BY BONITA JOYNER SHIELDS

HE THOUGHT OF SOLITUDE FILLED ME with anxiety for much of my life.

As a child I remember how I tried hard not to be the last one asleep in the house, because then I'd come face to face with all the quiet that night offered. The background noise of my older brothers and sister talking or watching television lulled me to sleep.

As a youth in boarding academy, the desire to live in a room by myself never entered my mind. And the nights were the longest when my roommates would have to be away for one reason or another.

As a young married woman, I dreaded the times that my husband would be away from home. I could handle several hours by myself; even an entire day. But if the truth be known, it wasn't until I was 35 years old that I could stay in a house alone overnight.

The Delmar family of Gaithersburg, Maryland, had two kids and six television sets that stayed on up to 17 hours a day.¹ It was part of nearly every significant moment in their lives, and stayed on right up until the time the mother drifted off to sleep at night. I think the mother's explanation of why she chose to have it impact her life as much as it did is telling: "I think that's the reason I have to have the TV on," she said. "If it's not on, I think. I think, I think, I think. . . . That's the thing about TV," she said, "you don't have to think."²

What is it about solitude that fills people with dread and drives them away? Is it possible that the dread of solitude is one reason that drives our frenzied society to its hyperactivity?

The Solitary Life
In the fourth century, men and women entered the desert en masse in a movement known as the Monastic movement. These "desert fathers and mothers," as they were called, exited society in order to lead a solitary, contemplative life of prayer. They were seeking a deeper experience with God. While I'm not advocating a reclusive lifestyle (neither did Jesus), I've had a fascination with these men and women of faith, and have learned much from them about the spiritual discipline of silence.

In his book The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, Belden Lane explores what the desert meant for these ancient men and women, and what it can mean for us today.

Using the term desert as metaphor, Lane states, "The so-called desert is any place of solitude, simplicity, and emptiness--a barren wasteland, figuratively--to which one withdraws for undistracted communication with God."³

Yet Lane warns us about the risk involved in our lifting the desert experience too far out of the context of the geographical desert as a metaphor. We risk creating a "sterilized and sanitized" religious experience, knowing not the pain, risk, or demands that the actual geographical desert gives.

My husband, Roy, and I traveled to Israel in 1999, and took a bus trip into the desert. As a resident of a densely populated metropolitan United States region, I find it difficult to describe the feeling of standing in a place where the landscape is barren and seemingly lifeless, the fierceness of the wind cuts like a knife, and the sound of silence is deafening. The desert beckoned feelings of anxiety--but also of anticipation.

Yet many of us are uncomfortable with silence. It forces us to think--and acknowledge the pain, risks, and demands that life presents. It confronts us with questions that we may not even know how to articulate, but are lying on the surface, begging to be answered.

It connects us with the Divine.

It Wasn't in the Wind
The prophet Elijah stood on Mount Carmel and boldly proclaimed the Lord as the true God (see 1 Kings 18). Then he, along with the other Israelites who were present, slaughtered 450 prophets of Baal. He then ran almost 30 miles in the rain. After Elijah came down from this adrenaline rush, Queen Jezebel threatened his life. What did this invincible prophet do? He ran for his life!

Going a day's journey into the desert, he lay down under a broom tree and, in his depression, asked the Lord to take his life. After the Lord sent an angel to feed him and strengthen him, he traveled 40 days and 40 nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God. There he spent the night in a cave.

When he was in the cave, the Lord asked him what he was doing there (verse 9). After the prophet engaged in a small pity party, the Lord decided that Elijah needed a fresh glimpse of Him.

"Then a great and powerful wind . . . shattered the rocks, . . . but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave" (verses 11-13, NIV).

Like Elijah, how often do we work ourselves into a frenzy, doing the Lord's work (which is a good thing) but forgetting to take the time to listen to the gentle whisper of the Lord of the work? We mistakenly think we will find the Lord in accomplishing great things for Him, yet overlook the fact that we find His power for the work in the silence of His presence.

