One of the fruits of solitude.
I want to share with you one of the deep graces I received during Lent a number of years ago.
I was a poustinik at the time, spending three days a week in prayer and solitude. In solitude you struggle with all kinds of thoughts. Everybody struggles with them, of course, but solitude intensifies the combat.
One such cluster of thoughts has to do with what other people think about your being in solitude. It’s an unusual lifestyle, so you yourself must come up with faith reasons for living it.
You have permission to be in solitude, the Church has an exalted view of people praying in solitude, and basically, it is God’s will that you are there. This is your first line of defense against temptations.
But still you struggle. What if others don’t understand? What if they think you’re lazy? What if they think you’re avoiding work or the active ministry? What if they think you are selfish, enjoying all that solitude when there is so much work to be done?
One way of handling these thoughts is to realize that you’ve no idea what people actually are thinking. Probably, at any given moment, only you and God are thinking about you! You see clearly that these thoughts are your own projections, but this doesn’t stop them.
For a while you live with this pain of fighting what you know are your own projections, literally fighting yourself. It’s a mystery why they should persist even after you know they are your own projections. You must simply stand still in the midst of your own craziness and powerlessness.
But then a new dimension is added. Somebody says it to you directly, or you hear it indirectly. Some people actually do have these thoughts about you! This is more terrifying. Now it is not a matter of your own projections but of reality.
So you pray for these people, forgive them, ask the Lord to enlighten them. You suffer these things now as a kind of martyr to solitude!
Finally, God in his mercy assists you in reaching a deeper level. One day it became absolutely clear to me, and I was given the grace to accept it in my heart.
I was given the grace to see that it’s really true!
What is true? It’s true that I am lazy, selfish, avoid work, avoid people, delude myself, etc. The Lord showed me that I’m only bothered by such thoughts because they are truths in my own heart. They are part of me.
I can’t tell you what a freedom I’ve had since then. It became clear that one of the fruits of solitude is precisely to admit this basic level of sinfulness in which we live all the time. That’s the only way I can describe it.
We say that baptism has taken away original sin, but it seems that all our lives we will be in some state of sinfulness. We will never be able to say, “I’m not proud,” or “I’m not lazy.” I can never say that I’m not proud or lazy or selfish. I will be these things until my dying day.
But now I’m not bothered by those thoughts any more. Or rather, when they arise, they no longer cause me anxiety or unpeace. Now they add to a healthy sense of reality about myself.
I am no longer frantically trying to get rid of these thoughts, like wiping off mud after being splashed by a car. I can’t really get rid of them.
God has given me the grace to accept the truth of them, whether I think them of myself, or I think other people are thinking them about me. I think about them because they’re true.
This is not some kind of fatalistic acceptance: “That’s just the way I am so, I have to live with it.”
No. I keep trying to be less selfish, less lazy, even though I realize that I can never totally eradicate selfishness and laziness altogether.
Solitude exposes this basic nakedness so that one cannot avoid it. It’s simply true. And I was given the grace to accept it about myself.
If people are thinking those thoughts, they just see what is really in my heart. I suspected that these thoughts were true. Now I know they are. And I am free.
