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The solitary life is the life of one drawn by the Father into the wilderness, there to be nourished by no other spiritual food than Jesus. For in Jesus the Father gives himself to us and nourishes us with his own inexhaustible life. The life of solitude therefore must be a continual communion and thanksgiving in which we behold by faith all that goes on in the depths of God, and lose our taste for any other life or any other spiritual food. . .
Where solitude is not an interval, but a continuous whole, we may well renounce altogether the sense of concentration and the feeling of spiritual stillness. Our whole life may flow out to meet the Being and the Silence of our days in which we are immersed, and we can work out our salvation by quiet, continued action.
The solitary is necessarily a man who does what he wants to do. In fact he has nothing else to do. That is why his vocation is both dangerous and despised. Dangerous because, in fact, he must become a saint by doing what he wants to do, instead of by doing what he does not want to do. It is very hard to be a saint by doing what you like. It means that what you like is always God’s will. This vocation is wisely despised by those who fear to do what they want to do, knowing well that what they want to do is not the will of God. But a Solitary man must be a man who has the courage to do the thing he most wants in the world to do--to live in solitude. It requires a heroic humilty and heroic hope--the mad hope that God will protect him against himself, that God loves him so much that he will accept such a choice as if it were his own. Such a hope is the sign that the choce for solitude is God’s choice. That the desire for solitude is possibly a divine vocation. That it implies the grace to please God by making our own decisions in the humiliating uncertainty of an everlasting silence that never approves or dissapproves a single choice we make.
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