Like the one who leaves Paris for the desert and smiles from afar at solitude; like the traveller who awaits with eager heart the long days by the sea; like the monk who lovingly contemplates the walls of his cloister, so must we, from the very morning, open our soul to the little solitudes of the day.

For our little solitudes are great, exalting, holy like all the deserts of the world; they are inhabited by God Himself, by the God who sanctifies solitude.

The solitude of the black asphalt separating our home from the tram stop; the solitude of a table around which others bring their share of the world; the solitude of long corridors through which flows the endless stream of lives moving towards a new day.

The solitude of those moments when, crouched before the stove, one waits for the flame to catch the little piece of wood before adding the coal; solitude in the kitchen before the pot of vegetables.

Solitude while kneeling to polish the floor; along the garden path where one goes to gather lettuce. Little solitudes of staircases climbed and descended a hundred times a day. Solitude of the long hours of washing, mending and ironing.

Solitudes we might fear and which are the emptying of our heart: loved ones who leave and whom we wish to keep beside us; friends awaited who never arrive; things we long to say and which nobody hears; the strangeness of our heart among other people.

The first step towards solitude is a departure.

The true desert is reached, in every sense of the word, by taking the train, the ship, or the aeroplane.

We do not know how to recognise the many little departures that succeed one another throughout the day because we never truly arrive at the solitudes that are ours, the solitudes prepared for us.

Because a state of solitude is separated from us only by the thickness of a door or the duration of a quarter of an hour, we fail to recognise its eternal value; we do not take it seriously; we do not approach it as a unique reality capable of essential revelations.

Because our heart does not know how to wait, the wells of solitude scattered throughout our days refuse us the living water with which they overflow.

We have the superstition of time.

If our human love requires time, the love of God makes light of hours, and a soul open to Him can be profoundly shaken by Him in a single instant. “I will lead you into solitude and I will speak to your heart.” If our solitudes are poor conductors of the Word for us, it is because our heart is absent.

There is no solitude without silence.

Silence is sometimes refraining from speech, but it is always listening.

An absence of noise emptied of our attentiveness to the Word would not be silence.

A day filled with noise, filled with voices, can still be a day of silence if the noise becomes for us the echo of God’s presence, if words become for us messages and calls from God.

When we speak about ourselves, when we speak among ourselves, we step outside silence. When we repeat with our lips the intimate promptings of God’s Word deep within us, we leave silence untouched.

Silence does not love the profusion of words. We know how to speak or remain silent, but we do not know how to be content with the necessary words.

We constantly waver between a muteness that suffocates charity and an outburst of words that leads truth astray. Silence is charity and truth.

It answers the one who asks something, yet it gives only words filled with life.

Silence, like every commitment in life, leads us to the gift of ourselves and not to a disguised selfishness.

Yet it keeps us united precisely through this gift. One cannot give oneself after having squandered oneself.

The vain words with which we clothe our thoughts are a continual squandering of ourselves.

“An account will be demanded for every word.” For all those that should have been spoken and which our selfishness withheld. For all those that should have been left unsaid and which our extravagance has scattered to the four winds of our imagination or our nerves.

Solitude as the Place of Encounter

We must look upon solitude positively, both the solitude of which we are speaking here and that which people seek in certain “deserts”.

For if some seek out deserts, they must know that imposed solitude, the solitude discovered within oneself, is good.

That solitude is a good is a truth that takes time to learn; that solitude is inevitable for human beings is a truth learned more quickly, and even more so for the Christian.

Human beings always move, even before the person they love most, towards an unavoidable solitude that encloses something unique within each person.

The Christian, from that other depth within himself — the very depth that separates him from unbelievers — encounters that which, in God, reveals itself to reason without reason having recourse to faith.

It is all that which, for the human being left to himself, makes God appear as a stranger.

This first encounter with solitude must be welcomed by the Christian as the true place of encounter with the Lord.

We must make of this original solitude — deepened further by whatever our conditions of life may add to it — a privileged place where God comes to meet us.

Many human sorrows are forms of solitude. If we render to God the honour of our joy, it is because all our solitudes will have been filled by Him.

The communist city and faith

In a Communist city, what may strike us most deeply is often the disappearance of a God who had previously seemed manifest and obvious before our eyes.

This disappearance is symbolised by a complete “uselessness” of God bursting forth in the life of Communists and in the life of the city itself.

As a consequence of this state of affairs, there occurs an “epiphany” of man — of his worth, his power, and his collective destiny.For if a specifically Communist environment demonstrates both indispensable human virtues and human efficiency in full activity, it appears that no one concerns himself with God, and as though God were missed by no one and by nothing.

Such an environment can place us before a temptation in which we fail to recognise the trial itself. This temptation is all the stronger because we may come to see, through the eyes of our companions and friends, those things which once were for us signs of God.

These signs then appear unreadable to anyone who does not already know beforehand what they mean. At the same time, despite the deepest affections, we realise that we are becoming strangers to others precisely because of the faith that makes us love them all the more.

It may then happen that we openly or secretly accuse faith of being foreign to our world. This is a profound suffering.

But if we believe in the One who, having called us, “is faithful”, He will tell us what we have forgotten:“Faith is a gift of God.”

Faith, a gift of God and foreign to the world, is nevertheless given for the world.To believe is to establish between faith and the world an eternal covenant. God calls each person by name.

See, Solitudine