BEAUTY LIKES NEGLECTED PLACES
Only in solitude can you discover a sense of your own beauty. The Divine Artist sent no one here without the depth and light of divine beauty. This beauty is frequently concealed behind the dull facade of routine. Only in your solitude will you come upon your own beauty. In Connemara, where there are a lot of fishing villages, there is a phrase that says, “Is fánach an áit a gheobfá gliomach”—that is, “It is in the unexpected or neglected place that you will find the lobster.” In the neglected crevices and corners of your evaded solitude, you will find the treasure that you have always sought elsewhere. Ezra Pound said something similar about beauty: Beauty likes to keep away from the public glare. It likes to find a neglected or abandoned place, for it knows that it is only here it will meet the kind of light that repeats its shape, dignity, and nature. There is a deep beauty within each person. Modern culture is obsessed with cosmetic perfection. Beauty is standardized; it has become another product for sale. In its real sense, beauty is the illumination of your soul.
There is a lantern in the soul, which makes your solitude luminous. Solitude need not remain lonely. It can awaken to its luminous warmth. The soul redeems and transfigures everything because the soul is the divine space. When you inhabit your solitude fully and experience its outer extremes of isolation and abandonment, you will find that at its heart there is neither loneliness nor emptiness but intimacy and shelter. In your solitude you are frequently nearer to the heart of belonging and kinship than you are in your social life or public world. At this level, memory is the great friend of solitude. The harvest of memory opens when solitude is ripe. This is captured succinctly by Wordsworth in his response to the memory of the daffodils: “Oft when on my couch I lie / In vacant or pensive mood / They flash upon the inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.”
Your persona, beliefs, and role are in reality a technique or strategy for getting through the daily routine. When you are on your own, or when you wake in the middle of the night, the real knowing within you can surface. You come to feel the secret equilibrium of your soul. When you travel the inner distance and reach the divine, the outer distance vanishes. Ironically, your trust in your inner belonging radically alters your outer belonging. Unless you find belonging in your solitude, your external longing will remain needy and driven.
There is a wonderful welcome within. Meister Eckhart illuminates this point. He says that there is a place in the soul that neither space nor time nor flesh can touch. This is the eternal place within us. It would be a lovely gift to yourself to go there often—to be nourished, strengthened, and renewed. The deepest things that you need are not elsewhere. They are here and now in that circle of your own soul. Real friendship and holiness enable a person to frequently visit the hearth of his solitude; this benediction invites an approach to others in their blessedness.
THOUGHTS ARE OUR INNER SENSES
Our life in the world comes to us in the shape of time. Consequently, our expectation is both a creative and constructive force. If you expect to find nothing within yourself but the repressed, abandoned, and shameful elements of your past or a haunted hunger, all you will find is emptiness and desperation. If you do not bring the kind eye of creative expectation to your inner world, you will never find anything there. The way you look at things is the most powerful force in shaping your life. In a vital sense, perception is reality.
Phenomenology has shown us that all consciousness is consciousness of something. The world is never simply there outside us. Our intentionality constructs it. For the most part, we construct our world so naturally that we are unaware that we are doing this every moment. It seems that the same rhythm of construction works inwardly, too. Our intentionality constructs the landscapes of our inner world. Maybe it is time now for a phenomenology of soul. The soul creates, shapes, and peoples our inner life. The gateway to our deepest identity is not through mechanical analysis. We need to listen to the soul and articulate its wisdom in a poetic and mystical form. It is tempting to use the soul as merely another receptacle for our tired and frustrated analytical energies. It deserves to be remembered that from ancient times the soul had depth, danger, and unpredictability precisely because it was seen as the presence of the divine within us. If we cut the soul off from the Holy, it becomes an innocuous cipher. To awaken the soul is also to travel to the frontier where experience bows down before the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of Otherness.
There is such an intimate connection between the way we look at things and what we actually discover. If you can learn to look at yourself and your life in a gentle, creative, and adventurous way, you will be eternally surprised at what you find. In other words, we never meet anything totally or purely. We see everything through the lens of thought. The way that you think determines what you will actually discover. This is expressed wonderfully by Meister Eckhart: “Thoughts are our inner senses.” We know that when our outer senses are impaired, this immediately diminishes the presence of the world to us. If your sight is poor, the world becomes a blur. If your hearing is damaged, a dull silence replaces what could be music or the voice of your beloved. In a similar way, if your thoughts are impaired or if they are negative or diminished, then you will never discover anything rich or beautiful within your soul. If thoughts are our inner senses, and if we allow our thoughts to be impoverished and pale, then the riches of our inner world can never come to meet us. We have to imagine more courageously if we are to greet creation more fully.
You relate to your inner world through thought. If these thoughts are not your own thoughts, then they are secondhand thoughts. Each of us needs to learn the unique language of our own soul. In that distinctive language, we will discover a lens of thought to brighten and illuminate our inner world. Dostoyevsky said that many people lived their lives without ever finding themselves in themselves. If you are afraid of your solitude, or if you only meet your solitude with entrenched or impoverished thought, you will never enter your own depth. It is a great point of growth in your life when you allow what is luminous within to awaken you. This may be the first time that you actually see yourself as you are. The mystery of your presence can never be reduced to your role, actions, ego, or image. You are an eternal essence; this is the ancient reason why you are here. To begin to get a glimpse of this essence is to come into harmony with your destiny and with the providence that always minds your days and ways. This process of self-discovery is not easy; it may involve suffering, doubt, dismay. But we must not shrink from the fullness of our being in attempting to reduce the pain.
ASCETIC SOLITUDE
Ascetic solitude is difficult. You withdraw from the world to get a clearer glimpse of who you are, what you are doing, and where life is taking you. The people who do this in a very committed way are the contemplatives. When you visit someone at home, the door into the house, the threshold, is rich with the textures of presence from all the welcomes and valedictions that have occurred on that threshold. When you visit a cloister or contemplative convent, no one meets you at the door. You go in, ring a bell, and the person arrives behind the grille to meet you. These are the special houses that hold the survivors of solitude. They have exiled themselves from the outside worship of the earth to risk themselves in the interior space where the senses have nothing to celebrate.