3 The Virtue of the Hermit is Silence
It’s of the essence of the hermit life as I see it that he is somebody who has found a lot of time and a lot of space in their life, both internally and externally, which means finding some silence because it’s there that you may have contact with God. If you are ever busy you will never hear this call. The hermit is one who has discovered the importance of silence and has ordered his life accordingly. The hermit sees silence as the key to the spiritual life and he wishes to share that with others. The difficulty most people have is that their lives are cluttered up, they are so busy all the time, if they’re not working they’re entertaining themselves, and therefore they are always occupied, and they never get beneath the surface, and they live out their lives in a most superficial way, without realising their true call to holiness.
The hermit life is a life of simplicity: there is a great clarity to life when it’s lived in this way. An outer simplicity corresponds to an inner silence, but there is a tendency to accumulation in life, and it’s important to see how detrimental this is to the spiritual life. We can accumulate things both materially and intellectually, and it requires a great vigilance to avoid this, but a life lived in simplicity gives witness to something beyond this passing world and its pleasures.
The great virtue of the hermit life is silence. Because it is at the time when the past and its accumulations which constitute the self has come to an end that the life of God is born. It is important to see that the silence I am talking about is not an absence of sound so much as an absence of self. At that time of self-emptying God is able to work through you, you have opened your heart and can be led by the Spirit.
It’s an essential part of the hermit life as I see it, that you get time alone abiding in silence, because in the silence you can go deeper, and hopefully you can find out if and where you are obstructing this ability to give birth to God. It’s in the silence that the chains of action and reaction which keep you enthralled, can be broken through, and perhaps then you will go deeper and look into the things that are really guiding your life, which is your conditioning, your desire for pleasure and your need to avoid pain. In the silence you will find that you are not self-sufficient, you will find that you are completely and radically poor. The hermit is one who has seen this and not run away from it, not denied it. Self-knowledge is always painful, but it’s that that brings self to an end, and it may happen at that point that love will be born in your life.