Solitude and Community

I'm rediscovering how much I love solitude and starting to understand how beautiful and necessary community is.

We spent the last week of classes out in Antalya with a couple who have a retreat type property out in the woods. The topic for the week was prayer and the idea was (for one week) to follow some of the monastic principles of living together--working, eating, playing and praying together, interspersed with times of silent and isolated contemplation. The space was ideal, a warm country style home with a large round table for meals, a firepit outside, fruit trees and a garden, woods all around, as well as a very small rustic cabin this couple had built for the purpose of meditation.

It was a fabulous week.

Seated in that dim cabin with a candle, listening to the rain outside and the birds, feeling the gentle wind blowing through the cracks, smelling the scent of pines, chatting with my maker...I came alive again. How I missed that. Another time was spent in an isolated spot amongst the pines with the sun shining down on me through the gaps in the trees, birds still singing, the smell of the woods engulfing me, and I just stood--arms outstretched--and worshiped.

As we read liturgical prayers together morning, noon and night in unison, did chores together, made jam and/or hung drain pipes together, ate meals together at that round table, worshiped together, cooked together, sat and laughed around the fire together, shared and learned together...I also came alive. How I long for comfortable, embracing, genuine community.

This evening I've had the privilege of having the house to myself and have enjoyed much needed alone time with my beloved, and now I'm anticipating tomorrow morning when I will get to share it with the others in our morning worship time and hearing from them of their experience of Him...

This is our faith--deep, intimate and intensely personal but equally so it is shared, diversified and enriched within a greater whole.