The Body of Work

Tag: god

  • Exceptionally Good at Being Alone

    I am exceptionally good at being alone.

    For a long time, I assumed this meant I was also good at solitude.

    Then I read Henri Nouwen’s The Way of the Heart, and he created a problem.

    The solitude of the desert fathers and mothers was not simply privacy. They weren’t trying to get away from people so they could hear themselves think. They withdrew from distraction to become available to God.

    That distinction landed hard.

    It is entirely possible to be alone and remain completely occupied with oneself.

    Thoughts. Feelings. Ruminations. Sensations. Plans. Questions. Self-examination. The endless internal assessment of how everything is going.

    No one is interrupting.

    But neither are we necessarily listening.

    We can become the loudest person in our own solitude.

    The Desert Is Not a Private Room

    Modern solitude is often understood as time and space for ourselves.

    Privacy. Restoration. Thinking. Processing. Making things. Getting away from demands. Being left alone long enough to hear ourselves again.

    There is real value in all of this.

    But Nouwen’s desert tradition asks something different of solitude.

    The desert is a place of conversion.

    The distractions are removed, but attention does not simply turn inward. It remains aimed toward God.

    Stay put.

    Refuse distraction.

    Let God address you.

    That is considerably less productive than much of what passes for solitude now.

    There may be nothing to solve. Nothing to produce. Nothing to understand about ourselves before the hour is over.

    We remain available.

    And that means solitude can become uncomfortable precisely when it begins doing its work.

    When Solitude Becomes Self-Sufficiency

    There is another difficulty here.

    The practices that appear most spiritual can become remarkably good hiding places.

    Privacy can become withdrawal.

    Discipline can become control.

    Silence can become insulation.

    Solitude can become a beautifully furnished bunker.

    None of these things necessarily look unhealthy from the outside. They may look peaceful, disciplined, contemplative, even wise.

    That is what makes the distinction difficult.

    Self-sufficiency can dress itself up as spirituality.

    A person can become extremely skilled at creating the conditions of peace while becoming less willing to be disturbed, less willing to need anyone, less available to the demands of love, and increasingly convinced that the absence of friction is evidence of formation.

    The desert fathers and mothers seem to have expected almost the opposite.

    Solitude was not where the self became more protected.

    It was where the self became available for conversion.

    What Comes Back From the Desert?

    This gives solitude a surprisingly practical test.

    If solitude is formative, eventually there should be evidence somewhere other than solitude.

    Not merely an insight.

    Not another page of writing.

    Not a profound realization.

    Something should become different in ordinary life.

    Are we more free?

    More loving?

    More capable of choosing rather than reacting?

    More able to remain present when another person is inconvenient?

    More willing to tell the truth?

    Less governed by the need to control what happens next?

    The test of solitude may not be how peaceful we become while nobody is bothering us.

    The test may be what happens when somebody does.

    A Different Measure

    I have started using one question:

    Did my solitude make me more free, more loving, more able to choose, or did it make me smaller and avoidant?

    It is an uncomfortable measure because it does not automatically reward silence.

    A peaceful afternoon can fail it.

    An uncomfortable period of prayer can pass it.

    Privacy can restore us or conceal us.

    Silence can make us available to God or leave us alone with an increasingly sophisticated version of ourselves.

    Perhaps this is why the desert tradition understood solitude as a place of conversion rather than escape.

    The point was never simply to become good at being alone.

    The question is what kind of person comes back.

    How would you know that your solitude was a place of conversion? What changed? What came back from the desert?

  • The Body Knew First

    For a long time, I thought good decisions came from thinking harder.

    Gather more information. Analyze the situation. Consider every angle. Wait for certainty.

    Looking back, I noticed something unsettling.

    My body often knew long before I was willing to admit it.

    A tightening jaw, a held breath, an unease I couldn’t explain, a quiet no.

    For years, I had a simple explanation for these reactions.

    Anxiety.

    That explanation was convenient because it kept the focus on me. If the feeling was anxiety, then the problem was my interpretation, my fear, my sensitivity, my wounds.

    I didn’t have to ask whether the feeling might be responding to something real.

    What I rarely considered was that my body might be witnessing something my conscious mind was not yet ready to admit.

    Again and again, I treated these signals as obstacles to overcome rather than information to consider.

    I trusted explanations more than sensations, stories more than signals, and hope more than reality.

    I assumed the signal was a cue to gather more data. To wait, investigate further, withhold judgment until more evidence arrived.

    Sometimes that is wise.

    But looking back, I can see that I often misunderstood the nature of the signal itself. The signal was not pointing toward the data. The signal was the data.

