When the Other Wars Go Quiet: On the Importance of Solitude in the Spiritual Life

There’s a mercy in discovering some battles can be escaped.

Close the door. Put down the phone. Stop answering texts. Let the voices go on without you for a while . . . The world, surprisingly, survives.

Abba Antony knew what solitude does. It takes weapons out of other people’s hands. No accusation reaches you unless memory carries it in. No praise can intoxicate you unless you pour it yourself. There’s no face across the table to irritate you, no careless sentence to correct, no beautiful thing to possess with your eyes. Hearing grows quiet. Speaking stops. Seeing has less to feed upon.

Three wars end.

And then the fourth begins.

This is the unpleasant gift of silence: eventually there’s no one left to blame for the noise.

We imagine solitude will give us peace because we imagine other people are the principal authors of our unrest. If the office were quieter. If the children needed less. If the news weren’t so maddening. If that person would stop saying that thing. If someone finally understood us. We carry around a small courtroom in which we’re almost always the injured party and the evidence is remarkably well organized.

Then the door closes.

The witnesses leave.

And the prosecutor is still there.

So is the defendant.

So is the judge.

The desert fathers went into solitude not because they hated the world but because they wanted to discover what remained when the world could no longer explain them to themselves. They found hunger and boredom, lust and resentment, old injuries with astonishing powers of resurrection. They found fantasies of holiness. They found themselves composing arguments against people hundreds of miles away.

There’s something almost comic about the persistence of the heart. A man can sit alone beneath an enormous sky and spend twenty minutes winning an argument that happened twelve years ago.

But this is where solitude becomes more than escape.

When there’s nothing left to distract us, we begin to notice that the heart doesn’t merely suffer temptations from outside. It manufactures them. It keeps old grievances warm. It rehearses admiration. It invents future humiliations and prepares speeches against them. It wants to be loved and resents needing love. It wants God, provided God doesn’t interfere too much with the arrangements.

The battle Antony names isn’t against the heart as though the heart were some diseased organ to be conquered. It’s the battle for it.

Christian asceticism isn’t the destruction of desire but its purification. The heart isn’t meant to become empty. It’s meant to become free. Beneath the vanity, resentment, fear, appetite, and endless self-defense lies something more ancient: the creature’s hunger for God.

Much of sin, it seems, may really be that hunger traveling under a false name.

We want to be seen, so we seek applause.

We want permanence, so we accumulate.

We want justice, so we cherish resentment.

We want love, so we try to possess.

We want God, and sometimes we settle for being right.

Silence begins stripping away the aliases.

Not quickly. Usually not pleasantly.

At first there’s only the noise of everything we thought we’d escaped. Memories come back. Old sentences recover their voices. The imagination drags furniture across the floor. Prayer feels less like rising toward heaven than sitting in a room while someone upstairs won’t stop pacing.

Stay there long enough, though, and something else can happen.

Not revelation in the dramatic sense. No fire descending. No voice in the cave.

Perhaps only the embarrassment of seeing clearly.

The grievance you’ve protected begins to look smaller.

The virtue you’ve been proud of reveals its vanity.

The person you’ve blamed becomes human again.

The wound remains a wound, but it stops being your name.

And beneath all that movement there may come, briefly, a quieter knowledge: God's been present through the entire argument.

He wasn’t waiting for you to become silent enough to deserve Him.

He was there while you were rehearsing the accusation. While you were defending yourself. While you were losing.

Grace seldom storms the fortress. Sometimes it simply remains outside the gate until the guard grows tired of explaining why it can’t come in.

This may be why the final war lasts a lifetime.

We don’t conquer the heart once. We keep surrendering it.

Again in the morning.

Again after the insult.

Again when praised.

Again when afraid.

Again when loneliness begins calling itself independence.

Again when resentment dresses itself as justice.

Again when prayer seems empty and God seems absent.

The desert doesn’t make a person holy. Silence doesn’t purify anyone merely by being silence. A man can sit alone for years and become only more fascinated with himself.

But silence removes certain alibis.

Sooner or later there’s only the heart, still making its arguments before God.

And God, who has heard them all, remains quiet.

Not because He has nothing to say.

Perhaps because He’s waiting for us to stop speaking long enough to discover what the battle was for.