We were looking forward to lots of things when we got back home from holiday last week, but one of the things I was dreading was seeing what had happened to the vegetable patch in the fortnight we were away.
I’ve been working hard at my wee patch this year with some good results, but keeping the weeds down is a constant battle. I’d given it a good going over before we left, but I might as well not have bothered because they’ve taken over and it’s going to take a good couple of afternoons to get things looking half-decent again.
Gardens need constant tending, I’m discovering. And our inner life - our soul, our character - is just the same.
The author Brian McLaren writes “in a wild world like ours, your character, left untended, will become a stale room, an obnoxious child, a vacant lot filled with thorns, weeds and broken bottles. Your deepest channels will silt in and you will feel yourself shallowing. You’ll become a presence neither you nor others will enjoy, and you and they will spend more and more time and energy trying to be anywhere else.
Well tended, your character will be a fragrant garden, an artist’s home, with walls and halls full of memories and beauty, a party with live music and good jokes and pleasant conversations in every corner. You’ll be good and deep company for others and yourself.
That’s why, through the ages, people have tried to find ways to tend themselves; to do for their souls what exercise does for their bodies or study for their minds.
That’s what the spiritual life’s really about; it’s not about rules and regulations and rituals. It’s about taking time out with God to reflect on what kind of person you really are, and what kind of person you’re becoming. Doing the work of tending what’s been given to you by God. And it’s hard work.
Over the years, lots of people have tried to put words to their experience as they’ve begun to take better care of their inner life. And I’ve always found the work of the Dutch Priest Henri Nouwen especially helpful on this.
In his book “Reaching Out”, Nowen describes the Spiritual life as having three movements – the movement from Loneliness to Solitude (reaching out to yourself). The movement from Hostility to Hospitality (reaching out to others), The movement from Illusion to Prayer (reaching out to God). Over the next three weeks I’m going to be look at each of those movements in turn.
So this week it’s the movement from Loneliness to Solitude.
Which of these people is lonely? (Slide with 4 images of people, alone and in crowds)
The right answer of course is that we can’t tell. Loneliness isn’t about where your body’s at. It’s about where your heart’s at.
It’s all too easy to be lonely in a crowd, lonely in a marriage, lonely at a party, lonely in a church.
I was down at the General Assembly in May and on the Sunday I took myself off to a church I’d never been to in Edinburgh. Sat through the service and they’d invited folk to stay behind for tea, so once it was over I went wandering off looking for the hall only to discover that tea and coffee were served in the church.
So I went back in, five minutes late, and sat down with my coffee hoping that someone might notice me. But by that time everyone was already in their little groups chatting away, and short of lurking awkwardly on the fringes of their conversations like a weirdo I couldn’t think of any way to break in. So after five minutes of feeling excruciatingly awkward and alone, I decided it was best to just get up and go. I literally couldn’t take it any more.
(Note to congregation. Don’t let that happen in this church, And don’t assume someone else will take the initiative with the visitor. If you spot them, it’s your responsibility to do something about it. If this church is your home, then that makes you the host, and hosts have certain responsibilities to their guests – not least to be welcoming.)
But I digress.
What was going on within me as I sat in that pew? Well if you could have heard my inner monologue it would have sounded something like this: “Please notice me. Please affirm my worth as a human being by smiling at me and inviting me into your conversation. It’s very hard sitting here wanting to connect but not knowing anyone.”
It’s the voice of loneliness and it’s a voice that we all know from time to time. We have a profound need to connect – to have meaningful interaction with other people. But sometimes that need’s just not met, and it feels awful.
You know what that’s like if you’ve been the new mum at the school gates and everyone's ignored you, or the new person on the team and no-ones made the introductions, or the friend of a friend of a friend who’s ended up at the party where everyone else seems to know each other.
You know what that’s like if you live on your own, and find yourself wishing every now and again that you had someone to come home to.
You know what that’s like if you’re living with someone but your relationship’s got to the stage where days and weeks go by without a word or a touch of genuine intimacy.
You know what it’s like when the phone doesn’t ring, and no-one calls round, and no-one asks how you’ve been and no-one misses you when you’re not there.
You know loneliness. We all do. We all have this profound need to be seen and known and valued by others; and it hurts when that doesn’t happen.
