Jesus walked this lonesome valley, he had to walk it by himself.
Oh, nobody else could walk it for him, he had to walk it by himself.
We must walk this lonesome valley, we have to walk it by ourselves.
Oh, nobody else can walk it for us, we have to walk it by ourselves.
Somewhere in Luther’s table talk, he mentioned that each of us have to do our own faith-ing, just as each of us have to do our own dying. Whatever Luther said, this will be my introduction to what I will call “aloneness,” and I will extend that word to mean “the intentional living of our solitary contemplative inquiries.”
“Contemplative inquiry” is the conscious viewing of the contents of our own consciousness. No one else can do this for us. “Contemplative inquiry” is also our thoughtfulness about these inward contents. This is essentially a solitary practice even though it can go on in group settings led by experienced persons.
For example, a contemporary Vipassana Buddhist retreat focuses strongly on a personally practiced meditation. This solitary practice entails getting used to a vibrant type of aloneness. This is quite different from a self-absorbed U.S. president rising at three in the morning to rage in his current defendedness and write tweets castigating his critics.
A Vipassana meditation practice focusses on the seemingly boring practice of carefully watching our own breathing—in-breath, pause, out-breath, pause for 45 minutes or more at a time, perhaps followed by a period of solitary walking, focusing on each step. What is going on here is an inquiry into the reality of our actual lives beyond the workings of our busy minds and beyond the always present impulses to think and do our established habits of living. This practice can be understood to be religious in the sense that it seeks to allow the happening of a realistic type of enlightenment of what it actually means to be a conscious human being. The interest that sources this practice is human authenticity. In doing this practice, we are not defending our current sense of self, we are watching those defenses come up and thereby preparing ourselves to be aware of the real me as something wondrously opposed to the self I think I am, wish I was, or hope to be.
We don’t have to invent or produce the reality of our own authenticity. Authenticity is simply Reality being Reality. It takes no effort to be authentic. It takes a sort of willing surrender not to be false. Meditation is a discipline of surrender that allows our authenticity to emerge into awareness from where it has been hidden among the replacements for authenticity that we have invented, defended, clung on to, and presented to the world.
Jesus practiced another solitary practice he called “prayer.” In Mark’s portrait of Jesus we see him going apart for hours of solitary prayer. This intense need for solitude dramatizes Jesus’ humanity, as well as our own.