1) One
At the beginning of this week, as I began to ponder our scripture texts for this morning, I couldn’t get a song out of my head. It’s a popular tune from the late 60’s written by Harry Nilsson. Maybe you’ve heard it. It begins like this:
“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.
Two can be as bad as one, it’s the loneliest number since the number one.”
Catchy little tune. The song expresses a widely held sentiment in our culture: that it’s bad to be alone; it’s bad to be “lonely.” It casts a vision of “the good life” that results from the character of our exterior relationships.
“It’s just no good anymore since you went away . . .” the song goes on to say.
But there’s that sophisticated twist in the second line:
“Two can be as bad as one, it’s the loneliest number since the number one.”
It seems that an external relationship gone wrong can be just “as bad as no relationship at all.
I think Mr. Nilsson had his finger on a central issue of real concern for all of us: From where is derived our identity as human beings? What is the source of meaning in our lives?
Harry and most of our society conceives of these questions and their answers along the lines of external relationships—a human being’s interactions with her environment, and, most importantly, with the other human beings in that environment. Let’s think of that environment as a plane of existence, we’ll call it the “plane of exteriority.” Our society teaches us to find our identities and the meaning of our life by moving around upon this plane. And on this plane of exteriority we can fix points that represent states of relationship. We can label one point, “alone,” and another, “together,” and others that represent everything in between.
The great spiritual traditions, on the other hand, conceive of these questions and their answers very differently. The questions of human identity and the meaning of life cannot be answered without taking into account a different plane of existence that we can call the “plane of interiority.” On this plane we can fix a whole different set of points that relate to our inner life experience. In these traditions, including our own Christian tradition, human beings occupy the space between these planes.
2) Mark 1: 35-37
In St. Mark’s Gospel we just heard, “In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.” Jesus withdraws from the plane of exteriority and settles himself deep within his inner life, on the plane of interiority.
But what happens to those he left back on the exterior? “And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’” I can almost hear Simon singing . . .
“It’s just no good anymore since you went away . . .”
And so what does Simon do but insist that Jesus engages with them the plane of exteriority where “everyone” lives. It’s as though he is oblivious to the larger Reality according to which Jesus conceives of his life. He’s completely unaware that a plane of interiority even exists, it seems. Yet, in Jesus’ Reality, the inner experience gives meaning to the outer experience. One could say that Jesus brings the power of his inner life to bear on all his dealings upon the plane of exteriority.
3) What is interiority?
What is this interiority, this inner experience? What does it look like? What is its nature?
Is it a personality disposition? Is it to be introverted? No, an introverted personality is simply a predilection, a preference, to spend time near this point on the plane of exteriority that we named “alone.”
So what is interiority?
This week was a rich week on the liturgical calendar. On February 1st we celebrated the Feast of St. Brigid of Kildare, one of the patron saints of our community. She is known as the patron saint of many, many things from babies to chicken farmers to dairymaids to blacksmiths to printing presses, but central to her identity among the Irish and throughout history is that she is the keeper of the perpetual flame, the keeper of the hearth. We all understand the symbolic significance of the hearth, even here in Arizona. The hearth represents the center of the home, the seat of intimacy and warmth, of belonging. It doesn’t get more iconic—a family sitting around the fireplace reading, mother knitting a sweater, the cat chasing the ball of yarn, etc.
In the language of interiority, the flame that Brigid tends is the fire of the Divine Presence that burns in each soul—in the hearth of one’s true home, deep within. The inner hearth is the place where we are fully and truly at home with God and God is truly at home with us.
This week we also celebrated the Feast of the Presentation, which is when Mary and Joseph brought the newborn Jesus to the temple and they encounter an old, mystic seer named Simeon.
From the Gospel of St. Luke we read, “Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him what was customary under the law, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying . . .” and he goes on to say what has become one of the primary canticles of the Church, the Nunc dimittis.
We see here a portrait of a man who lived deep within on the plane of interiority. Simeon communicated with God; he was guided and directed by the Holy Spirit in all his dealings upon the plane of exteriority.
Interiority, it seems to me, is an art; it is a capacity to be cultivated. It is learning to find your chair by the hearth. It is learning how to sit there long enough to be warmed by the fire of the Divine indwelling. It is learning to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit and to be guided onto and along the plane of the exterior. In short, interiority is intimacy with God. As St. Augustine of Hippo said, “God is more intimate to me that I am to myself.”
4) Why interiority?
The question before us now is, why would one desire to cultivate this capacity? Why would one want to learn the ‘art of inwardness’, as the late Irish poet and mystic John O’Donahue called it?
First of all, it is the path modeled by Jesus for us as Christians, as we see in today’s gospel. That path is one that engages the exterior plane in light of the interior—to bring the experience of our inner life to bear on all our relationships and all our dealings upon the plane of exteriority.
Secondly, it is by learning this art of inwardness that we are enabled to relate to others in a healthy manner—in a way that transcends our personal programs and agendas. This art teaches us to engage all in light of our deep awareness of God’s love and our true belonging as a member of God’s family seated around the hearth. When we bring that awareness with us onto the plane of exteriority we are freed from the need to grasp for our identity by finding some “us” that can be in opposition to some “them.” And we free others from our need to feel affirmed and approved of and safe because we find the source of our identity and the meaning of our life is on a different plane.
Thirdly, to cultivate interiority is the process of transducing God’s own work into our own work and our own work God’s own work. It is to convert God’s words into our words and our words into God’s words. It is to make God’s own breath our breath and to make our breath God’s own breath. It is the process of becoming fully alive, fully human.
5) How to cultivate interiority
John O’Donahue said that “there is an evacuation of interiority going on in our times,” and that we are in need of “a pedagogy of interiority.” I am far from being a master of the inner life, but I will humbly offer what I understand to be some rudiments of such a pedagogy as modeled by the masters of interiority we’ve looked at today: Jesus, Brigid, and Simeon.
A first rudiment is solitude. “In the morning, while it was still very dark, [Jesus] got up and went out to a deserted place . . .”
A second rudiment is silence—silence of mind and thought. Simple as it sounds, it is not simple at all as anyone who has sat amidst the chatter of the monkey mind can attest.
And a third rudiment is waiting—waiting, like Simeon, for the whisper of the Spirit, for the hope to be revealed. Waiting, like Brigid, by the fire that was tended and kept for lifetimes on end in Kildare.
Solitude. Silence. Waiting.
After some time, when you’ve become acclimated to the plane of interiority by engaging in these rudiments, you might find that Harry Nilsson’s tune is in need of some substantial revisions, because, as it turns out, one is not lonely in the least.
Amen.
