Alone with God
Sue Andraeas
Then after being ministered to by Ananias
and visiting with the disciples, [Paul] withdrew
to converse with Christ for three years in the
isolation of the Arabian Desert.
Galatians 1:15-16
Our society operates in an odd paradox of connected isolation. With a smartphone in our hand, or a computer on our lap, we can be constantly connected to the world—but only if we first disconnect from the one immediately around us. Studies have revealed that there is a direct correlation between the increase in depression and an increase in feeling isolated, and that our obsession with technology does more to isolate us that we realize. For all its benefits, the instant ‘connection’ of social media, cell phones, and email isn’t preventing us from feeling alone. I’m not condemning cell phones, or email, or social me-dia. They have their place. But they are poor substitutes for real communication, real social cohesiveness, and real relation-ships.
If isolation truly is a problem in our culture, if loneliness is truly at epidemic levels, then why would the Church offer solitude as a spiritual discipline? Wouldn’t it seem that what we need is to spend more quality time together? Wouldn’t we want to guard against encouraging people to be alone? The answer is no, and here’s why. There is a real danger to being constantly bombarded with information, news, pictures—whether from the world or from our friends and families—and even trivial ‘factoids’ without having time (and the ‘safe space’ of prayer) to digest it all or put it into perspective.
We are now expected to assimilate a constant barrage of news (most of it heart-wrenchingly cata-strophic yet mind-numbingly repetitive) and information (and constant ‘viral’ videos and Facebook ‘favorites’) while still remaining in control of ourselves, our work, our family commitments and social obligations, and all while ‘being positive’ as the new mantra commands. It’s impossible. Oh, and we must be instantly accessible to everyone. (I had a woman email me, email again two minutes later, and then call a minute beyond that, hysterically worried that something bad had happened to me. I don’t have a cell phone, and I wasn’t at my computer; I had no clue she was trying to reach me! What she wanted wasn’t even important. She just had no idea I was ‘so isolated.’ She lives less than 5 miles away!!)
Our human brains are not designed to mentally and emotionally multi-task on this level for any length of time. We can’t be constantly, simultaneously present everywhere with everyone. We need time to assess what is important—and what is not; what has been sensationalized and what truly needs our attention. We need to be alone with ourselves. Better yet, we need to be alone with our God. Our ability to cope with the pain and fast-paced chaos of our world is contingent upon our seeing it through His eyes and on His terms. It is, after all, HIS world.
I looked through some online references to spiritual solitude and was rather appalled by what I read. The first three links were to Christian magazine articles written by ‘expert’ leaders in discipleship—names you’d probably recognize. One suggest-ed listening to soothing music during times of solitude—while driving to or from work. Another suggested taking a walk in a nature park. The third advised letting your friends and family know that you will be ‘out of reach’ during the 5-10 minutes per day that you are setting aside for solitude. 5-10 minutes? One also quoted Jesus’ words found in Mark 6:31-32, where He called the disciples, as a group, to come away from the demands of ministry. This is not solitude. Fellowship, perhaps, but not solitude.
These types of ‘strategies’ do more, I think, to explain why so many religious leaders suffer from compassion fatigue or burn-out than they do to teach the discipline of solitude. Our lives, today more than ever, require more than 5 to 10 minutes of soothing music or a walk. These activities are good places to begin, but as people seeking a deeper relationship with Christ, and a lay monastic commitment to heeding God’s voice, it is not nearly deep enough. Let’s look at the ex-ample of St. Paul instead.
He was a zealous Jew. Social unrest, caused by Jesus’ crucifixion, was disrupting the peace of Jerusalem, his city. He had a life-changing religious experience. He was led, in his blindness, to the home of Ananias, who caught him up to speed with what really happened to Jesus and his disciples. If ever there was a tumultuous time in history, it was Jerusalem during these months! If ever there was a man trying to figure out what God was doing, it was Paul! Did he spend a few minutes to allow God to sort it out for him? No, he went far away from all ‘external stimuli’ to talk it all over with the Lord. He emerged, 3 years later, not as an enlightened Jew but as an Apostle responsible for the bulk of the non-Gospel New Testament, the human vessel used by God to convert the gentile nations.
“There is no safer place to be than in the
arms of your Savior and King. There is no
better place to totally lose yourself than
in the great Timelessness of God Himself.”
Solitude is a game-changer of a discipline. You come out on the other side as someone other than the person who began—not someone else, just less influenced by everyone else and more of the YOU that God intended you to be. I’m sure Paul took some breaks during those 3 years to eat, sleep, and walk around, but his time qualifies in my book as extreme, uninterrupted solitude. Still, imagine how effective we, as the Fellowship of Saint Brendan’s, would be if we would devote even a few hours a week to the sole purpose of allowing God to have His way with us.
