Open to Judgement by Williams Rowan;

Author:Williams, Rowan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Darton, Longman & Todd LTD
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about.

(‘East Coker’, 118–121)

Any culture which is terrified – as ours is – of silence and aloneness is one in which the sense of human reality, human truth, is being eroded. I am not talking about ‘the erosion of individual liberties in collectivist societies’; that is a complaint normally uttered by those who are most terrified of the real freedom of solitude, who need society for their audience or their victim or both. No, this is something that affects equally the so-called ‘collectivist’ societies and the so-called ‘free’ societies. Neither kind can afford to trust solitude. Indeed, in one sense, no society at all could completely trust it because it puts them all in question. And no society can eradicate it so long as human beings continue to talk to each other and love each other, because, as we have seen, it is in the middle of intimacy that the reality of loneliness most dramatically appears.

Solitude teaches us about our truth; but it teaches us too that our truth is not our own. It is, as I have said, ‘behind and beyond’, not at our disposal, not to be grasped by us. And if we see Jesus as the ultimately lonely person because of his complete embodying of a truth that can’t be grasped, we are driven to say finally that he is the ‘home’ of all our truth, our reality. To put our loneliness next to the loneliness of God-in-Christ is to see our truth in the light of what the truth is like – the truth which is (who is) irreducibly not of this world. And that is disturbing, yes; yet it is also a ground of hope. We cannot grasp or plan or organise our reality, but it is somehow in the hands of God. There is, behind and beyond, someone who not only sees and grasps, but accepts and holds our reality. This is not even to argue a doctrine of providence – God plans, even when we can’t – only a belief that we are not deserted by our unknown God, even when all our nameable and domesticated gods forsake us. When all our words vanish, the Word remains. In our silence and empty fear, the reality of our grounding in God and our acceptance by God can make itself known.

This will happen only if we let it, of course, hence the importance of not glossing over and trivialising our loneliness but facing it and feeling it. If we can trust that truth has a home, an objective place in the all-perceiving mercy of God, then our hidden life is ‘hidden with Christ in God’. What’s more, if I can see my reality thus, I can see yours and everyone’s in the same way. I shall see your elusiveness, your mystery, your terrible singleness and solitude.

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