Wilderness.
“Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.”
When I was in college, I went a little crazy.
In my third year at my university, I decided to move out to a studio apartment on the “bad” side of Santa Cruz, with a kitchen that was slightly wider than my body, a bathroom that was somehow bigger than the kitchen, and two hundred square feet of carpet to call my own, where I often stretched out on the floor and stared at the ceiling as an exercise in meditation. I did this because I realized halfway through my second year that I was an introvert, and without having a space to call my own, I would walk or bus aimlessly around the town just to get a quiet moment to myself.
But when you live by yourself, you don’t have to maintain social standards. So after a while, you start getting up late and going to bed late; your only form of human contact is through instant messenger or the phone; and the only time that you leave the apartment, apart from classes, is when you have to wash your clothes. (And even then, you start avoiding eye contact, concentrating intently on separating the colors from the whites.)
After about the tenth meal by yourself, you start making up conversations in your head.
After the fifteenth, you regress back to imaginary friends.
After the twentieth, you just stop talking.
It was around this time that I found myself grappling with this unreal sense of loneliness. Humans just aren’t meant to be alone. It’s not in our design. Even if you’re an introvert, you still need human contact—you need people to talk to, argue with, eat meals with, because we’re all meant to live in community. Deep down inside, we’re hardwired for some sort of human interaction. I started becoming acutely aware of those around me who were starving for conversation.
One neighbor who lived by himself began striking up conversations with me when I went to go take out the trash every so often, when the towers of pizza boxes were dangerously at risk of falling over and entombing me in my sleep. One time, he pointed to the unit next to mine and said, “Yeah, that guy died in his sleep and we didn’t know about it till three days later, when the smell started seeping through the walls.”
I almost threw up.
Everyone goes through the wilderness.
It’s this period when you are subjected to some of the most trying and difficult circumstances of your life. Sometimes you wonder whether it will ever end. (It does.) I started realizing that even though I was used to being alone, and that I even somewhat thrived in periods of isolation, there was a deeper sense of loneliness and isolation that bubbled out of me during this period. I think it was during this time that my prayer life began to take shape. I was so lonely that I started talking to Jesus. No kidding. Actually talking to Jesus, at first in my head, and then out loud. On the bus, in the car, walking through the forest to get to my class, I would have these full-blown, fascinating conversations with Jesus. In Santa Cruz, of all places.
The Jesus I read about and learned about in elementary school became a real person to me. He had real thoughts, a good sense of humor, a way of being stern when I found myself unable to let go of my prejudices.
My biggest epiphany during my first wilderness season is that God is eager to speak to us. He looks forward to communicating with humanity. He is, after all, a relational God. The problem is not that God does not speak; the problem is that I have difficulty making time to listen. And in that year of loneliness, I found myself silenced—enough for God to finally speak.
On the weekends I drove down from school to San Diego, spending anywhere from eight to ten hours by myself in the car. I would watch the sun set over the hills. It was a wonder to me—the way that the earth was arranged, the smell of the fields driving down the 5, the way Los Angeles looks at night when you’re flying down the freeway and the streetlights start glimmering in anticipation of dusk.
After the first two hours I got tired of listening to the radio and the endless search for intelligible stations, so I would often turn off the radio and ride the car in silence. At first, I resisted the invitation to quiet my thoughts, longing for some sort of distraction from my surroundings, but eventually I could feel God sitting in the car with me with a bemused look at my internal struggle. And then I said, "Speak."
And in those moments, too, God spoke to me.
My soul was being set free.