The experience of solitude is necessary because only in solitude and silence is the living God revealed as the binding source of all that is. The veil is lifted, and we begin to see the wonderful possibilities of life together that surround and inhabit us. This means that, at our worst and darkest moments, we can affirm that we are God's handiwork, that God's image has marked us forever, that the most real thing about us is the Spirit who dwells in every human heart. We may be fundamentally and utterly nothing, we may be creatures marked for death, but we are peculiar beings whose very emptiness has been designed to be inhabited by nothing less than the living God. And it is in the living God that we meet one another. The life of prayer revolves around two poles: solitude and community. God is encountered in both places.
~ from LIVING IN THE SPIRIT by Rachel Hosmer and Alan Jones
Is it possible to see the future as dark and darkening further; to reject false hope and
desperate pseudo-optimism without collapsing into despair?...if you don't feel despair, in
times like these, you are not fully alive. But there has to be something beyond despair,
too; or rather, something that accompanies it, like a companion on the road....I am
going to pick up [my scythe] and go and find some grass to mow. I am going to cut
great swaths of it...I am going to walk ahead, following the ground... I am going to
breathe the still-clean air and listen to the still-singing birds and reflect on the fact that
the earth is older and harder than the machine that is eating it—that it is indeed more
resilient than fragile—and that change comes quickly when it comes, and that
knowledge is not the same as wisdom.