    The tightening fist. The shifting in my balance. The sense of alarm. The difficult no.

    These were not distractions from reality. They were reality arriving through a different channel.

    Not conclusions, nor certainty. But rather, information. And information I repeatedly ignored.

    Part of the work of Secret Places became learning to stop arguing with those signals.

    Not because the body is God, not because every feeling is true, and not because intuition is infallible.

    But because my body had been recording reality long before I had language for what it was witnessing.

    The body was not the authority. But it was a witness.

    And often it arrived first.

    Many of the things I eventually admitted intellectually had already been registered physically.

    My body knew before I did.

    Listening wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was obeying.

    What truth might your body already know?

    A charcoal drawing of a figure kneeling and holding his head by Wendy Sinclair
    WS/2022

  • The Places Are Not Secret Because They Are Hidden

    “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”
    — Matthew 6:6

    This was one of the first passages of Scripture I spent time with after becoming an apprentice of Jesus.

    At first, I understood it literally. I thought the secret place was a location.

    A room with a closed door. A private place to pray. A quiet corner where nobody could see me.

    I looked around my condo and wondered where that place might be. A chair. The edge of my bed. The floor beside the window. Somewhere set apart from the rest of life.

    And I think that’s partly what Jesus meant.

    But over time, I discovered that the room was not the point.

    The relationship was.

    The secret place was not a room. It was a protected relationship with God. The room simply made that relationship easier to hear.

    The more time I spent there, the more I noticed that the relationship seemed to follow me. It appeared in my kitchen, on rooftops, in church pews, on the subway, beside lakes, on long walks, and in the quiet moments between ordinary responsibilities.

    The geography kept changing but the relationship remained.

    What surprised me most was that protecting this relationship came with costs. Not dramatic costs, but ordinary ones:

    Less performance.

    Less visibility.

    Less explaining.

    Less turning every meaningful experience into something public.

    Some things stopped becoming content, and moments stopped becoming stories. My experiences were allowed to remain between God and me.

    At first that felt like loss. Then it began to feel like freedom.

    Because the reward turned out not to be recognition, certainty, productivity, or even insight.

    The reward was the relationship itself.

    A quieter nervous system and a sweeter, slower pace.

    The miracle was the feeling of being less divided. The growing sense that I no longer needed to have a witness in order for something to be real.

    The places were never secret because they were hidden.

    They were secret because they were protected.

    What in your life deserves protection?

    A photo of footprints in the snow leading to the trees.

  • The February Silent Retreat

    There was nothing to fix.
    That’s the first thing that became clear.

    Not because everything in my life is perfect, but because the moment I removed the noise, there was nothing inside me that needed managing. No urgency, no pressure, no demand to become something else.

    Just space.

    Time changed first. Or maybe it disappeared. There was no clock, no watch, no anticipation. My body knew when to eat. Light told me it was morning. The dishes told me it was lunch. The day unfolded without asking anything from me.

    I wasn’t trying to get anywhere.

    Mary Oliver writes about “the lovely meaninglessness of time,” and I understood it immediately. Not as an idea, but as a condition. Time didn’t need to mean anything. It didn’t need to produce anything. It was just something I was inside of.

    And inside that, something else became obvious.

    I am sound just as I am.

    That line sounds simple, but it didn’t come from affirmation. It came from the absence of everything that usually interrupts it. No music, no input, no conversation, no devices, no performance. Without those, there was nothing left to argue with.

    There was no gap to close.

    The quiet didn’t make me better. It revealed what was already there when I stopped interfering.

    The biggest shift wasn’t emotional. It was structural.

    I stopped asking, “What should I do with this day?” and started noticing that the day didn’t require anything from me at all. I could sit. I could walk. I could write. I could do nothing.

    There was no prize for doing more.
    There was no consequence for doing less.

    There was just life, happening at the pace it actually happens.

    At some point, I realized how much of my normal life is built around unnecessary intensity. Not crisis, not chaos in the obvious sense, but a constant low-grade pressure to move, respond, produce, optimize.

    And I don’t want that anymore.

    It’s not necessary.
    It’s noise.

    When the noise drops, something else becomes audible. Not louder, just clearer. Signal doesn’t need to fight for attention. It’s already there.

    And underneath all of it, something even simpler:

    I am home.

    Not in a place. Not in a future version of my life. Just here.

    Mary Oliver writes, “Whenever I get home… somebody loves me there.”

    That’s what this felt like.

    Not something I created. Something I finally stopped interrupting.

    What might become audible if the noise were allowed to leave?

    The sitting room at Loretto Maryholme Retreat centre, wicker chairs and window showing the lake and sunset at dusk