Solitude is necessary for your emotional health, whether you are living alone or with another. Solitude gives you the time and space to integrate your experience. And all growth depends on integration. Without solitude, spiritual nourishment will be lacking. If you want a single cause for the amount of distress in the world, it is the fact that people do not take time to commune with self, nature and the divine. A spiritual life — a life free of needless tension and self-created suffering — requires such communion.
Listening is not always easy. In biting back the urge to interject, to advise, even to condemn, the listener gives him or her self to the other. That giving is an act of love. Dialogue, that is speaking and listening, creates a unity of being, draws us together, pulls us up and out from the "other" everyday world where we are apart into a moment of communion ... Through creative listening we imitate God, the ultimate Listener. God listens, and God waits ... drawing us upward through the sublime power of listening. Dialogue with God and with those we love is the necessary bread of life. Without it we starve.
~ from "Renewing a Marriage" by Walter Reinsdorf in "Fellowship of Prayer" (April 1992)
