The chasm between being alone and loneliness is deep. The way you begin to be alone and at peace without being lonely is to know that you are with your best friend. When you are at peace with yourself and love yourself, you can never be lonely. Only when you learn to love yourself, can you love another. You must find that love for yourself before you can touch the purity of aloneness. Love of self, without being selfish, will not allow loneliness to exist. Love of self also creates a love for everything else and brings us closer to the Sacred Oneness.
To begin to enter into the profound silence that resides in the depths of our beings is to begin to enter the realm of the Godhead beyond God. Beyond speech, beyond apprehension, is a realm of generative actuality, the realm of essential being out of which the Word is eternally begotten. Our silence is both and the clear road by which the Word proceeds most directly into our hearts.
For the abbas (fathers) and ammas (mothers) of the desert, solitude with its silence was a creative medium, a forge of transformation through which the false self in its adaptation to the pride, luxury, lust for power, and greed of the "world" was melted away in the fires of spiritual discernment. One emerged from the silence as a transformed self ... a person of humility, compassion, and responsiveness to the Word of God.
Silence was much more than not speaking, it was mostly a quality of heart. It was the creation of an inner space where genuine listening takes place. The ammas and abbas knew that in silence the Word most readily takes root.
~ from THE VIGIL by Wendy M. Wright with thanks to Elizabeth Fribance
