Solitude and Community

I value deep relationships. I desire to know and be known in the secret places. Nouwen insists that everyone needs a place that remains hidden and we are often too quick to reveal the inner workings of our lives. I find that difficult to understand. Transparency is a downright discipline for me, and I agree with Nouwen that that which is most intimate is the most universal. Yet, Nouwen also displays an intense desire for community like I do. Nouwen’s life and body of work demonstrates a relentless drive to integration. How then does he integrate the hidden solitary place with a robust community?

Structuring Solitude


I value depth of relationship so much! I long to enter into life giving soul-level conversation with people I meet. I have often felt it ironic that, for me, beginning a relationship is difficult. The shallow small talk causes me to stumble and gives me enough pause to avoid beginning a relationship.

Nouwen talks about the hidden place in the center of people. This is a place that is private, and secret. In this place I meet with God. I agree with Nouwen’s admiration of the words of St. Symeon the New Theologian; we must descend with the mind into the heart and there find God. This is intimate. It is secret. It is so intimate that I have found it difficult to pray with my wife. It is like I am brining her to meet another lover and show her how we are intimate together. Why should praying together be so difficult?

Nouwen talks about this as the meeting place between the conscious, the unconscious and God – the place of prayer. Nouwen gives us the tools to nurture the depths of this place through silence and solitude.

I am struggling to integrate Nouwen’s words about this hidden place. I have felt that ministry and evangelism will take place naturally if I but commit to being transparent and live out of the depths of that hidden center. Here, Nouwen suggests that I ought not be too easily communicative about what happens in the hidden place. Yet he also affirms that, as we love God, our selves and our neighbors from that center, ministry will flow. What, then, is the difference between a facile inappropriate transparency and the living waters that flow from within?

Honoring the hidden place
“There is a false form of honesty that suggests that nothing should remain hidden and that everything should be said, expressed and communicated” (Nouwen, Reaching Out 20). That secret place is to be nurtured, honored and cherished. In ministry, my relationship with others, this means hospitality. I give space to others to nurture that hidden place. That hospitality reminds me of the roll of a spiritual director. To direct a directee it is not necessary to hear the details about what happens in the heart. The spiritual director’s goal is to help people see where God is working throughout their daily experience. This leads to the directee connecting with God in the inmost place, but that does not mean that the director is privy to all that happens there.

My wife is my guinea pig in my experiments with spiritual direction. It took me years to come to a place of powerlessness, where I realized that I couldn’t “disciple” her. Even writing the words I realize how futile it is to think I can effect discipleship. From the place of powerlessness I began to offer hospitality, rejoicing in and contemplating the mysterious slices she chooses to share with me (Nouwen, Reaching Out 43). This is a place of shared discovery and it is exciting. It is very different from my trying to draw her out, or lead her into the depths. It is extremely rewarding to contemplate that her otherness means a beautiful hidden depth. I find that secret place terribly romantic.

Silence and Solitude
Through silence I can nurture the hidden place in my heart. The movement of intimacy I experience with Christ is difficult at times to put into words. It does my soul good to bask in the reverie of that grace. Perhaps later I can write it out for my benefit and that of others, but like yeast, it first has to work its way through my spiritual life. I have been experimenting some at silent centering prayer and some of the most maddening distractions for me to deal with is the constant narrative my mind is playing about what I am doing. I am constantly thinking, how can I communicate this? How would I write this down? Silence needs to precede these considerations. Nouwen says that that are not born of silence are flat.

The essence of solitude is being at home as a solitary being, and honoring the solitariness of others. Here again is that contemplation of the other that draws us into a deeper love. Real solitude is what I need to experience real community.

Structuring Community


Community is another place where I find the irony of deep longing mingled with fear. I find myself untrusting of those around me as I worship. I question whether their displays of adoration come from their depths. I feel uncomfortable displaying my own adoration in the midst of a mixed crowd – even unable to enter into the deep secret place with God to worship. At those times I wonder what it means to worship together. Wouldn’t a shared intimacy and real relationships of depth aid to worship? I have found worshipping with those who I know, whose hearts I know at our J-term residency to be something special. Nouwen suggests that unity in worship is possible even among strangers. How does that work?

The togetherness of community
“Being a Christian is not a solitary affair” (Nouwen, Behold the Beauty of the Lord 88). Nouwen’s value for community is most evident in his life long love affair with the Eucharist. Here he offers hospitality in the midst of intimacy – the mystical presence of Christ. I too have grown in my appreciation for the corporate nature of Christian worship. Coming to church is important, and we come, not as solitary worshippers but as a body. The whole reason for our Sunday gathering is to be able to worship together. The corporate remembrance of the resurrection has two millennia of precedence. Certainly there is something key and vital in our togetherness in worship.

In Reaching Out, Nouwen suggests that togetherness is one of the reasons that we seek community. We feel the need for companionship and friendship. The church should be a place where real, honest, and open relationships can be found. Nouwen says that is not enough. We must recognize that we cannot meet each other’s needs and our basis for gathering is more than social, it is the response to the calling voice of God (153).

The mystical communion
For Nouwen there is a greater reality to being together - at the bedrock there is a communion that is based on the soul’s relationship with God. “[T]here the voice calls us beyond the limits of human togetherness to a new communion” (Nouwen, Reaching Out 44). This is a relationship beyond sentimentality and fleeting emotional connections. Nor is this a unity in name only, based on a common theology, creed, or heritage. This is a soul level unity based on real experiential connection with God.


The Descent of the Holy Spirit

Nouwen found in the icon of the Descent of the Holy Spirit the image of this kind of togetherness. There are the disciples, depicted in their inner reality as the Spirit of God fills them. While outwardly there were tongues and crowds, winds and rumblings, the iconographer depicts the disciples, as they would be seen from the hidden center where they are meeting with God. Here they are together. They are each depicted as unique, and Nouwen is struck by the diversity in unity. Here I see the clue to the nature of the tension between the solitary and the communal. We are bound together by the Spirit of God in the hidden place. We are connected there, below the surface, where we may not even see, and from that center we embrace one another.

The Coinherance of Interpersonal Spirituality in Ministry

Solitude is the province of the inward journey, but the journey is threefold, and in the outward journey to ministry, solitude takes on the contemplation of the solitary. As I realize that those with whom I worship are not flaky or deep versions of myself, but rather are individuals responding to the whispers of God, I can accept them and join them.

As I contemplate the solitary individual I begin to see that he or she is filled with hopes and dreams all their own. I realize that within them is that God-longing that woos the human heart. A love rises in my heart for them, and my heart is bound with theirs in community. As I honor the reality of their inner sanctuary, I feel a space arise within me – a place where they can be and experience and worship as they will. Nouwen calls this hospitality, and it means that I can join them in true worship.

Bibliography
Ford, Michael. Wounded Prophet. New York: Doubleday, 1999.
Nouwen, Henri J. M. Behold the Beauty of the Lord. Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1987.
—. Reaching Out. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1975.
—. Spiritual Journals. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1997.
—. The Living Reminder. New York: The Seabury Press, 1977.