact, we
also implicitly know that everyone else in the world shares in
that same image and likeness. To know oneself, under the impulse
of grace, is to know everyone else.
Solitude, even when the solitude is enforced, brings us close
to the deepest truths about ourselves and our relationship to
the world in which we live. That is why so much great literature
comes from people who languish in prison. That was certainly true
in antiquity (Boethius wrote The Consolations of Philosophy
while waiting execution in Pavia, Italy) or in the Renaissance
(Thomas More, Sir Walter Raleigh, Cervantes), but it is even more
true in our own day. The literature of the Gulag comes to mind
as do such spiritual classics as the prison letters and diaries
of victims of Nazism by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Alfred Delp.
It is not easy to be alone today. Students seem incapable of
walking across campus without a cell phone attached to their ear.
We live in a matrix of white noise emanating from instant messages,
elevator music, voice mail and overstimulation from headphones.
Is this all an evasion of some sorts? Are all of the stimuli aimed
at us, often at our own instigation, a sort of penumbra that we
throw up to protect us from . . . what? Boredom? Our selves? Silence?
This is not a Luddite diatribe against modern communications.
It is meant only to indicate that such sense assaults may block
us off from the solitude where we might grasp our own interior
depths. In that solitude we might begin to hear something quite
different, namely, that "silent music" about which John of the
Cross speaks so eloquently in his poetry. That "silent music"
is the stillness which allows us to hear something in the silence,
namely, the voice of God. John puts it this way: "When . . . souls
are conscious of being placed in solitude and in the state of
listening, they should even forget the practice of loving attentiveness
I mentioned [previously] so as to remain free for what the Lord
desires of them."
John is speaking about mystical prayer, but he makes a point
that is crucial for every person of pray: Prayer is first of all
an act of listening before it is an act of speaking. All authentic
prayer begins with an act of putting oneself in the presence of
God. It is simultaneously an act of faith and a gesture which
says, in effect, that we have turned toward God and away from
that which is not God. The great Christian poet of solitude, T.S.
Eliot, understood that well. In Four Quartets he imagines
himself coming to a place hallowed by saintly people (Little Gidding)
not as a tourist but in order to pray. He comments that prayer
is not only "an order of words, the conscious occupation/ Of the
praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying." It is, rather,
the act of turning to God.
To cultivate solitude is not to fall in love with oneself --
that is egoism -- nor is it shunning or resisting others or an
act of self-indulgence. It is to grasp who we are as distinct
from how society, the reigning culture or others see us. If we
find true solitude we not only discover that we are contingent
upon something greater (that something will eventually reveal
itself as Someone), but in that discovery we will learn about
our solidarity with all others who are contingent and, finally,
be able to praise the One in whom we have our being. That is why
Bonhoeffer, the great modern martyr who lived his last days in
a solitary Gestapo cell before his execution, could write these
words in a little book (Life Together) in which he sketched
out an ideal Christian community for those who wished to resist
the power of the Nazi state: "Let the one who cannot be alone
beware of living in community."
* * *
Lawrence S. Cunningham is John A. O'Brien professor of theology
at Notre Dame.
(April 2004)
