21. Turn Your Solitude into Prayer
21
Turn Your Solitude into Prayer
Only one sentence from all that was said at a certain retreat remains in my mind. That one sentence was worth the weekend: Turn your loneliness into solitude, and your solitude into prayer.
We have noted that aloneness was not a painful thing until sin entered the world. Loneliness now means pain. The other aspect of aloneness, solitude, need not mean pain. It may mean glory.
Loneliness is a wilderness, but through receiving it as a gift, accepting it from the hand of God, and offering it back to Him with thanksgiving, it may become a pathway to holiness, to glory, and to God Himself.
We hear people speak of wanting freedom—from the familiar, from responsibility, from everything—in order to “find” themselves. I wonder how many could clearly explain what they mean by that finding, or what they would do if the quest were successful. When one has found “himself,” what has he found? What does he do next? The revelation of the self is a horrifying thing unless there is another to turn to. Albert Camus described it in The Fall:
Alone in a forbidding room, alone in the prisoner’s box before the judges, and alone to decide in face of oneself or in the face of others’ judgment. At the end of all freedom is a court sentence; that’s why freedom is too heavy to bear, especially when you’re down with a fever, or are distressed, or love nobody.
Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence, one must choose a master, God being out of style.1
The prophet Isaiah experienced what it is to be alone before God. It happened, he tells us, in the year that King Uzziah died. There was a connection in his mind, surely, between the two events.
Uzziah had reigned for fifty-two years, during many of which he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord as Amaziah his father had done. He set himself to seek God’s guidance. He took instruction from Zechariah in the fear of God, and as long as he pursued this course God made him prosper. He gained tremendous power in the military field, having an army of 307,500 men, equipped with shields, spears, helmets, coats of mail, bows, and sling-stones. He had his engineers design machines for discharging arrows and rocks. He became very famous; then he became very proud, presuming to enter the temple and usurp the place of the priests in burning incense. God struck him down with disease so that he had to live out the rest of his days not in royal splendor but as a leper. Even his burial was ignominious—not with the kings but in a burial ground.
Isaiah must have thought long and hard about this man’s life—his fame, his power, his reign, his pride, his exile in leprosy, his lonely death. What had he to show for it all? Possibly Isaiah had Uzziah in mind when he wrote, “Mankind is brought low, men are humbled, humbled are haughty looks. But the Lord of Hosts sits high in judgment, and by righteousness the holy God shows himself holy” (Isa. 5:15– 16 NIV). No doubt the prophet sensed the great loneliness we all feel when we contemplate death—the most solitary of solitary things. No one can share it. A man dies alone. Alone he goes out into the unknown.
Sometime during that year of the king’s death Isaiah found solitude. He did not record where or how, but he told us what he saw: the Lord, seated on a throne, high and exalted, attended by seraphim ceaselessly calling, “Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of Hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory” (Isa. 6:5 NEB). As their voices thundered and reverberated with the solemn words, the threshold shook to its foundations, and the house was filled with smoke. This vision of holiness shook not only the house but also the prophet himself to the very foundations. He had had ample opportunity to witness the wrongs of Uzziah’s life and, if he was so inclined, to make comparisons with his own. But when he saw the holiness of God, comparisons between himself and other men fell away. He cried out that he was a lost man, a man who, because with his own eyes he had seen the King, saw at the same time the truth about himself. He was a sinner. Fortunately for him God was not “out of style,” as He was for Camus’s protagonist. Fortunately he knew his Master.
In solitude Isaiah saw the Lord. In solitude he found himself and the revelation was more than he could bear. “What a wretched state I am in! I am lost!”
So it is with all who enter into real solitude. The layers of acquired knowledge, conditioned behavior, and self-confidence are sloughed off. The vision of the self without all its accustomed accretions is shocking. How different from the cherished image does the authentic self appear!
“When I’m alone”—the words
tripped off his tongue
As though to be alone were
nothing strange.
“When I was young,” he said,
“when I was young . . .”
I thought of age, and loneliness
and change,
I thought how strange we grow
when we’re alone,
And how unlike the selves that
meet and talk,
And blow the candles out, and
say goodnight.
Alone . . . The word is life
endured and known.
It is the stillness where our
spirits walk
And all but inmost faith is
overthrown.
Siegfried Sassoon2
I do not know Sassoon’s inmost faith, but I know Isaiah’s. Faced with the truth of the unknown self, so disquieting in its strangeness, Isaiah knew where to turn. Standing in the Uncreated Light, he knew himself to be naked, guilty, and powerless. There was nothing for him to do but to cast himself on God’s mercy. And mercy met him, not with sympathy but with cleansing fire.
It takes the fire of God to cleanse our hearts of selfishness in all its subtle forms. Even loneliness may be a form of selfishness. One can reject friendship when it is not offered on the terms one chooses. One can reject the grace of God as Naaman the leper came perilously close to doing because it was not offered with the kind of ceremony he felt befitted his station. One can magnify his loneliness out of all proportion, as though he suffered something that is not common to man, forgetting that “this is life”—not more, not less. One can draw about himself a thick quilt of self-pity and isolate himself in other ways, but if one turns the loneliness into solitude and the solitude into prayer, there is release. It may require a willingness to be burned if burning is necessary as it was for Isaiah, but there is forgiveness and cleansing and peace. In Isaiah’s case, this was followed by God’s call for a volunteer to work for Him. With a heart at leisure now from itself, Isaiah could answer, “Here I am. Send me.”
I was pondering this matter when the Lord brought straight to my kitchen table yesterday a living example of such a heart. A bright young woman and I were eating lamb sandwiches. I asked her if she is lonely.
“Lonely? Why should I be?”
“You’re single. Most of the single people I know talk about being lonely.”
With a look of surprise and then a laugh she said, “Oh no. You see, I have a sense of expectancy every day. What does the Lord want to do with me today? I have no agenda of my own.”
No agenda of my own. There is the key to Linda’s freedom. I continued to question her. Yes, she said, she knows what loneliness feels like—it’s isolation, when you think you can’t reach anybody, nobody reaches you, you’re cut off. You have your own agenda.
“What do you mean by an agenda?” I asked.
“Thinking there’s only one solution and God has to give you that or nothing. You have a closed mind. A closed mind is a closed heart and a closed door.”
Now I recognized the reason for the smile which seems always to light Linda’s face. I think it must come from her wholehearted acceptance of God’s “agenda.”
“I love solitude,” she said. “As I drove up here this morning [it was a dazzling winter morning of sunshine and blue sky and blue shadows on the snow] I didn’t have the radio on. I wasn’t listening to tapes. I was just quiet. I love times like that.”
The heart which has no agenda but God’s is the heart at leisure from itself. Its emptiness is filled with the Love of God. Its solitude can be turned into prayer.