And that’s why we spend a good deal of our lives trying to bury our loneliness. We can’t bear to face it and ask what it means, so we do our level best to pretend it isn’t there.
We bury it under mountains of work; piles of possessions; hours of entertainment. Fed up with the disappointments of human interaction, we spend more and more time gazing at screens; screens that become ever more small and more portable so we’re never without them and never have to contemplate the possibility of spending a moment alone with our own thoughts.
Some try to bury their loneliness by raiding the fridge, or hitting the bottle, or surfing for pornography, but it always surfaces again. We can’t escape our essential aloneness says Nouwen. It’s right there at the heart of who we are, and no friendship nor love nor community can ever fully take that loneliness away.
So we have only two choices, Nouwen argues. We can try to bury our loneliness, or we can befriend it and change it into something better. And that's where Solitude comes in.
If loneliness is the experience of being alone and anxious, solitude’s the experience of being alone and at peace. And that’s something that most of us will have to cultivate because our lives are just so full-on we’ve forgotten how to do it.
Think about your life for a moment. When did you last sit in your own company for half an hour without a screen or a phone or another person as a distraction?
When did you last take half an hour to sit down and process what’s been going on in your life? To try and get some perspective on things?
We need that kind of time to manage the garden of our lives. Because living is messy, and if we don’t tend our souls they get overrun and unmanageable.
Jesus teaches us this. One of the constant refrains of the gospel writers is that Jesus took himself off to a solitary place. He had periods of intense activity, but he always punctuated them with spells of intentional rest.
In this morning’s reading, the disciples have returned after their first assignment and they’re full of stories about what’s happened to them. But so much is happening round about that they don’t even have time to eat! So Jesus intervenes. “Let’s go off by ourselves to some place where we will be alone and you can rest for a while” he says. So they set out in a boat by themselves to find a solitary place.
A solitary place. A place where your aloneness stops being a worry and starts being a blessing. Where the chatter of other peoples’ lives is stilled long enough so you can listen more closely to what’s going on in your own life. A place where some of what’s broken within us begins to mend and find its strength again.
I had a friend once who helped me find a solitary place when I really needed one. I found it between here and here (indicate ears), sitting in a comfortable chair with the telly off for about 15 minutes every evening. And I visited that place pretty consistently for about 6 months until it became like home. And I'm still a regular visitor in that place today. I get homesick when I haven't been there for a while.
“You’re too busy”. She had said. “And you’re running on empty. Get some time alone and just keep company with God. Don’t say anything at first, don’t try to pray; make your companionship and your attention the substance of your prayer”.
I found that so hard! It took me about a week before I could sit still for any more than a couple of minutes without all kinds of stuff flooding through my mind. But it got easier. And in time it became a blessing, because in that place I began to get God’s perspective on my life, and God’s strengthening to help me live it. I became more at home with myself. And I returned from those times of solitude with more to give of myself to the folk around me.
I discovered that creating space for solitude in your day actually makes you more available for other people. It’s a paradox, but it’s 100% true.
The disciples in this morning’s story didn’t get the rest they needed. They went off to that quiet place with Jesus, but when they got there, the crowds had followed them.
Now if I’d been Jesus I’d have been pretty hacked off at that. But what does Mark tell us? He says that when Jesus got out of the boat and saw the large crowd, his heart was filled with compassion for them. He didn’t see them as an inconvenience, a pain in the neck. His soul was larger than that. Better tended. So strengthened by his own spells of solitude he understood that his real work was often in the interruptions. I could do with some of that wisdom in my life; and I’m guessing you could too.
The beginning of a spiritual life is the realisation that we have a soul and that it needs looking after. Loneliness is one of the things that wakens us up to the painful reality of our soul’s need. Solitude is the place where those needs are understood, befriended and put in perspective. Where we keep company with God for a while and let him show us what needs tended, and what needs planted within us.
This is the way to grow, it seems. And there are no shortcuts to maturity. Brian McLaren says you can’t take an epidural to ease the pain of giving birth to character.
But character, Christian character, is what will be birthed in us if we make the choice not to bury our loneliness in activity or amusement, but let it bed down in the womb of a creative solitude where the truth of who we are and who God is can gradually emerge.
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