This is an excerpt from my dissertation Radical Amazement and Deep Sympathy. I have chosen not to rewrite these paragraphs which were originally intended primarily for caregivers and spiritual guides. In point of fact, what is said here for caregivers holds true for all of us as persons committed to living into the Mystery. In the original, the Joseph Campbell quote was an explanatory footnote.◊

Without solitude, [Henri] Nouwen maintains, caregivers run the risk of becoming nothing more than compulsive doers (or compulsive do-gooders) in a society plagued by the busyness, compulsiveness, and competitiveness it peddles and promotes. [Abraham] Heschel explains:

One must withdraw and be still in order to hear. Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society’s hysteria, a period of cure and recovery. (Heschel, Who Is Man, 44)

The compulsions which caregivers and others face are the compulsions of the false self. The false self is the self which is fabricated by social compulsions, that is, by obsessive concern with how others perceive us. Thus, as was the case after Jesus’ baptism by John when he was tempted by Satan in the desert, the three temptations with which caregivers must wrestle are the social compulsion to be relevant, to be spectacular, and to be powerful. (Nouwen, The Way of the Heart, 25) In this sense, especially for caregivers seeking to cultivate a contemplative heart, solitude is no cozy vacation. It is more than privacy, more than a place to recharge one’s emotional battery, even more than a place to regain some needed strength to face the daily struggles of life or ministry. Solitude is often the place of intense struggle, “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 (Nouwen, 25).”

The late mythologist, Joseph Campbell uses another more pleasant image to describe the importance of solitude. When being interviewed by Bill Moyers, he was asked, “What does it mean to have a sacred place?” Campbell replied:

This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you.This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. (As quoted in Quoted from Aline D. Wolf, Nurturing the Spirit, 61)

[Solitude] is also potentially the place of “the great encounter” where transformation occurs, for the genuine struggle against the false self awakens persons to the fact that they cannot overcome their compulsions alone. Solitude dismantles persons’ normal “scaffolding”—

no friends to talk with, no telephone calls to make, no meetings to attend, no music to entertain, no books to distract, just me—naked, vulnerable, weak, sinful, deprived, broken—nothing. (Nouwen, The Way of the Heart, 27)

—thereby confronting them with their powerlessness, their nothingness. Here the persevering mystic discovers the loving God who becomes the source of transformation and the substance of the new self. Ultimately, solitude, what Nouwen calls “the furnace in which this transformation takes place,” is not merely the place where we are confronted with our own sinfulness but more so the place where we experience the mercy of God. It is especially the felt sense of God’s presence experienced as mercy that when embodied in the contemplative caregiver becomes the gift they bring to others (494-495).♦

Source: Daniel J. Miller, Radical Amazement and Deep Sympathy: A Mystical-Prophetic Approach to Pastoral Theology and Care Inspired by the Works of Abraham Joshua Heschel, © 2007 (Dissertation)

Reflection Q?s:

Do you have a special/sacred place where you can be alone?
Do you intentionally take time each day/week to be there?
Whether secret or shared, how aware are you of your compulsions?

Practice:

Choose a day or a half day of the week or an hour or half hour in the day when you can be alone with God in your sacred place. Turn off the phone. If you live with others, ask not to be disturbed. Be ALONE with the All ONE and allow God’s mercy to wash over you.