COVID-19 and the Contemplative Life

Yesterday I didn’t talk to a single human in person. A video call with a friend at 8pm was the first time I had spoken, except for singing morning and evening prayer, and saying the responses to live streamed Mass twelve hours earlier. The sound of my own voice surprised me.

My university classes are online. My internship is online. Church is online. Almost all of my friendships are conducted by phone call and messenger. My birthday on Monday will most likely be entirely online (talk about a Digital Age (cue pity laughter)).

Australia isn’t in lockdown (yet), but already I have no reason to leave the house apart from exercise and seeing my boyfriend while I still can. Days once filled with getting places and doing things and seeing people and planning the future – days once spent aching for a morning at home reading a good book – have been downscaled, simplified, and stripped back to the bare essentials. No volunteering. No religious commitments. No travel. No parties. No gym. No cafes. No cuddling friends’ babies.

Simplicity. Solitude. Stillness. Silence.

The combination of living these things now, and imagining what it will be like to live them for weeks on end is enough to drive a girl crazy. I’m not lonely yet – but I’m already anxious about what the loneliness is going to feel like. I’m not bored yet – but I’m already feeling purposeless envisaging the shape of that boredom.

For me and so many others, identity and purpose is usually found in busyness. The going-places-and-doing-things-and-seeing-people-and-planning-the-future is what keeps us sane and seems to ground us. Stripping back and slowing down is terrifying, because we feel like we’re losing something vital.

Forced into our most basic version of reality, we realise that we are a kind of naked. Nothing is covering up our barest identity. We don’t have much left to hide behind. We can’t even mentally escape into future plans, because none of us knows what the world is going to look like even next week. We have the choice either to confront everything that we were ignoring and pushing aside under the mask of busyness, or to numb ourselves with distractions.

We’re vulnerable.

Obviously we are vulnerable to illness, to grief, and to economic difficulty. But even without those things, each of us has now been asked to enter the vulnerable territory of seeing who we are in the emptiness.

We are vulnerable in encountering our own fears, our loneliness, and our powerlessness in the face of international crisis.

We are vulnerable as we begin to wonder how fragile and shallow our ‘busy’ lives have been.

We are vulnerable in knowing there is very little we can take for granted or control – maybe not even ourselves.

We are vulnerable in experiencing tangibly that we have little to offer God or others. Our hopes of something great and glorious are downscaled; our opportunities to serve have been taken away one by one.

What’s left?

Simplicity. Solitude. Stillness. Silence.

Funnily enough, at other times these have been things I have pursued wholeheartedly. In discerning Benedictine religious life, I was deeply drawn to a lifestyle structured around contemplation, a lifestyle marked in large part by emptiness.

In my time at the monastery, I began to realise that Emptiness makes room for God. Emptiness lets us hear the echoes of our own heartbeat, the ‘deep calling upon deep’ that reveals to us our desires, our wounds, our unique capacity to love Christ and others. Emptiness allows us to see and hear the Lord and the world more clearly.

Emptiness is also a bit like Devil’s Snare. The more you strain and fight against it, the faster and more tightly you feel constricted by it.

Yesterday I faced Emptiness in a panic, wrestling with the anxious feeling that I did not want solitude or simplicity or stillness or silence. I did not want confinement, a life cut off from the world. I didn’t want to confront my own vulnerability, to see that nakedness and feel ashamed of how sad and stressed and powerless I really was.

And I faced a choice: to distract myself or to dive deep?

In the coming weeks we will all face that choice. Emptiness - the contemplative life - is coming to us and calling to us without us ever having asked for it. For some of us, it comes as an old friend – but the kind of friend who interrogates and challenges us so much that we’d often prefer not to hang out with them. For others, the contemplative life is brand new – intriguing, perhaps; terrifying, definitely.

In a monastery you cannot run from yourself. Silence and solitude hold up a mirror in front of you and do not allow you to pass until you have confronted and embraced what you see. You come to understand that until you are capable of loving your own broken soul, you remain unable to truly love others, and merely use them to answer your own question of self-worth.

It strikes me that in this pandemic and particularly in social isolation, there will come a time when we cannot run from ourselves any more. Netflix will only fill the void for so long. Eventually there will be no more distractions to turn to. Eventually we will be forced to confront our nakedness and vulnerability, to begin walking the path of contemplation that emptiness forges for us.

It is not a path we should fear. In turning to the writings of so many voluntary and involuntary contemplatives – Thomas Merton, St Therese of Lisieux, Viktor Frankl, Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum – we find that surrendering to the emptiness brings with it an unparalleled freedom.

Reflecting on 2 Corinthians 6:12, Fr Jacques Philippe writes:

“Very often we feel restricted in our situation, our family, or our surroundings. But maybe the real problem lies elsewhere: in our hearts. There we are restricted, and that is the root of our lack of freedom. If we loved more, love would give our lives infinite dimensions and we would no longer feel hemmed in.” [Interior Freedom, 20-21]

Our movements may be restricted and our exterior freedoms progressively stripped away. We may be forced into a smaller life than we ever hoped to be living. But within that emptiness, there exists the expansive horizons of God’s infinite mercy and our own capacity to become the real image of his Son.

In silence and solitude, in nakedness and vulnerability, there is the chance to encounter within ourselves a happiness and an interior freedom that no virus, no ban, no isolation can take away.

Here in this unchosen confinement, this imposed stillness, this undesired loneliness, “I find life beautiful and I feel free.” (Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life)

Vulnerable as I am to fear and despondency, I am also now more than ever vulnerable to joy. Emptiness has carved out the space for Mercy to meet me and heal wounds. Emptiness has carved out the space for the Lord of Love to teach me again how to love others. Emptiness has carved out a space of listening where I can begin to see beyond the tragedy, beyond the unknowing, to the unshakeable goodness of God who is at work in all things to bring peace and hope.

Friends, don’t be afraid of the loneliness or boredom of these coming weeks. When faced with the choice to distract yourself or to dive deep into the emptiness, let the Lord lead you. He is gentle and trustworthy, and the contemplative life is filled with transformative Grace.

“Peaceful suffering is no longer suffering,” St John-Marie Vianney tells us. To surrender to circumstance with faith, hope, and love is to begin to find true freedom.

AMDG