The pandemic has made us unintentional monastics
We are urged into the desert of retreat, and we are afraid.
Solitude, said Henri Nouwen, is the “furnace of transformation.” A good spiritual director, Nouwen advises us that the place of retreat is the place of struggle, where we fight demons—or, to put it less shockingly, where we can no longer use our compulsions to escape our littleness, our selfishness, or our deaths. The monastic cell is, ultimately, a place of freedom. It is, initially, a place of terror.
It is to this place that we have been called. Some of us to a sort of hermitage, if we live alone; some of us to a kind of monastery, if we live with others. But all of us, usually distracted and pulled by the struggle to make a life, are being implored to go into our home-cells and, for the love of all that is holy, stay there. We now know isolation is no vacation. Unintentional monastics, we are urged into the desert of retreat, and we are afraid.
The problem is not primarily being indoors. Our desert involves our collapsing routines and communities, the constellations by which we navigate our lives. We are, thus, less equipped and more bereft than our predecessors. St. Anthony gave all that he had; our wages are taken from us. St. Anthony arranged for his sister’s well-being; our dependents go into the desert with us. And these communities of dependence can be as much a source of grief as comfort. We have no readily available spiritual director to guide our journey. We have no established communal rule to form us. We have no communities who have experienced this desert to instruct us.
