Learn to be alone

     Physical solitude, exterior silence and real recollection are all morally necessary for anyone who wants to lead a contemplative life, But like everything else in creation they are nothing more than a means to an end, and if we do not understand the end we will make a wrong use of the means.

     We do not go into the desert to escape people but to learn how to find them; we do not leave them in order to have nothing more to do with them, but to find out the way to do them the most good.  But this is only a secondary end.

     The one end that includes all others is the love of God.

     How can people act and speak as if solitude were a matter of no importance in the interior life?  Only those who hae never experienced real solitude can glibly declare that it “makes no difference” and that only solitude of the heart really matters!  One solitude must lead to the other!

     However, the truest solitude is not something outside you, not an absence of men or of sound around you; it is an abyss opening up in the center of your own soul.

     An this abyss of interior solitude is by hunger and thirst and sorrow and poverty and desire, and the man who has found solitude is empty, as if he had been emptied by death.

     He has advanced beyond all horizons.  There are no directions in which he can travel.  This is a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.  You do not find it by traveling but by standing still.

     Yet is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin.  It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is in profound repose, vision in obscurity, and beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.

Quote: Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, pgs. 82-83