My spiritual life is a dialectical movement between solitude and community, solitude and community, solitude and community... Solitude with God, koinonia, solitude with God, koinonia... I need both. Ontologically, solitude comes first. Solitude is, as Nouwen has said, the "furnace of spiritual transformation." In solitude God purges my soul. This is good. I experience this, I know this, as a good thing. Without much time alone with God "community" (koinonia) becomes like a costume party that I'm at, wearing my mask. In solitude the mask gets peeled away to reveal the true self. Spend much time in true solitude with God and the masks you are wearing will get removed by the Spirit. "You" will then go to the party, interact with other people, in authentic ways. This is all about your own freedom, who God has made you to be, and who you truly are in Christ.
Thomas Merton has written:
"The truest solitude is not something outside you, not an absence of men or of sound around you: it is an abyss opening up in the center of your own soul. And this abyss of interior solitude is a hunger that will never be satisfied with any created thing. The only way to find solitude is by hunger and thirst and sorrow and poverty and desire. The man who has found solitude is empty, as if he had been emptied by death." (New Seeds of Contemplation, pp. 80-81)
Learn these things and live:
- True solitude is a condition of the heart.
- In true solitude God morphs the human heart.
- All persons have a hunger within that cannot be satisfied by any created thing. That includes you.
- So - stop questing after created things.
- Hunger and thirst for the real thing. In this way consider yourself impoverished and needy.
- What you and I need is God.
- Therefore, meet often with God.
- He loves you, so in his presence you won't need the mask anymore.
2 comments:
One by one, as we rest in the solitude of Him, He peels away the layers for us. Sometimes, it is horrifying and heartbreaking. But other times, the Encounter fills us with unspeakable joy and moves us into an entirely new level of "redemption" and rebirth. What an experience God is!
I pray as I begin to spend larger blocks of time with the Lord in the private places, that the person He made in His own image begins to be displayed. I seek Christ-likeness which can only come through spending time with Him.
Phil 3:12-14
"Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead,I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus."
These past 2 days under John's instuction at "Fanning the Flame" have been an awesome time of rediscovering God's voice in my life.
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