Solitude played a huge role in the life of Jesus and the ones who changed the world for him. But what is solitude? Is it simply being alone for an hour or two? If so, how difficult is that? Most of us are hardwired to desire solitude every once and a while, some of us (like me) every day! No, solitude isn’t just being alone. It is purposefully abstaining from interaction with other people, denying ourselves companionship and all that comes from our conscious interaction with others. We close ourselves away; we go to the ocean, the desert, the wilderness, or to the anonymity of the urban crowd. Solitude is choosing to be completely alone, and dwelling on our experience of isolation from other human beings. But why is solitude so important?
The normal course of our day-to-day busy lives and interactions with other people locks us into patterns of feeling, thought, and action that are geared to a world set against God. Nothing but solitude can allow the development of a freedom from the ingrained behaviors that hinder our intimacy with God.
Think about this: it takes twenty times more the amount of amphetamine to kill individual mice than it takes to kill them in groups. Experimenters also find that a mouse given no amphetamine at all will be dead within ten minutes of being placed in the midst of a group on the drug. In groups they go off like popcorn or firecrackers. We, too, will submerge and die with culture if we don’t find the time to break away and dive into solitude. It is the inevitable trend – just a test of time.
It is in solitude that we find the psychic distance, the perspective from which we can see, in the light of eternity, the created things that trap, worry and oppress us. It is where we are convicted of our faults, of our nasty habits; it is where God says, “This is where you need to change.” And it is where we draw ever closer to God, developing a more intense relationship than when we first started.

“Solitude is a terrible trial, for it serves to crack open and burst apart the shell of our superficial securities. It opens out to us the unknown abyss that we carry within us… [and] discloses the fact that these abysses are haunted.” - Louis Bouyer

We can only survive solitude if we cling to Jesus there. And yet in that suffering and anguish of solitude, what we find of Jesus enables us to return to society as free persons! Solitude is generally the most fundamental in the beginning of the spiritual life, and it must be returned to again and again as that life develops. Just try fasting, prayer, service, giving, or even celebration without the preparation accomplished in withdrawal, and you will soon be thrown into despair by your efforts, very likely abandoning your attempt altogether.

“That is the only reason why I desire solitude – to be lost to all created things, to die to them and to the knowledge of them, for they remind me of my distance from [God]: that [God is] far from them, even though [He is] in them. [He has] made them and [His presence] sustains their being and they hide [Him] from me. And I would live alone, and out of them.” - Thomas Merton

In stark aloneness it is possible to have silence, to be still, and to know that Jehovah indeed is God (Psalm 46:10). In aloneness do we set the King before our minds with sufficient intensity and duration that we stay centered upon him – our hearts are transfixed by him, established in trust (Psalm 112:7,8) – even when back in the office, shop, home, school or work.

“The great holy men, where they might, fled men’s fellowship and chose to live to God in secret places. One said: As ofttimes as I was among men I came back less a man, that is to say less holy… If in the beginning of thy conversation thou keep thy cell and dwell well therein it shall be to thee afterwards as a dear and well beloved friend and most pleasant solace. In silence and quiet the devout soul profiteth and learneth the secrets of the scriptures… Leave vain things to the vain… Shut thy door upon thee and call to thee Jesu thy love: dwell with him in they cell for thou shalt not find elsewhere so great peace.” - Thomas a Kempis

“We go more constantly and desperately to the post office, [but] the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while… read not the Times, read the Eternities!” - Henry David Thoreau