If you are not careful, you might miss the many times when you read something to the effect of, “Jesus went out to pray.” In the Gospel of Luke, it happens with regularity. Silence and solitude is a gift that has been given to humanity through the church, yet many of us do not practice these gifts. 

Jesus when confronted with burdens, decisions, or the terrible agony of the cross, went to a time of prayer and solitude with God.  Many of us would rather start laying out the pros and cons, maybe immediately begin to devise schemes to overcome whatever barriers we face, and sometimes we just work ourselves to the point of exhaustion in order to overcome anything that might stand in the way of our purposes. Yet Jesus retreated so that he could clearly hear the voice of God. 

Another reason I am scared (yes, scared) of solitude and silence is that I would have nothing to distract me from myself. I always find it easier to ignore all my stupidity when I can scroll through Facebook, Twitter, and watch reality TV shows and think about how wrong and stupid everyone else is. I mean that’s comforting, but what if I had to lay myself before God without distraction. It would certainly be uncomfortable to have to think about my stupidity before an all-holy God. 

I think I am going to practice some times of solitude and silence and see where it gets me. I think it will be uncomfortable at first, but as Henri Nouwen says about the ancient desert mystics, solitude is a “place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born, the place where the emergence of the new man and the new woman occurs.”