5.

I just booked myself into Saint Michael’s Abbey for next week. Three days. I’ll bring my Bible, my journal, my pen, a good pair of hiking shoes, but that’s about it. My phone I will leave behind, along with its steady stream of noisy demands on my time and attention, and its many (mostly illegitimate) claims on my life.

I won’t miss it, at all.

Sadly, the monastery is hard to get into now, squeezed out by the law of supply and demand. Their website no longer advertises private retreats, but a friend of a friend connected me to the Abbot. I’m in, thank God. I need to re-center, to re-set.

To begin again.

Three days of quiet is a luxury, and that is not lost on me. It really isn’t. I’m painfully aware that many people don’t have access to a quiet place, surrounded by natural beauty, and saturated in prayer and peace. Others simply can’t get away — there’s a two-year-old that needs to be, you know, kept alive, or a struggling business that’s never more than a few days away from self-implosion, or a teenager on suicide watch, or a cruel and demanding boss, lording-it-Pharoah-esq over a job you can’t afford to lose.

So, maybe you can’t “come away to a quiet place” for three days at a monastery.

But what can you do?

Do what you can, not what you can’t.

Can you shut off the TV tonight, go to bed early, and rise early to sit before God and listen?

Could you take a day this weekend to keep a digital sabbath, as well as a sabbath-sabbath; a whole day to just stop and rest and delight and worship? Too much? What about a half day? What about a few hours?

What can you do?

Excuses are never far away, always within easy reach.

But the eremos is never far away, either …

And God is waiting for you there. Yes, yes, I know, he’s with you everywhere: “I am with you always.”¹ And thank God for that.

But just as there is a special quality to God’s voice that we hear in community, that really can be found nowhere else, so too with solitude. Just as we learn who we are, and what God’s call upon us is, by living a deeply relational life in close proximity to others, who mirror back to us our true selves, who occasionally see us better than we see ourselves, and call forth the essence of Christ-in-us; so too, we learn our identity and calling by following Jesus into the desert, stripping ourselves down to the bare essentials of a soul before its Maker, and there, in the quiet, in the stillness, listening to the voice of love.

Go, my friends, into the quiet, and listen …