Sermon 090208

Sermon 02/08/09

Mark 1:35-38
(Luke 4:42-44)
Hosea 2:14

On Solitude:

Finding Strength in the Desert

"It is God who awakes

and God who slakes

our thirst."

- Von Hugel

A very short text, yet it says so much.

A celebration of Jesus' wonderful humanity!

His need to nourish his own soul and connect with God in prayer.

His need to withdraw into solitude.

Not much detail here about what Jesus prayer consisted of, or how long Jesus was away from the group in prayer.

When he is finally found by his friends, he seems to have a renewed sense of his mission and the need to move on to other villages in the area rather than stay put and have people travel to him. . . .
Prayer and solitude

Therefore I will now allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her.

Hosea 2:14

Hosea uses the imagery of courtship to depict God's relationship with the people. Another translation of this text reads:

"I will entice you into the desert and there I will speak to you in the depths of your heart."

(Translation from Douglas Steere, TOGETHER IN SOLITUDE, p. 92)

Anyone who's ever spent time in a wilderness area knows how spending time in an isolated place can bring us into a mode of awareness of the sacred that is so intimately present all around us.

Traditionally, the desert is a place of transformation.

There is also a sense here in which God is being proactive towards us, enticing us into the sacred space within our own soul.

(Yesterday's discussion of Jung's view of the collective unconscious as being a force for human evolution. . . . . Comfort in the idea of the assisting forces of grace that surround us. . . . It's not all up to us.)

Did Jesus need to connect with those assisting forces as well? Did he need to come to the realization that he could do what he felt called to do because it was not all up to him?

In solitude we find a deep connection with all of creation and all of life.

Douglas Steere, in his book, TOGETHER IN SOLITUDE, shares a letter that was written by Jane Richardson, a nun who had been living in hermit-like solitude for nine years. Steere wrote to her asking about her life of voluntary solitude and what its gifts and struggles had been. This was part of her reply;

Briefly, nine years of living in quiet escape a certain kind of scrutiny simply because they are, in being solitary, quite ordinary and uneventful, so to speak. The burdens and fruits, in other words, seem to resemble those of so many not living in solitude - at least, as I hear my friends and visitors. Of course, the style is different, the flavor of the learning and dying and rising - of the struggle to believe in love and to ever choose life - has its own uniqueness. If anything, I am more aware than ever before how similar all our lives are, inasmuch as the universal call that persistently draws our hearts onwards has its origin and end in the one same Goodness, the one same Spirit, the one same Mercy and Compassion. Solitude for me has meant a way of learning that, of coming to a knowledge of what I used to believe: that we all share the Great Life of God, that we can, in your own words, "touch the thresholds of the lives of others in the Being of God where we are all interrelated." The poets are right: no one is a stranger, a foreigner. For those who live, latitude and longitude, fences and rivers, literacy and bankbooks cannot determine kinship. . . . it is clear that Mercy holds us all, and will find a way to lead us into glory, even though we enter "kicking and screaming," as Auden says somewhere.

(Douglas Steere, TOGETHER IN SOLITUDE, p. 102)

I find it most amazing that for Richardson it is in solitude that she has come to a deeper sense of love and connection with people, with the world, with life. I am sure that this is not simply because she is alone, but because within that aloneness her interior life, that is her life of prayer, has awakened within her a deep recognition of the unity of all life. Some of us find the same awakening within community. Some of us find it within an intimate relationship. I think that most, if not all of us need both times of solitude and the experience of community in order to awaken more fully to the divine reality that is always and everywhere embracing and upholding us.

Today let us celebrate our wonderful humanity and innate connection with all life. Let us celebrate our incredible diversity and ground of unity that sings underneath it. Let us find strength and assisting grace in times of solitude and in the experience of community. We were created for both.

Mark 1:35-38

In the morning, while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, "Everyone is searching for you." He answered, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do."

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