A Day of Quiet Contemplation

Daylight Savings Sunday, 2015

On a day when many Christians feel a need for communion, the irony is that churches--and secular authorities--have prohibited Sunday gatherings. (Note: over two dozen churches in the Diocese offer remote Episcopal services.)

It's turned into a day of quiet contemplation for many of us. It's an opportunity for solitude, free from the unquiet and disquieting world.

Another consequence of social separation is loneliness, the subject of extensive sociological and psychological literature since the mid-20th century. Both loneliness and solitude are aspects of alone-ness, a fundamental human condition.

Theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) wrote how communion with God can grow out of solitude:

We have seen that we can never reach the innermost center of another being. We are always alone, each for himself. But we can reach it in a movement that rises first to God and then returns from Him to the other self. In this way man’s aloneness is not removed, but taken into the community with that in which the centers of all beings rest, and so into community with all of them. Even love is reborn in solitude. For only in solitude are those who are alone able to reach those from whom they are separated. Only the presence of the eternal can break through the walls that isolate the temporal from the temporal. One hour of solitude may bring us closer to those we love than many hours of communication. We can take them with us to the hills of eternity.

And perhaps when we ask -- what is the innermost nature of solitude? we should answer -- the presence of the eternal upon the crowded roads of the temporal. It is the experience of being alone but not lonely, in view of the eternal presence that shines through the face of the Christ, and that includes everybody and everything from which we are separated. In the poverty of solitude all riches are present. Let us dare to have solitude -- to face the eternal, to find others, to see ourselves.

The concept that God is present in the sacrament of marriage, in the church ("when two or three are gathered together"), and other human relationships is found in the Bible.

Paul Tillich's insight is that God breaks down the alone-ness that separates one from another and is the means by which human beings achieve true communion with Him and with each other.