Invitation to Silence and Solitude

As many know, this past semester, my last one at college, was quite a rough one.  On the verge of a mental breakdown, I begged God for the opportunity to "just get away from it all."  It was at that time that an idea came to me - to go on a road trip come May for a week, after school was done.  I began to make plans for this trip, and part of my plans involved purchasing a bookCD from Amazon that was on sale and that had caught my attention: Invitation to Silence and Solitude by Ruth Haley Barton.

Listening to this book probably changed my life, but in ways that are still intangible and unexplainable.  As I listened to the author explain the essence and substance of these two disciplines, I began to identify the overwhelming desires of my own soul to experience these two things.  I realized that there is nothing more that I desire in life right now than silence and solitude.  I am tired of doing, tired of trying and tired of performing - I want the permission to be, and not for anyone else except for myself and God.

The thing that I liked most about this book, I think, is that the author made it all right for a person to seek out silence and solitude, even at the expense of being anti-social.  She made it all right to be selfish for a time, so that we can feel free to be silent and solitude without having to fulfill any external obligations.  She observed that if we give our souls the care they need, they will start caring again on their own.

The only problem with silence and solitude is that they are all but impossible to obtain in this world that we live in.  My week long road-trip/pilgrimage was such a short time, just a quick dip before I had to get out again and into the real world.  I still find myself longing for silence and solitude, but once again the rhythms of everyday life are obstructing its call.  This book remains a reminder to me that solitude will always be there waiting for me, ready to pick up where we left off, if I am willing to take the plunge into the silence.

  

Recursion

I did the math a couple of weeks ago and realized that if I read a book a week from the unread books pile on my shelves, I would have more than enough books to keep me busy for well over a year. Now that I am finished school, I have decided to begin to make inroads on this pile of books, since I can now indulge in the life of a free woman: I can read what |I want to, when I want to and how I want to.  As a result of this freedom, I have gone through a number of books over the past couple of months that I have been meaning to mention on here, but have neglected to write about thus far.

It is time to rectify this situation.

The first book I picked off my shelf was Recursion by Tony Ballantine.  I had picked up this book a couple of years ago at the sale section of the library for .50 cents.  I had never heard of the author before |(this apparently was his first book), and I have not read much science fiction in my reading history thus far, but I came to the conclusion that there must always be a first time for everything

At first the book was confusing.  The first chapter was about a young rich man who destroyed a planet through rogue robots and had gotten caught by a mysterious, powerful stranger.  The second chapter was about a young woman who was trying to get away with her own suicide in a society that has its every moved watched.  The third chapter was about a young man who could function in this omniaware society without being seen, like a ghost, as he followed a strange woman to the heart of a technological city to hear about its secrets.  Needless to say, the novel made no sense to me at first.

As I persevered however, the stories began to converge as the overlining plot began to be revealed, and the truth of the plot was something quite profound indeed.  The book was asking the basic existential questions that if there was a being such as God, who had the power to make everything in our lives perfect, whether it would be worth the surrendering of our privacy, free choice and free will to have our lives planned for us?  We would all be happy, but would that be worth the cost of our freedom?  Not only that, but if one person's happiness was worth the destruction of another person's happiness, which person would you choose to make happy?  The book, in its subtle way, makes the reader slowly aware that the basic human skepticisms about theodicy are simplistic in their assumption that a good God must always act in a way that brings about our happiness.