A Reflection for Tuesday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time
You can find today’s readings here.
Jesus departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God. (Lk 6:12)
I enjoy being alone. Not in the sense that I shirk relationships or despise the company of others, but I deeply appreciate time to myself. While I work with Jesuits in this media ministry, I was formed in large part by Benedictines who, though they live intentionally in a community, value contemplation, quiet and even solitude. I guess you could say that I’m a bit monkish.
In the same way that certain people are gifts in our lives–they help us grow and mature and bring out the best in us–solitude can contribute to our becoming fully alive. Insofar as my contributions to these daily scripture reflections are insightful or meaningful to you, our subscribers and supporters, I can attribute much of it to the fact that I write them early in the morning, before the work day begins, when I’m alone and things both around me and within me are relatively calm.
To be honest, the few deeply spiritual moments I’ve experienced in my life (I can count them on one hand) have all occurred while I was alone. On one occasion I was at a conference on a beautiful college campus in Minnesota. During a long break I went outside and sat under a tree and read a chapter of a book. I don’t remember what book it was, but after reading something profound, I paused and looked around me. The best way I can describe the experience is that for a fleeting moment I saw the world a bit more clearly. It was like a fog had been lifted and I could sense the goodness of things. Imagine that throughout your whole life you experienced the world in standard definition and then, briefly, you saw things in high definition.
These moments are gifts. That probably sounds like a cliché, but they are gifts in the sense that they are spontaneous and uncontrollable. We can’t manufacture them or make them linger. “The wind blows where it pleases; you can hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.” (Jn 3:8) And then you get up and go back to the conference hall.
It’s one of the ironies of the Christian life that in moments of solitude we are in fact connected to Jesus in the simplest but most real of ways. He would often leave his disciples and the crowds following him to escape to a private place. He, too, enjoyed being alone. It brought clarity and energy to his mission. It kept him grounded. It nurtured his ability to show mercy and love to a person the rest of us would readily belittle, dismiss or judge.
At the end of his seminal book “Orthodoxy,” G.K. Chesterton reflected on Jesus’ affinity for these moments of solitude: “There was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.”
