Poimen Ponderings

Christianity is full of paradoxes.  We cannot put our minds around the idea that God can be human.  Its blasphemous!  It is the great scandal.  Through that paradox, we gain life through death.  Solitude as loneliness and solitude as grace offers us another such conundrum.  One person speaks of sorrow while another experiences it as a gift.  Our modern culture shuns solitary places and those that seek it out.  Solitude can be a desperate alienating and isolated place in which hearts withers and hope is abandoned.  Loneliness, I have seen it in the eyes of a Soldier in Iraq who has no one to write to or to call.  I have heard it in a patients voice when there is no one to visit them in the hospital.   Sadly, I have read the anguish in a letter written by a young man in his suicide note.  People experience unimaginable depth of loneliness at times, and these are indeed lonely, un-chosen solitary places of the human heart.

Imagine an arid, rocky, barren, and dark land.  The call to explore this terrain may come to persons in many walks of life.  You see, in the desert, life still flourishes, flowers still bloom.  We met the divine mystery at the end point of a lonely road.  But loneliness doesn’t easily transform into grace filled solitude.  With all paradox, we find no easy resolution.  But what we can do is take action.  We can pray for the gift of community to find and envelop the troubled, the marginalized, and the outcast.  We can intentionally put our selves aside and be alert to those around us who need our companionship and be Christ to them, by accepting them, no matter how different they may be.  We can work to alleviate the loneliness of those close to us.  But the most significant impact we can have is when we are able to see the potential of the “secret garden” and led others to this sacred place.  But, the doorway there must always be open with chosen hearts - they must want to be there. 

There are lonely places in the human heart and in the community of hearts, places where we fear to tread and yet which invite us.  Wherever we are found along our journey, solitude is before us, around us, inside us, repelling and beckoning, offering both loneliness and grace.