SOLITUDE, SILENCE AND STILLNESS
Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre service (dated 16th March 2025), continuing our exploration of Jesus-shaped and Jesus-shaping habits.
You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded).
‘The best of any song | is bird song | in the quiet | but first you must have quiet’
—Wendell Berry[i]
‘Solitude is the furnace of transformation … the place of the great struggle and the great encounter—the struggle against the compulsions of the false self, and the encounter with the loving God who offers himself as the substance of the new self.’
—Henri Nouwen[ii]
READ: MARK 1:29-38 (NIV)
APPETITE FOR DISTRACTION
I was ‘channel hopping’ a few months ago—you know, flicking through the TV stations, not really watching anything, bouncing from one thing to next—when I happened to catch the last minutes of historian, Simon Schama’s recent documentary The Story of Us.
I was about to flick the channel over again when Schama’s closing words grabbed my attention.
Looking back on a long life, a life that has been fascinated with studying the eras of human history, Schama stated, ‘you can’t help thinking this is an epoch above all of distraction; where the difference between the profound and the trivial is being lost.’
I thought it was a spot on observation: an age of distraction.
In fact, I thought it was so good that I picked up my phone to make a note of it, only to discover my phone’s battery had died. So, I ran around the house seeking a pen and something to write on. I then rewound the show and replayed the quote several times, while making a note of it on a flattened piece of toilet roll.
I tucked the quote into my phone case (thinking, ‘I’ll tap it into my phone once it is charged’) and then, ironically, I sat back down on the couch, picked up the TV remote, and continued hopping through the TV channels, bouncing between one thing and the next, the profound and the trivial, seeking distraction.
Simon Schama is not the first to spot the relentless stream of distractions and diversions in our age. It’s been going on for some time.
Years ago, an American preacher called Charles Hummel wrote a thirty-one-page book, a pamphlet really, called ‘Tyranny of the Urgent’ (it’s still available today). He opens the book by talking about how his life seemed choked by a gang of priorities all screaming for his attention.
Like many of us, he wished the day would be longer, so that he could get everything done. But, he admits, we all know more time isn’t the answer. We’d only fill that time with more priorities; more things to do, more places to be, more people to speak to.
Then, one day, his factory manager hit him with a few words that haunted him: ‘Your greatest danger is letting the urgent things crowd out the important.’[iii]
By ‘urgent’, he wasn’t describing ambulance moments and crises. Rather, in a world of scattered priorities, where we think we need to be all things to all people, where everything seems to be demanding an immediate response, where every appetite is treated as an entitlement, and where we endlessly and meaninglessly binge vast quantities of information, we mistakenly diagnose every demand upon us and every impulse from within us as urgent.
We live under a tyranny of the “urgent”—a tyranny that, unless we act intentionally against it, will inescapably enslave us to a scurried, harried, unprioritized life. It may even be a life brimming with productivity, but this doesn’t mean it’s a good life, a healthy life.
We need solitude, stillness, silence. Time out. But getting that, Hummel admitted, is a difficult fight. Considering his own time, he laments that ‘a person’s home is no longer … a private place away from the urgent tasks’ because ‘The telephone breaches its walls with incessant demands.’[iv]
That was back in the 1960’s, when it was just a land line. Today, most of us carry a phone with us wherever we go and the telephone breaches more than walls.
I’ll be honest, I have an addiction to my mobile phone.
I was meeting a minister friend of mine at the beginning of 2024—we meet on a regular basis to check in with each other. This friend asked me what I was struggling with. So, I answered, ‘I’m cheating on my wife, my kids and God, with my mobile phone.’
It was true then, and sadly, it’s still true.
Most days, my phone is the first thing I reach for when I wake up. Anyone else?
For the past year, I have been trying to kick the habit. It’s hard. The thing is, I only truly realised I had an addiction when I tried switching my phone off, or leaving it in another room, or simply pressing ‘aeroplane mode’. It’s then that I discovered a certain ‘nervousness’ suddenly kick in.
I am certainly not alone in my addiction—just watch what everyone’s up to while they’re sitting in the GP’s waiting rooms, or travelling on the bus, or having a meal out with their families.
Through our phones, we have access to news stories, pictures, friends, emails, shopping, games—the world all in the palm of our hands. Whether it’s Facebook or TikTok, YouTube or Twitch, Ebay or Gmail, we are constantly ‘checking in’ and ‘doom scrolling’, often out of a fear of missing out (FOMO). We are binging more information than we can realistically do anything with, which has the knock-on effect of reducing our brain’s ability to focus and process.
Apparently, in the “developed” world, the human attention span is now shorter than that of a goldfish.
I can’t remember where I read that—I should have been paying more attention.
In addition to this, amid an already ‘noisy’ world that bombards us with an endless barrage of distracting siren calls, we also find it difficult to resist the temptation of adding our own voices into the constantly increasing volume.
For every minute that passes…
… 18.8 million text messages are sent,
… 3,472,000 YouTube videos are viewed,
… 138.9 million reels are watched on Facebook and Instagram,
… 5.9 million Google searches take place,
… Snapchat users send 3.3 million snaps,[v]
… and Amazon makes $238,000 in sales (which equates to $17M per hour, if you’re interested).[vi]
We seldom escape—even though we believe we are doing so when we pick up our devices.
We seldom shut off.
We seldom shut up.
We tell ourselves that we hardly have any time, but apparently the average screen-time per day in the Western hemisphere is just over 6 hours (and that’s on top of the average 4 hours of TV we watch, too).
I’m not attacking anyone here! Again, I’m speaking as a fellow addict. My own phone shocks me with a weekly reminder that my average screen time per day is just over two hours!
That’s on a good day. When my depression is heavy, that number increases. Tellingly, so does the depth of depression.
I am both a victim and a perpetrator of this demanding, distracting and ‘noisy’ world. There is something, a zeitgeist of our culture, that has infected me and affects my ability to unplug and unwrap myself from the noise.
To pull something Jesus said slightly out of context (or maybe it’s not out of context): I’ve gained the world in the palm of my hands, but I can’t help but feel that I have forfeited something of my life in the process.[vii]
THE FURNACE
The problem is not mobile phones, by the way. They are just an outlet of all this, and not the only outlet. The problem, as the novelist Richard Ford described it, is that our culture is possessed by a ‘nervous intensity for something else.’[viii]
In other words, we have ants in our pants, as my late mother would say. We can’t sit still. Some social commentators are even beginning to suspect that we may be the first generation that does not know what it is like to be bored.
Which, if true, is a shame, because the best of creativity comes out of being bored. Boredom is a gift and an amazing teacher. Please, let yourself get bored.
The thing is, despite the suspicions of the social commentators, we are not the first generation to struggle with boredom. Way back in 17th century, the famous mathematician and thinker, Blaise Pascal wrote that, in his opinion, ‘the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.’[ix]
For Pascal, all humanity’s problems—from international conflicts to envying our neighbours—stem from our inability to come to terms with stillness, silence and solitude.
Maybe it’s because we have wrongly associated busyness with growth, while stillness, silence, and solitude leave us with the impression that nothing is happening. Taking time out helps your brain process information, developing your working memory, and greatly helps to reduce anxiety and stress, helping us cope with whatever’s next. Real growth happens in the stillness.
Maybe we shun stillness because we find silence eerie. When we ‘switch off’, the inner thoughts turn on, the illusions break, we’re reintroduced to reality, and we come face to face with ourselves. There’s something about stillness and silence that strip us of all our noisy disguises. In a way, we find ‘noise’ easing—like a teething toddler with a comforter
Dietrich Bonhoeffer certainly thought so. Writing to Christian’s back in the 1940’s, he wrote, ‘We are so afraid of silence that we chase ourselves from one event to the next in order not to have to spend a moment alone with ourselves, in order not to have to look at ourselves in the mirror…’
More than this, Bonhoeffer added that we are afraid of silence because, strangely, ‘We are afraid of such lonely, awful [awe-filled] encounters with God.’[x]
Oddly, we’re more comfortable with doing things for God, then actually being with God.
There are plenty of physical and mental benefits to seeking solitude and silence—you can find books full of advice. And I suppose, as with the rhythms of simplicity and fasting that we’ve already explored, you could pluck these rhythms out of a context of a relationship with God and talk about them in a general way.
I’m not dismissing any of those benefits. But, as Christians, and as a Christian, the solitude I’m referring to is not merely about getting some ‘me time’. Rather, it’s the beautiful rhythm of carving out space in our lives to pray, to read scripture, to listen to the ‘still small voice of God’ and to reflect. It is to step away from the distractions and ‘doings’, ‘urgencies’ and worries of the world for a moment, and to recentre myself on God, and see things in the light of eternity.
To stand, sit or kneel before God without distraction or disguise.
This isn’t about personality traits, whether we’re introverts or extroverts. All of us as disciples need these silent and still timeouts with God. And it’s not like the introverts find this any easier to do. In many ways, it’s harder.
I’m an introvert—I am very comfortable on my own. I could do solitude and silence quite happily, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks of the year. The problem, however, is that even in the silence of a quiet environment, I can still be scrolling my phone or devouring a book. I’m still consuming content. When really, I need to be turning off all the other inputs so that the input of God’s voice and presence becomes my priority.
And like Bonhoeffer said, I often don’t want that awe-filled encounter.
It’s not that I am fearful of God; I’m fearful of change and challenge.
I don’t want it because, as another writer described it, solitude with God is the ‘furnace of transformation.’ It is the place of the great struggle and the great encounter. It’s where all my noisy disguises fall off; where all the distractions and idols that I am trying to build my life upon come into conflict with the almighty love God—a God who offers himself as the substance of my reality.[xi]
God speaks into my darkness, the very same darkness I’m trying to cloak myself in, emitting light and rousing me from my slumber.
A couple of years ago, whilst full of a cold and unable to hurry, God challenged me. I remember it clearly, I was hugging my duvet and sipping Lemsip when I felt this impression of words, ‘Tristan, you’ve not come aside with me enough.’ I wanted to show my completed task lists, protesting that I had been busy with everything God had told me to do. But the impression was inescapable and undeniable. The truth is, I hadn’t spent enough time aside with God. I had an unhealthy estimation of my own importance, thinking my deeds for God were more important than my communion with God.
