For nearly 15 years, once a month I have gone into the mountains to practice the spiritual disciplines of silence and solitude. I learned this first from my mentor, Bob, in 2001 and practised this monthly with him from 2001-2005.... and then it was reinforced by my friend Jay who did this with me for nearly a decade. My literary mentor, Brennan Manning once wrote:
I have found that once a month, if I practice stillness....I connect with Jesus in profound ways.…it takes time for me to be still, to come to that place of inner quiet. Stillness is more than silence and it is beyond solitude. Interior stillness is too deep for words. Unhampered by self-consciousness, our attention is focused entirely on God and His love.
Last month I took my son, Noah, to the mountains with me to learn this discipline. I wonder if one day he will will answer Jesus’ invitation to him to “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.” (Mark 6:31). I'm trying to teach my kids this art in a world filled with busyness, media, marketing, and productivity.
My former professor Eugene Peterson once wrote,
Spirituality means, among other things, taking ourselves seriously. It means going against the cultural stream in which we are incessantly trivialized to the menial status of producers, and performers, constantly depersonalized behind the labels of our degrees or our salaries. But there is far more to us than our usefulness and our reputation, where we’ve been and who we know; there is the unique, irreproducible, eternal, image-of-God me. A vigorous assertion of personal dignity is foundation to spirituality.
I have discovered that silence and solitude are a means to discover my "made-in-God's-image-ness". So, the last Friday of every month I take a half-day to practice what Emily Dickinson calls "Renunciation–the piercing virtue"....rejecting my deep seeded compulsions for productivity, efficiency, self-promotion, and self-direction.
These are good days.
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