hermitage

friday.night.thoughts:

my own voice from the practice room rings in my ears as i sit in the student union, one girl and her computer and cell phone and books and pens and cup of tea at a big empty table, having passed up one too many chances to go out or hang out with people tonight. no art show. no coffee shop. no library study buddies.

so i'm thinking about my music, from Samuel Barber's 20th century art song cycle, "The Hermit Songs", i sing one piece about ominous church bells, one piece about a saint's vision of nursing the baby Jesus at her breast, and one piece called "The Desire for Hermitage". ah, to be all alone, in a little cell, with nobody near me...

i get so anti-social sometimes. and i think that has to be okay. probably an indication that i need some intentional space-time of solitude with God, to get right with the world again, to make things make sense again.

because really, as Henri Nouwen says so piercingly in his book "The Return of the Prodigal Son", I am God's home! Jesus says, "Anyone who loves me will keep my word and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make our home in him." ...To make our home where God has made his, this is the great spiritual challenge...Coming home and staying there where God dwells...that was, indeed, the journey I most feared...when would I be ready to accept that kind of love? ...I am called to enter into the inner sanctuary of my own being where God has chosen to dwell. The only way to that place is prayer, unceasing prayer. Many struggles and much pain can clear the way, but I am certain that only unceasing prayer can let me enter it.

prayer. i wish i could just take a week, a month, a year, and be a hermit, practicing prayer, unceasing prayer. but i guess the secluded hermitage is not my calling right now. right now i must live in the open spaces, the mingling crowds, the testing fires, the betraying kisses, the spread tables, the clinking glasses, the ringing harmonies, the gritty towels, the clasping hands and knocking knees and penetrating eyes and discerning ears of community. however much i want to run from it sometimes...i know there is no other true vocational option for me, but to find God's home in me; to love and serve the people he has made; and to learn to receive their love and service as gifts from him. from the Father in Rembrandt's 'Return of the Prodigal Son' painting that lives in the Hermitage in Russia. he is just as present in the multitude as in the solitude, in the din of communication as in the silence of stillness, in the busyness as in the restfulness, in the chaos as in the peace. because wherever i am...there he is. wow. sounds so simple, but so easy for me to forget.

the.painting.

so. hermitage. as with many things, i go through a rollercoaster of how much i love/like/need/hate/want the idea to be reality. for tonight, in some little, almost trivial ways, it has been my reality, even though murmurs of conversation drift around me from neighboring tables, little islands of whirring, ticking, talking, working minds and mouths inside this dome-shaped architecture. ah, to be all alone... but i don't need to. no Lord, all i need is to

be.
with.

YOU.