"To submit to silence in prayer is to admit that we stand naked before God, without even words to cover ourselves. Words are the fig leaves we continually grasp in the effort to clothe our nakedness."⁴

Words, of course, are necessary. (I'm a writer!) Even God revealed Himself as "the Word . . . made flesh" (John 1:14).⁵ I'm not advocating an anti-intellectual, overly emotional relationship with the Lord. But, like Lane, I can't help wondering if we clutter our lives with an overabundance of sound and activity and words--even in prayer--to quiet our fear of silence, and to conceal our nakedness of mind and spirit.

Experiencing the Desert
I have a chair in the corner of my bedroom. Technically it belongs to Roy and me, but we both know it's really Bonita's chair! (Our cats, however, haven't learned this yet.) This is sacred space for me; it's where I retreat for solitude: to read, talk with God, and get away from the crowds. No one bothers me there. Sometimes when I can't sleep, I'll just sit there in the middle of the night, look out the window, and talk with God.

One of my former colleagues used to take a week for a personal retreat and go camping by himself. I admired him for doing this, yet wondered what a person does for an entire week by themselves in a tent and sleeping bag. Of course, the unexpressed concern was What does a person do with that much solitude?

This past spring I decided it was time for me to take an extended personal spiritual retreat. (No, I didn't go camping; I'm not there yet!) I left home on a Sabbath morning and headed out to a personal retreat center, where I got a room, meals, and all the solitude I could handle until Sunday afternoon. Even before leaving on this relatively short excursion, though, I wondered how I would fill up that much time with solitude.⁶

What I discovered after spending this time reading, writing, praying, walking, eating, thinking, planning, crying, laughing, and sleeping--almost all of it in silence--was that my body, mind, and spirit craved more (especially the sleeping!). No distractions. No noise. No places to go, people to see, things to do. A peace and calm worked their way deeper into my soul. I felt that I had more deeply connected with the Divine.

These times of solitude aren't ends in themselves in that I seek to seclude myself from others as a way of life. Actually, anyone taking time to detach from the busyness of modern life to connect with the Divine can't help reaching out to others. I am discovering as I get older that these times of solitude help me stay emotionally strong so that I can relate to others more calmly and lovingly.

"True contemplation can never fulfill itself in 'the false sweetness of a narcissistic seclusion.' It has to re-enter the world of others with its newly won freedom. . . . The contemplative returns to the ordinary, not in spite of her detachment from it, but because of that detachment. No longer driven by fear of rejection and loss, she is able now to love others without anxiously needing anything in return."⁷

Now I can understand how Jesus could spend entire nights alone in prayer. This time of solitude--of connecting with the Father--gave Him the power to fulfill His mission. And I believe it is this time of solitude in our lives that will give us the power to live more effective, fruitful, and loving lives.

The Gentle Whisper
The thought of solitude no longer fills me with anxiety. I now schedule solitude into my life. I enjoy being the last one to bed so I can hear the tick, tick, tick of the clocks in a house devoid of sound. I embrace those times of travel where I have a room to myself for a few nights. I take pleasure in those times when Roy travels and I'm in our house alone overnight, and learning to depend solely on the Divine for companionship. (Though I do enjoy it when Roy returns home!)

The only thing about solitude, though, is that it makes me think, think, think . . . and the Lord faithfully whispers back.

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1 David Finkel, "TV Without Guilt," Washington Post Magazine, Jan. 16, 1994.
2 Ibid.
3 Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 20.
4 Ibid., p. 68.
5 Interestingly, Sarah Sumner in her book Men and Women in the Church, explains that according to the Greek, the word Logos can be translated in various ways: Jesus is the Word, Jesus is Reason, and/or Jesus is Logic.
6 My first experience at this retreat center was mistakenly entering a dining room designated "No Talking." I'd never eaten a meal in a roomful of people without a word being spoken. After my initial discomfort I entered the dining room again-this time intentionally--and enjoyed myself immensely.
7 Lane, p. 75.

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Bonita Joyner Shields is an assistant editor of the Adventist Review.