To be honest, this is by far the spiritual discipline I struggle with the most. It’s not because I don’t like to be alone. In fact, I spend most of my day alone! I don’t have a cell phone, or a Facebook account. I don’t like to spend time ‘just talking’ on the phone. The television is rarely on, and I don’t ‘live’ at my computer. I do often have music playing, but I can do without it. But I don’t think my ‘alone time’ qualifies as solitude. My concept of solitude as a spiritual discipline more closely resembles a sensory deprivation tank than anything else.
For me, solitude should be an attempt to remove all mental, emotional, physical, and psychological stimuli save one—the voice of God: not time sharing my brain while I drive (or muck the barn or milk a goat); not contemplating Scripture I’ve just read; not listening to meditative music; not even admiring creation. I do all those things, to be sure. But for times of solitude, I want one thing—time alone with my Savior. It takes me more than 5-10 minutes just to organize my conscious thoughts so that they don’t bombard me. It takes even more time for subconscious thoughts to float to the surface so I can deal with them and put them aside. It’s still very hard for me to focus totally on Christ when I hear the washing machine beeping that it’s done, or when the phone rings, or my computer’s email signal chimes. (I’ve not ‘evolved’ beyond Pavlov’s dogs very much, have I?)
Remember that old praise song? “Turn your eyes upon Jesus; Look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth become strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.” No, they don’t! Turn your eyes upon Jesus and all in the sudden, all you can think of is the million earthly things that seem to need your attention more!! That’s why it’s called a discipline—you have to work at it. And it’s why even prominent church leaders are afraid of it, I think. It immediately reveals just how out of control we truly are. So, if we want to develop our ability for solitude—being fully alone with God—where do we start?
I suggest that you leave a minimum of a few hours for your ‘introductory attempt.’ Turn off ALL electronics (or at least their bells and whistles). It might help to have a tablet handy at first, to write down ‘important reminders’ that you just can’t let go of otherwise. Don’t have an agenda other than listening and being alone with God. It’s tough. We want to get up and move around, check fingernails, straighten out wrinkles, see what’s going on outside. Resist those urges. (What if you were paralyzed and couldn’t respond? Maybe ‘Bible People’ tended to fall on their faces when they saw God’s messengers because, that way, they couldn’t run away or fidget!) Your mind is going to want to race all over the place. Don’t chastise or reprimand yourself; just go back to waiting for God. (Perhaps this is why God talks to people in visions so much; their conscious thoughts were ‘sleeping’ and He had their undivided attention.) As you practice more, you’ll get better at leaving the world behind—and time won’t be so overwhelmingly controlling. (A thousand years, to God, is like a day—or a watch in the night; Psalm 90:4. IMAGINE! He can show you a thousand years in just a few hours! Can you imagine a better way to lose sleep than being an audience of one, alone with God!?)
I’m here to tell you, there is no better teacher than the Holy Spirit. There is no safer place to be than in the arms of your Savior and King. There is no better place to totally lose yourself than in the great Timelessness of God Himself. You don’t get to experience that kind of Love if you’re only willing to give up earthly connectivity for a few minutes, or only partially relinquish it! I’m not saying God doesn’t love you unless you ‘do the time.’ I’m saying that you can’t fully experience that Love unless you do!
One final thing. I went to a secular website with articles concerning the difference between loneliness (and the depression it causes) and being alone. Do you know what the experts there listed as their #3 strategy for avoiding depression—only after ‘make a plan so that the future is not totally unknown’ and ‘say hello to the person behind the cash register where you buy your morning coffee so you make real contact with a real person?’ #3 was ‘Explore your faith.’ I quote here: “People who have a personal relationship with their God or a higher power tend to do well” (Dr. Hawkley, PhD in psychiatry and professor at the Univ. of Chicago).
Note that he does not recommend that we ‘spend time with other people of our faith,’ or ‘study the religious writings of your faith’ in order to combat isolation. He says, as a secular psychiatrist who is not ‘taking sides’ with any religious group over another, that we need to have a personal relationship with our God. Even non-Christians seem to innately know what we need. It’s not a secret; we just resist truth. God doesn’t want us to only read what He’s written, or to just talk with others who know Him, or to bring all our problems to Him. He certainly welcomes all those things! But at the very core, God is looking for us to be willing to sit and BE with Him; to just leave everything behind for a bit and BE with Him. You
wouldn’t think it would take so much effort on our part, but it does. Is God worth it to you? I hope so!
Rejoice!
