The hardest part of my job is also the hardest part of my faith. I’ve been trying to master it for decades, but it still eludes me. There is plenty for me to blame it on. I’ve a long list of legitimate excuses. But none of them acknowledge the real hurdle. To serve well as your pastor and in order to live faithfully as a Christian, I need a daily practice of prayer and solitude. And yet I too often run from solitude and fail to get around to praying!
In his recent book, Make Your Home In This Luminous Dark, James K. A. Smith highlights the human struggle to practice a contemplative life. We often blame technology for trouncing our spiritual life. We doomscroll or play games or veg out to Netflix rather than reading a devotional, meditating, or doing yoga. But long before Words with Friends, Instagram, or YouTube, the philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “man’s unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room.” Being distracted from what nourishes the soul is a human problem, not merely a modern one. Smith encourages us to awaken to ourselves as God’s beloved by practicing quiet as a part of our regular daily life. “Solitude, we will see, is like a dry dock for the mind where our attention is refitted and recalibrated.”
Perhaps one reason social media is so prevalent today is that TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook feed our human need for affirmation from other people. The 16th-century nun, St Teresa of Avila, said that the hardest part about entering the interior castle of the soul was to relinquish her worries about how others perceived her. And the more modern spiritual leader, Father Henri Nouwen, who taught at both Harvard and Yale before retreating into solitude, described how he missed hearing the feedback of others. He was no longer writing and teaching, and so he was no longer receiving letters from readers and admirers. In The Genesee Diary, Nouwen admits his own shortcomings. “Prayer and meditation are important here because in them you can find your deepest identity, and that keeps you from putting your whole self on the line every time you work with other people.”
I know what to do once prayer and meditation begin. That is not the challenge. But how do we make that leap from community affirmation into quiet solitude where God’s divine love is whispered?
Grace and Peace,
Carla
