Lectio
“Discernment performed alone often can become delusion. We need each other.”
— Henri Nouwen, Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life
Meditatio
God often speaks to us when we are alone. His still small voice heard in solitude and silence, when all of life’s noises and distractions — and our inner noises and distractions — are allowed to settle like silt to the bottom of a pond made placid by the calming force of love. But in the silence and the stillness other forces are also at work — the devil who accuses and entices and deceives is also at work. And the evil one’s voice is often louder and more imposing than the Lord’s, and the devil tempts us with what we want to hear, rather than what we need to hear, which is from the Lord.
For this reason, the work of discernment — learning to distinguish God’s voice from the many voices that are not God — is rarely safe when undertaken alone. We need spiritual counsel, companionship, and direction along the way. As God said at the very beginning of creation when he gave Eve to Adam and Adam to Eve, it is not good for us to be alone (Genesis 2:18). God not only gave us Godself in Christ and gives us Godself in the Holy Spirit, but he also gave and gives us one another. Nearly as much as we need God, we need each other because, as a spiritual director of mine once said, “When it’s just me and God, I’m always right.” That is, without another discerning spirit to reflect our discernment back to us, we are all too easily deceived into believing that the loud voice of the evil one cloaked in a thousand forms of self-centeredness is God’s voice, and that the quiet voice beneath the clamour of self which is, in fact, God’s voice, is nothing more than a nuisance to be disregarded like an insect buzzing in our ear to be swatted away.
This does not mean that our spiritual counselors, companions, or directors are always right. They cannot hear God’s intimate whispers in our hearts. But, if they are listening to our words and experienced through the filter of God’s intimate whispers in their own hearts, they can often help us to hear what in us is God and what is not-God. Jesus, after all, did not breathe the Spirit upon a solitary soul. He breathed upon a gathered community and entrusted to them together the sacred work of loosing what binds us — of helping one another hear, beneath the noise, the voice that is God. And it was not one disciple alone on the road to Emmaus who recognized the Lord, but two — and it was one speaking to the other that sealed the knowing: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32).
Our friends, spouses, spiritual directors, and pastors or priests do not replace the quiet time we must spend in prayer if we are to hear fully God’s gentle, loving whisper. Nothing replaces going into our room and shutting the door and praying to our Father who is in secret, as Jesus invites us to do (Matthew 6:6). Nothing replaces sitting at the Lord’s feet and simply listening to his words, as Mary did when she and Martha welcomed Christ into their home (Luke 10:39). And nothing replaces being drawn into the wilderness of our own hearts, where God speaks tenderly to us as a lover to the beloved, in the place where no other voice can reach.
But even the desert fathers and mothers who left everything behind to live ascetical lives dedicated solely to the purpose of prayer and discernment, were not truly alone. They had visitors to whom they spoke, they had one another, and they often returned to the world to offer what the desert had given them — not to keep the silence for themselves, but to become, for others, a still small voice, giving us a model for spiritual accompaniment — because it is not good for us to be alone (Genesis 2:18).
Oratio
though I retreat
into you
O Lord
you send me back
into the world
to be with my sisters
my brothers
who are with me
even if only so briefly
so very briefly
so
very
briefly
to weep and to laugh
to celebrate and agonize
to live and to die
together
in the blink of an eye
to be not alone
while we are alone
we are never alone
in you
Contemplatio
Where in your life are you trying to discern alone what was meant to be discerned together?
Related Scripture
“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help.” — Ecclesiastes 4:9–10 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like When The Ashes Rise: Resentments And The Purifying Fires Of Love, which explores what happens when isolation from neighbor becomes isolation from God — drawing on Thomas Merton’s unsettling observation about the cost of too much privacy and Abba Anthony’s stark saying that our life and death is with our neighbor.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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