Sue Andraeas
Prioress, Saint Brendan’s
This article is dedicated to Mr. David Holifield who has taught me more through his stillness than I have learned through the words and actions of others. Thank you!
and visiting with the disciples, [Paul] withdrew
to converse with Christ for three years in the
isolation of the Arabian Desert.
Galatians 1:15-16
Our society operates in an odd paradox of connected isolation. With a smartphone in our hand, or a computer on our lap, we can be constantly connected to the world—but only if we first disconnect from the one immediately around us. Studies have revealed that there is a direct correlation between the increase in depression and an increase in feeling isolated, and that our obsession with technology does more to isolate us that we realize. For all its benefits, the instant ‘connection’ of social media, cell phones, and email isn’t preventing us from feeling alone. I’m not condemning cell phones, or email, or social me-dia. They have their place. But they are poor substitutes for real communication, real social cohesiveness, and real relation-ships.
If isolation truly is a problem in our culture, if loneliness is truly at epidemic levels, then why would the Church offer solitude as a spiritual discipline? Wouldn’t it seem that what we need is to spend more quality time together? Wouldn’t we want to guard against encouraging people to be alone? The answer is no, and here’s why. There is a real danger to being constantly bombarded with information, news, pictures—whether from the world or from our friends and families—and even trivial ‘factoids’ without having time (and the ‘safe space’ of prayer) to digest it all or put it into perspective.
We are now expected to assimilate a constant barrage of news (most of it heart-wrenchingly cata-strophic yet mind-numbingly repetitive) and information (and constant ‘viral’ videos and Facebook ‘favorites’) while still remaining in control of ourselves, our work, our family commitments and social obligations, and all while ‘being positive’ as the new mantra commands. It’s impossible. Oh, and we must be instantly accessible to everyone. (I had a woman email me, email again two minutes later, and then call a minute beyond that, hysterically worried that something bad had happened to me. I don’t have a cell phone, and I wasn’t at my computer; I had no clue she was trying to reach me! What she wanted wasn’t even important. She just had no idea I was ‘so isolated.’ She lives less than 5 miles away!!)
Our human brains are not designed to mentally and emotionally multi-task on this level for any length of time. We can’t be constantly, simultaneously present everywhere with everyone. We need time to assess what is important—and what is not; what has been sensationalized and what truly needs our attention. We need to be alone with ourselves. Better yet, we need to be alone with our God. Our ability to cope with the pain and fast-paced chaos of our world is contingent upon our seeing it through His eyes and on His terms. It is, after all, HIS world.
I looked through some online references to spiritual solitude and was rather appalled by what I read. The first three links were to Christian magazine articles written by ‘expert’ leaders in discipleship—names you’d probably recognize. One suggest-ed listening to soothing music during times of solitude—while driving to or from work. Another suggested taking a walk in a nature park. The third advised letting your friends and family know that you will be ‘out of reach’ during the 5-10 minutes per day that you are setting aside for solitude. 5-10 minutes? One also quoted Jesus’ words found in Mark 6:31-32, where He called the disciples, as a group, to come away from the demands of ministry. This is not solitude. Fellowship, perhaps, but not solitude.
These types of ‘strategies’ do more, I think, to explain why so many religious leaders suffer from compassion fatigue or burn-out than they do to teach the discipline of solitude. Our lives, today more than ever, require more than 5 to 10 minutes of soothing music or a walk. These activities are good places to begin, but as people seeking a deeper relationship with Christ, and a lay monastic commitment to heeding God’s voice, it is not nearly deep enough. Let’s look at the ex-ample of St. Paul instead.
He was a zealous Jew. Social unrest, caused by Jesus’ crucifixion, was disrupting the peace of Jerusalem, his city. He had a life-changing religious experience. He was led, in his blindness, to the home of Ananias, who caught him up to speed with what really happened to Jesus and his disciples. If ever there was a tumultuous time in history, it was Jerusalem during these months! If ever there was a man trying to figure out what God was doing, it was Paul! Did he spend a few minutes to allow God to sort it out for him? No, he went far away from all ‘external stimuli’ to talk it all over with the Lord. He emerged, 3 years later, not as an enlightened Jew but as an Apostle responsible for the bulk of the non-Gospel New Testament, the human vessel used by God to convert the gentile nations.
“There is no safer place to be than in the
arms of your Savior and King. There is no
better place to totally lose yourself than
in the great Timelessness of God Himself.”
Solitude is a game-changer of a discipline. You come out on the other side as someone other than the person who began—not someone else, just less influenced by everyone else and more of the YOU that God intended you to be. I’m sure Paul took some breaks during those 3 years to eat, sleep, and walk around, but his time qualifies in my book as extreme, uninterrupted solitude. Still, imagine how effective we, as the Fellowship of Saint Brendan’s, would be if we would devote even a few hours a week to the sole purpose of allowing God to have His way with us.
