Thomas Merton inspired me to value solitude and seek it whenever I could. This week, freshly diagnosed with Covid-19, have a chance to embrace solitude more fully and completely than I have had in many years.

This is something that Maria and I often seek together, and it not only deepens our connection to one another but it also deepens our lives in the most powerful of spiritual ways.

This is the Merton writing that first awakened me to the beauty and power and healing of solitude:

“Vocation to Solitude – To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up that land and fills its silences with light. To pray and work in the morning, to labor and rest in the afternoon, and to sit still again in meditation in the evening when night falls upon that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and stars.

This is a true and special vocation. There are few who are willing to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into their bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn that very substance of their life into a living and vigilant silence.”

I have no excuses or rationalizations to make this week, I am free in the morning, during the day and the evening to hand myself over to the quiet, to sit till the sun comes up over the land and fills its silences with light.

I want to deliver myself up to it as often as I can. What a precious way to spend the time I have to be alone.

I did that this morning and will do it again this evening. I have a deep hunger for silence; in silence, I have come to see who I truly am and to be true and authentic to it.

In silence, I have faced the truth about myself and come to see how  I wish to spend the rest of my life understanding who the man is that I wish to be.

I don’t want to exist just to pay my bills and spend my days without thought or meaning.

The martyr writes Merton, is a man who has made a decision strong enough to be proven by his death.

A solitary man (or woman) has made a decision strong enough to be proven by the empty wilderness and the woods. To devout Christians, solitude is sought as an expression of a person’s total gift to God.

For secular people like me, solitude is sought as an expression of my total gift to myself: who am I really? What is the purpose and meaning of my life? How can I do some lasting good in the world?

Why am I here, and how can I live my life fully and with meaning and compassion? How can I face up to my own truths and move beyond them? That’s what I’ve sought in solitude and seek still.

That is work that will never be done, a journey that will never end. But I’ll never stop walking on that path, listening and searching for my truth.

I am broken and incomplete in so many ways, but I entrust myself completely to the silence outside of me, just outside my door.

I understand that some people will scoff and jeer at these ideas and roll their eyes. Cynicism, suspicion, and anger run wild in our world.

Tomorrow I mean to rise and get outside and sit still when the sun comes up over the land and fills the silences with color and light. Covid can give me the time to do it.