Seminary Life: Transforming Loneliness into Solitude
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April 5, 2022A few weeks before returning to Toronto from my summer break in Vancouver, I was suddenly struck with a sad realization: not only was I about to leave my Vancouver friends and family but that this was my last year in Toronto before leaving for Redemptorist Novitiate in July 2022.
To make matters worse, if God continues to call me towards religious life and priesthood, that will mean moving to San Antonio for Theology. I suddenly felt like I was getting further and further away from home—like I was slowly drifting away from everyone I loved.
From that moment, a subtle yet unmistakable angst and fear settled and made its home in the corners of my heart like the way an incoming storm envelops the sky. This feeling would linger for another 6 months as I fell in and out of an endless cycle of evasion, distraction, and despair. Thankfully, God’s grace, through prayer, community and spiritual direction, broke through and allowed me to name the darkness I was wrestling with: loneliness.
Matsuo Bashō, recognized as the greatest master of Haiku, wrote his most famous haikus about loneliness or what is sabishi 寂 , which commonly meant one who is lonely or is wanting of company. For Bashō, however, this had a deeper meaning. Many of Bashō's famous poems of sabishi often had similar drafts but instead of the word sabishi, it was replaced with the word shizuka 静か which means "quiet", "peaceful", or "calm”:
Sabishisa ya Loneliness—Iwa ni Shimikomu Sinking into the rocks,Semi no Koe A cicada's cry.Shizukasa ya Peaceful—Iwa ni Shimikomu Sinking into the rocks,Semi no Koe A cicada's cry.
Bashō's notion of sabishi conveys a duality between loneliness and solitude like two sides of a coin. As the first haiku suggests, the fragile and fading cry of a cicada in the presence of the immense and timeless majesty of a mountain conveys both how seemingly small and insignificant we are in the large expanse of the universe and the deep existential loneliness this evokes. However, this sense of aloneness can also be peaceful, calming, and serene, like the silence which washes over and trickles down the hidden crevices of the heart.
In a word, sabishi is both a feeling of the deep ache of loneliness and the sublime sense of peace and serenity which aloneness can bring us not in spite of being alone but because one is alone. John Mark Falkenhain, in "How We Love," describes solitude as “the space in which we meet God alone and come to understand just how deeply we are known by him and how completely we are loved by him.”
The past 6 months have taught that when the ache of loneliness begins to rise to the surface, rather than running away from it, I ask the Holy Spirit for courage to face it head on, to help me “sit in it” so to speak, and to wait on the Lord until He reveals his Face in the darkness.
I wait until I am carried to a place of solitude. This is at the heart of sabishi: loneliness is not the end but the beginning of a journey that carries me to God’s loving embrace. Loneliness is the passage to the secret chambers of the Father’s Heart.
(Mark Suezo is studying for the Province of Canada.)
