Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
An Assignment for Lent: Learn the Difference Between Solitude and Being Alone

An Assignment for Lent: Learn the Difference Between Solitude and Being Alone

Last updated on: March 1, 2022 at 7:30 am by Vance Morgan

An Assignment for Lent: Learn the Difference Between Solitude and Being Alone 2022-03-01T07:29:26-04:00 Vance Morgan

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to yourself. Michel de Montaigne

Tommorow is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Whoopee. I freely confess that Lent is my least favorite season of the liturgical year. Over the past several years I have regularly posted something like “Why Lent is a Bad Idea” on this blog around Ash Wednesday. I have struggled not so much with the season, but rather with what Lent seems to represent for many people. It often is little more than a forty-day exercise in playing at getting serious about one’s faith. One can easily pray more, study more, try to be a better person, and generally try to be more “Christian” for a limited amount of time.

Over the past couple of liturgical cycles, Lent has become more meaningful to me as I have shifted from thinking of it as a “religious” season to thinking of it as a season of inwardness, the sort of thing that is healthy for a human being to engage in regardless of religious commitment (or lack of same). A helpful guide for this has been Dietrich Bonhoeffer, especially the letters he wrote from prison before his execution by the Nazis, letters in which he explored what a “religionless Christianity” might look like as traditional religious trappings and accoutrements become more and more meaningless. Bonhoeffer wrote that

Our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as people who manage our lives without God . . . The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually . . . By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities.

What if the life of faith was lived in such a key of “this-worldliness,” reflecting on, struggling with, focusing in a centered way on “life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities,” with “no consolation” to ease such a time of attention? What, in other words, might faith without religion look like? Lent strikes me as a perfect time to consciously explore this.

Regular readers of this blog know that the 16th century philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne has over the years become an important influence on both my teaching and my understanding of what a balanced and effective human life in Morgan form might look like. In his essay “On solitude,” Montaigne writes about the importance of taking ownership of oneself rather than seeking happiness externally.

Montaigne reports that “Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels. ‘I should think not,’ Socrates said; ‘he took himself along with him.’” As we might say today, “your giant goes with you wherever you go.” As a dedicated time for inwardness, Lent might be an opportunity to become acquainted with the person I often seek to avoid at all costs—myself. Montaigne’s essays are one of the first extended efforts in self-investigation that we have in the Western tradition—essays that had a direct and measurable influence in the next generation on one of the other great investigators of the human condition in the Western tradition: William Shakespeare. Both Montaigne and Shakespeare were thoroughly secular writers; although Montaigne never left his native Catholicism, it was more of a social than religious commitment for him.

But there is something sacred, if I may use that “religious” word, about careful and honest self-reflection and analysis. Later in “On solitude,” Montaigne writes something that has concerned my students greatly when I assign this essay in class, but strikes me as worth taking very seriously:

We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.

Montaigne was very influenced by Stoicism early in his writing career; this passage reflects that influence. The Stoics advise us to carefully distinguish between those things that are within our power and those that are not, then to focus our attention and energies on those things that are in the first category. And other people, even those whom we love the most, are definitely not within our power. The ancient Stoic philosopher Epictetus puts it this way:

When you kiss your child or wife, say that you are kissing a human being; then, should they die, you will not be distressed . . . It is foolish to wish that your children and your wife and your friends should live forever, for you are wishing for things to be in your power which are not, and wishing for what belongs to others to be your own.

Not surprisingly, my students interpret such passages as saying that no one should ever fall in love, that one should never give oneself completely to another, and that Montaigne’s and Epictetus’ family/friend relationships must have been cool and distant, at best.

Maybe, but not necessarily. The romantic view of love is that the lover is “completed” by the beloved, that each person is incomplete without the other. The Stoic perspective, rather, is that each person must be an individual, even in the most intimate of relationships. More bluntly, even those most deeply in love should not “need” each other in order to be complete. As Jean-Paul Sartre said in a twentieth-century version of the Stoic point, one should never become so attached to any one thing—including another person—that the loss of that thing would lead to one’s own destruction.

Jeanne and I have for years had a good-natured disagreement about which of us will die first. Neither of us wants to outlast the other. From my end, at least, this is because I’m not sure who or what I would be without the person with whom I’ve been and whom I have loved for over three decades. And that, Montaigne and Epictetus suggest, is something that I might want to pay attention to.

Consider again the end of Montaigne’s insight above. “We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.” No one, even the most naturally introverted person (as I am), wants to be alone. But there is a difference between being alone and solitude—it is the latter that Montaigne is advocating. The “back shop” of solitude is where the hard work of figuring out who I am takes place, apart from my profession, my relationships, my social status, my race, my gender—all of the things out of which most of us weave our “selves.” Who am I, apart from all of that? If I can’t answer that question, I have work to do. Regardless of one’s religious or faith commitments (or lack of same), Lent is a great time to work on it.

The goal is what Montaigne describes at the opening of this essay: “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to yourself.” I’m almost 66 years old, and I’m not sure that I even know exactly what that means—but I’m committed to a Lenten exploration of this and related matters. Stay tuned.

Previous Post

February 27, 2022

Stop, Look, and Listen: A Transfiguration Sunday Reflection

Next Post

March 3, 2022 What if Jesus Turned the Stones into Bread?

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abortion Advent AI Angels Artificial intelligence atheism attention baptism Baptists beauty belief Benedictines Bible bicycling Big Bird books Bovina Camaldoli hermitage Canada Catholicism cats certainty change Christianity Christmas Collegeville Covid-19 creativity Development of Western Civilization dogs doubt Easter Enneagram Epiphany Episcopal ethics Eucharist evil extroverts Facebook faith family fear flowers forgiveness freedom friends God goodness grace happiness heaven hell history Holy Spirit Holy Week hope human nature humility humor idolatry incarnation introverts irreverence Islam Jeanne Jesus Joe Biden joy Judaism justice Kamala Harris knowledge Lent listen literature liturgy love Marsue Memorial Day miracles movies music mystery mythology NPR Old Testament optimism paradox peace Penguins philosophy piano podcast politics power prayer Protestantism Providence College Religion Rhode Island sabbatical sacrament science seeing silence Simone Weil Socrates soul sports St. John's College stories suffering tattoo teaching technology television theology thinking time tolerance transcendence travel trees trust truth Uncategorized Vermont wisdom wonder writing

Select a Month May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz