Solitude: The Holiest Calibrator
2025-11-05
In yesterday's entry I said that one of my 'rules' for living a good life was to "do the right thing, especially when it's hard." That got me thinking: how can I properly communicate the essence of knowing what that right thing is? Christian theology has a relatively simple answer to this question I think. The third part of the Trinity, the mysterious and seldom explained Holy Spirit, is a signaling guide here. It is the little piece of God that's in all of us, connected directly to the sources that are the Father and the Son. It is essentially the nuts and bolts of our direct line of communication with God. When we pray, we channel the Holy Spirit so that we can commune with the Father and the Son.
Unfortunately, it's easy to warp this hardware into something nefarious. Many people will do the wrong thing because they believe that they are being compelled by the Holy Spirit, which makes it difficult to assert its authority as our spiritual compass. But despite these problems, we all have the same hardware, so to speak. I find that it's often difficult for me to tune into that compass and have it guide me into doing the right thing. My perspective on this difficulty is that there are opposing spiritual forces that fog our view of what is right. We let them take over slowly until eventually, we have completely lost the plot.
So how do we keep the compass calibrated and our view clear? This is why personal prayer is extremely important, perhaps even the most important form of prayer. It is one thing to pray at church in communion with your parish or congregation, but it is a whole other level to pray in solitude. And when I say solitude, I mean complete solitude; there should not be a phone or computer or anything else listening in. Unfortunately, this degree of solitude has become practically impossible to achieve despite its foundational importance. People have ignored this degree of solitude because it is a tough place to be. Blaise Pascal put it best:
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
So to answer the question of how we can attune to the Holy Spirit, the answer is this: find time to be completely alone. Prioritize it. Put your phone somewhere else. Be silent. Let the surroundings of solitude be your music and tune into the frequencies the world doesn't want us to hear. From there, it'll be easier to figure out that next move. God will give it to you. Just make sure to ask for mercy, rest, and grace.
Be thankful and live in fear of Him—all He ever wanted was to make sure you were listening.