Posted on by Kurt Bodling

asking for stuff in prayer

“Far from ruining the purity of solitary prayer, petition guards and preserves that purity. The solitary, more than anyone else, is always aware of his poverty and of his needs before God. Since he depends directly on God for everything material and spiritual, he has to ask for everything. His prayer is an expression of his poverty. Petition, for him, can hardly become a mere formality, a concession to human custom, as if he did not need God in everything.”

Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1958), page 105.

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holy anticipation

“Silence and solitude are a small anticipation of eternity, when we will be in God’s presence permanently, irradiated by him, the great Silent One, because he is the great lover.”

Sarah, Robert Cardinal with Nicolas Diat. The Power of Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise. With an Afterword by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Translated by Michael J. Miller. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), page 70.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

anchorite, anchoress … what were they?


“Anchorite, anchoress, a person dedicated to a life of strict solitude and penance. Because they are not allowed to leave their dwellings, anchorites often have their cells attached to the church sanctuary so they may receive the Eucharist through a window; their meals are passed through a different window. In addition to a life of prescribed prayer and fasting, these solitaries study, write books, sew clothing for the poor, and offer spiritual advice to visitors through a veiled window. Prophetic witness and compassion characterize this canonical form of consecrated life.”

McBrien, Richard P., ed. The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism. “Anchorite, Anchoress.” (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995) page 44.

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hermits in the world

“So how does semi-eremitism apply to you? In more ways than you might think.


“On a weekly basis you might go to church only on Sundays and holy days. At the very most you might have one other day or evening dedicated to the work of the church. But all through the rest of the week you choose to find your own rhythm between solitude and communion in the family and the work place. You learn this from studying, praying, and practicing. You cultivate the hermit within. You meditate. You cultivate awareness of your relationship to God and all creation. You trust that you cannot wrong. Your inner voice is the voice of the Holy Spirit.”


Talbot, John Michael. The World is My Cloister: Living From the Hermit Within. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010), pages 57-58.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

good nutrition for the soul

“The deeper spiritual life calls us to external and interior silence and solitude that open us to the real abundant life of God. They call us to deny the false nourishment of egotistic junk food and to seek out real spiritual food. This means sometimes cutting ourselves off from the sugar-coated food of the secular world in order to find the real meat of the gospel. The sugar might seem to taste better, but it will kill us when eaten exclusively or to excess.”


Talbot, John Michael. The World is My Cloister: Living From the Hermit Within. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010), page 116.

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a hermit’s dark night

“The solitary easily plunges to a cavern of darkness and of phantoms more horrible and more absurd than the most inane set of conventional social images. The suffering he must then face is neither salutary nor noble. It is catastrophic.”


Thomas Merton. “Notes for a ‘Philosophy of Solitude’.” (1960) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), p. 72.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

commonplace

“My life has always been more or less detached from the life about me. I have not been a hermit, but my temperament and love of solitude, and a certain constitutional timidity and shrinking from all kinds of strife, have kept me in the by-paths rather than on the great highways of life. My talent, such as it is, is distinctly a by-path talent, or at most, a talent for green lanes and sequestered roadsides; but that which has most interested me in life, nature, can be seen from lanes and by-paths better even than from the turnpike, where the dust and noise and the fast driving obscure the view or distract the attention.”

John Burroughs. “The Summit of the Years.” The Writings of John Burroughs. 15 vols. The Riverby Edition. (Boston and NY: Houghton Mifflin Co., The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1904-1913) Vol. 15, pages 1-2.