Solitude

Thursday 2/4/21 3:38 AM

    Over the past year I have spent much time in solitude. This is especially true when I walk alone, without listening to music or podcasts, early in the morning. I am frustrated by the lack of face-to-face interaction with people while teaching remotely during the pandemic and spend a lot of time walking alone throughout the day in an attempt to maintain circulation in my legs and maintain my sanity. Jaci and I are fortunate to have some interaction with our children and grandchildren but we both long to nurture meaningful relationships outside of our family, which is difficult or impossible to do over the phone or during a Zoom session. Sometimes I feel like the solitude and isolation I am experiencing during the pandemic will become too overwhelming to deal with. A couple of weeks ago I heard that Cerritos College will likely still be exercising remote learning during the fall semester, which I found to be very disheartening. It makes me sad and depressed to even think about it.

    Today I read an excerpt from Henri Nouwen’s book The Way of the Heart that gives a different perspective on solitude. He writes, “Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self. Jesus himself entered into this furnace. There he was tempted with the three compulsions of the world: to be relevant, to be spectacular, and to be powerful. There he affirmed God as the only source of his identity. Solitude is the place of the great struggle and the great encounter – the struggle against the compulsions of the false self, and the encounter with the loving God who offers himself as the substance of the new self. … Solitude is not a private therapeutic place. Rather, it is the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born, the place where the emergence of the new man and the new woman occurs.”

    I’m not sure what kind of transformation God has in mind for me but I definitely feel like I am changing in a profound way. Perhaps I need to stop striving for praise and validation from others - my own attempts to be relevant, spectacular, and powerful - and let my encounters with my loving God on my solitary walks be sufficient.