Spontaneously, each of us gets used to living isolated in his cell with no obstacles to his desires, no one else’s thoughts to contend with, no need to adapt opinions differing from one’s own. This results in a tendency for each individual to be enclosed in himself. At every level, we remain confined to the limits of our own little world. We are absorbed in our own ideas; everything is arraigned according to our personal tastes; we have our own system for absolutely everything: it is a sort of systematic organization of egoism in which we risk being engulfed.

This results almost automatically in our putting on a sort of mask when we are with others, so as to protect our little treasures. We become incapable of ever meeting anyone else. Our deepest self is carefully sheltered; it has not the slightest concern, nor the slightest desire, to come into the presence of the deepest self of our brother. What complications that would lead to! So there is a risk of relations remaining permanently on a very superficial level, with mutual agreement carefully to avoid annoying one another. I dare say the bond of charity is not actually violated, but how weak and superficial it can become, impaired by so many omissions and negligence.

This is a fact of experience, and obvious to all of us if we are lucid enough to look at what is happening within ourselves and around us. It is easy to draw the conclusions for our interior life. What meaning can our prayer have in such a setting? What real encounter can there be between the Word of God, the eternal Word, and someone who habitually lives shut away like this in such a well-camouflaged house?

Don’t think that I am deliberately exaggerating the severity of the temptations that will assail you in your cell: it is of utmost importance for us to realize that we have to go beyond the human satisfaction that solitude gives us in order to open ourselves up completely to the light and truth which are not to be found in ourselves, but in forgetting and abandoning the self. It is only then that we can start speaking of solitude for God. ‘The Wound of Love’ A. Carthusian

(1985) A Carthusian choir monk sits alone, reading in his cell, at St. Hugh’s Charterhouse monastery in Sussex, England. Religion News Service file photo by Colin Horsman