To be honest, this is by far the spiritual discipline I struggle with the most. It’s not because I don’t like to be alone. In fact, I spend most of my day alone! I don’t have a cell phone, or a Facebook account. I don’t like to spend time ‘just talking’ on the phone. The television is rarely on, and I don’t ‘live’ at my computer. I do often have music playing, but I can do without it. But I don’t think my ‘alone time’ qualifies as solitude. My concept of solitude as a spiritual discipline more closely resembles a sensory deprivation tank than anything else.
For me, solitude should be an attempt to remove all mental, emotional, physical, and psychological stimuli save one—the voice of God: not time sharing my brain while I drive (or muck the barn or milk a goat); not contemplating Scripture I’ve just read; not listening to meditative music; not even admiring creation. I do all those things, to be sure. But for times of solitude, I want one thing—time alone with my Savior. It takes me more than 5-10 minutes just to organize my conscious thoughts so that they don’t bombard me. It takes even more time for subconscious thoughts to float to the surface so I can deal with them and put them aside. It’s still very hard for me to focus totally on Christ when I hear the washing machine beeping that it’s done, or when the phone rings, or my computer’s email signal chimes. (I’ve not ‘evolved’ beyond Pavlov’s dogs very much, have I?)
Remember that old praise song? “Turn your eyes upon Jesus; Look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth become strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace.” No, they don’t! Turn your eyes upon Jesus and all in the sudden, all you can think of is the million earthly things that seem to need your attention more!! That’s why it’s called a discipline—you have to work at it. And it’s why even prominent church leaders are afraid of it, I think. It immediately reveals just how out of control we truly are. So, if we want to develop our ability for solitude—being fully alone with God—where do we start?
I suggest that you leave a minimum of a few hours for your ‘introductory attempt.’ Turn off ALL electronics (or at least their bells and whistles). It might help to have a tablet handy at first, to write down ‘important reminders’ that you just can’t let go of otherwise. Don’t have an agenda other than listening and being alone with God. It’s tough. We want to get up and move around, check fingernails, straighten out wrinkles, see what’s going on outside. Resist those urges. (What if you were paralyzed and couldn’t respond? Maybe ‘Bible People’ tended to fall on their faces when they saw God’s messengers because, that way, they couldn’t run away or fidget!) Your mind is going to want to race all over the place. Don’t chastise or reprimand yourself; just go back to waiting for God. (Perhaps this is why God talks to people in visions so much; their conscious thoughts were ‘sleeping’ and He had their undivided attention.) As you practice more, you’ll get better at leaving the world behind—and time won’t be so overwhelmingly controlling. (A thousand years, to God, is like a day—or a watch in the night; Psalm 90:4. IMAGINE! He can show you a thousand years in just a few hours! Can you imagine a better way to lose sleep than being an audience of one, alone with God!?)
I’m here to tell you, there is no better teacher than the Holy Spirit. There is no safer place to be than in the arms of your Savior and King. There is no better place to totally lose yourself than in the great Timelessness of God Himself. You don’t get to experience that kind of Love if you’re only willing to give up earthly connectivity for a few minutes, or only partially relinquish it! I’m not saying God doesn’t love you unless you ‘do the time.’ I’m saying that you can’t fully experience that Love unless you do!
One final thing. I went to a secular website with articles concerning the difference between loneliness (and the depression it causes) and being alone. Do you know what the experts there listed as their #3 strategy for avoiding depression—only after ‘make a plan so that the future is not totally unknown’ and ‘say hello to the person behind the cash register where you buy your morning coffee so you make real contact with a real person?’ #3 was ‘Explore your faith.’ I quote here: “People who have a personal relationship with their God or a higher power tend to do well” (Dr. Hawkley, PhD in psychiatry and professor at the Univ. of Chicago).
Note that he does not recommend that we ‘spend time with other people of our faith,’ or ‘study the religious writings of your faith’ in order to combat isolation. He says, as a secular psychiatrist who is not ‘taking sides’ with any religious group over another, that we need to have a personal relationship with our God. Even non-Christians seem to innately know what we need. It’s not a secret; we just resist truth. God doesn’t want us to only read what He’s written, or to just talk with others who know Him, or to bring all our problems to Him. He certainly welcomes all those things! But at the very core, God is looking for us to be willing to sit and BE with Him; to just leave everything behind for a bit and BE with Him. You
wouldn’t think it would take so much effort on our part, but it does. Is God worth it to you? I hope so!
Rejoice!
Sue Andraeas
Prioress, Saint Brendan’s
This article is dedicated to Mr. David Holifield who has taught me more through his stillness than I have learned through the words and actions of others. Thank you!