Last winter my ninety-one-year-old mother had a series of mini strokes resulting in a hospital stay followed by weeks in a nursing home. The strokes affected my mother’s physical and cognitive health enough that it seemed likely that her living situation would have to change. My brother and I met with her team of care givers hoping to get some help and clarity about what her next steps would be. During that meeting, it became clear to me that there was a great gulf between these professionals and myself. Though they clearly knew the science and expectations of most patients who had experienced what my mother had, they did not know my mother. I was the expert on her and I knew that some of the possibilities they held out for my mother’s recovery were not realistic.
The distance I experienced between my mother’s team and me, stirred up a memory. I remembered riding home from a gymnastics meet in a van with my coach and the other girls on the team. Because the meet was over, all my teammates were relaxed, giggling, having fun, and enjoying the ride home. Everyone, that is, except me. I was sick to my stomach with tension, fear, and worry because I had not performed well in the meet that day. I knew that when I got home, my mother would take my score card and go over every mistake I had made, point out all the ways I had failed, and let me know in no uncertain terms that I was a very big disappointment to her. There was a great gulf between what I was experiencing because of what I knew about my mother, and the experience of every other girl on that team. At the time, I would not have been able to explain this experience in words, but I felt the force of it.
Remembering that moment in the van so many years later and in new circumstances, helped me to realize that this separation between my experience and others, though a source of great pain in my life, also fueled my search for meaning, a search that led me to God. It was a forced experience of solitude, but like all practices of solitude it shaped who I became as a person and shaped my experience of God.
Spiritual writers recognize the value of solitude. Solitude separates us from the demands of others, from social obligations, and from losing ourselves in thoughtless immersion in the busyness of life. In solitude, we come face to face with ourselves and wrestle with the questions of meaning arising from our experiences, deep questions about who we are, about who God is, and about what God demands of us.
Solitude is often depicted as a gentle calling or invitation, one that offers refuge, comfort, and hope. Sometimes though, solitude is not chosen but thrust painfully upon us through our life circumstances. Solitude is not always about being alone by ourselves, it also emerges from painful experiences that make us feel separate from others, from God, and even from ourselves. This harsh form of solitude draws out feelings of loneliness, vulnerability, and doubts about our value, our identity, and our relationship with God. Solitude can be a gentle, quiet, nurturing space, but it can also descend upon us with great force, tearing holes in our stability and shaking the foundation of our interior world.
In a poem “Song: If You Seek…,” Merton calls solitude a professor. The poem begins,
If you seek a heavenly light
I, Solitude, am your professor!
I go before you into emptiness,
Raise strange suns for your new mornings,
Opening the windows
Of your innermost apartment.”
Thomas Merton
Whether solitude invites you gently or drowns you in turbulent waters, it is of extreme value. I am grateful for the memory stirred in me at the meeting with my mother’s healthcare workers last year because through this memory, I glimpsed new meaning in the painful solitude that was my constant companion throughout my relationship with her. Healing, distance, and time allow me to see that this unwanted painful solitude was more valuable than any solitude I chose. It formed within me deep pathways of vulnerability, humility, emptiness, and poverty, habits of heart that prepared me to receive God’s deep, loving, merciful grace.