It’s important that we take time.
JESUS’ GREAT ESCAPES
Jesus was not a slave to the ‘tyranny of the urgent’.
He was intentional about his own practice of stillness. His rhythm of solitude is everywhere in the gospel accounts.
At the very beginnings of his ministry, the Holy Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness for forty days of solitude (Matt 4:1; Mk. 1:12; Lk. 4:1). Often, when we think of the Holy Spirit, we think of empowerment for action. Yet, the Spirit also woos us to withdraw. Before Jesus does anything, he is driven by the Sprit into stillness.
Before picking his team of twelve, Jesus withdraws from the crowds and up a mountain to pray all night (Lk. 6:12).
In Matthew, after he hears the news of John the Baptist’s death, Jesus attempts to slip away in boat to a remote area to be alone (Matt. 14:13). If you’re familiar with the story, you’ll know that a vast crowd track him down, preventing him from having that solitude. Jesus is not grumpy with them, however. He has compassion on them, even while carrying his own grief. This is incredible in itself. My own ability to nurse people is often compromised or totally non-existent while I’m nursing sorrow.
In compassion, Jesus then feeds this mass of people, all five thousand of them, miraculously, with a handful of fish and bread.
But also notice that, after doing all this, Jesus makes his disciples get back into the boat, he then dismisses the crowds and then proceeds to go up into the hills by himself to pray (Matt. 14:22-23).
Jesus is happy to be interrupted, but he is still determined to pursue his intimacy with the Father.
At the turning point of his ministry, as he begins his journey towards Jerusalem and before he asks an important, pivotal question to his disciples regarding his identity, Jesus has been alone, praying (Lk. 9:18)
Before facing the agony of the cross, Jesus goes to the garden of Gethsemane. He takes his disciples with him. When they get there, he tells most of them to hang back and takes three of them further on with him. But ultimately, he tells those three to wait with him and goes on further, by himself, to be alone with the Father (Matt. 26:36-39; Mk. 14:32-35; Lk. 22:39-41).
In the passage we read earlier, Jesus’ fame has spread everywhere (Mk. 1:28, also Lk. 4:42). There’s been an extraordinary evening of ministry at the home of Simon Peter, with the whole town basically turning up at the doorstep. There has been this tangible demonstration of the power of God—the kind of experience we would likely have skipped our private time to attend, enjoying and savouring the successful meeting of the urgent swelling masses. Yet Jesus takes a remarkable step: ‘In the quiet of the morning’, he slips away, alone, into the wilderness, away from the ‘urgent’, to grab some important time in prayer.
It’s not that Jesus is heartless. Jesus is constantly giving himself to the needs of the people. But communion with the Father was a priority for Jesus; seeking to be about what the Father is about. As a result of this time, Jesus decides to go elsewhere to preach—other people need to hear this, too. His disciples want him to go to back to Capernaum, where they’ve enjoyed success, but Jesus wants to pursue his mission.
In also worth saying, that Jesus isn’t taking time out to recharge his ‘spiritual batteries’. It’s not that he’s been drained by the previous evening of miracles and so needs to download more godly power. In all the preceding verses, Jesus hasn’t been praying to God to heal and cast out demons, he has been acting as God (something he will be criticized for, in Mark 2:7). His prayer is not for more power—he’s fully God, and fully human. It’s purely communion.[xii]
Whether it was morning, or night, or during the day; whether it was about major decisions or just the continual, day to day; Jesus made a habit out of seeking solitude with God.
As Luke 5:16 states it, ‘Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.’ (NIV)[xiii]
I prefer how Eugene Peterson translates that, ‘As often as possible Jesus withdrew to out-of-the-way places for prayer.’ (MSG)
Jesus withdrew from people, daily life, and even ministry (for the super spiritual out there) to be alone with the Father.
If Jesus—God incarnate—carved out such space in the demands of his human life, then shouldn’t we, too?
To repeat what has already been said at the start of this series of rhythms; discipleship is not just about the ideas we hold about God and Jesus. Sure, our theology is very important. But following Jesus is more than an intellectual pursuit.
He’s not just some abstract truth to studied and analysed. He is the way, the life. He offers us a posture that can be replicated.
All the gospel writers connect Jesus’ teachings with the pattern of his life. If they wanted, they could have just given us a record of all his teachings, totally dislocated from his own person and life (just like some late second century heretical, gnostic accounts of Jesus’ life do so). There are many reasons why they don’t do this. One of those reasons is that Jesus sets up a pattern for us, as followers, to follow.
We may only have glimpses of Jesus’ habits and spiritual practices. We certainly don’t have a day-by-day, minute-by-minute breakdown. But what we do have is far from scant. We know more about Jesus’ rhythms than we do of any other scriptural character.
This is not accidental! Jesus shows us a human mirror that is perfectly angled toward God.
As Thomas à Kempis said it, ‘Christ counsels us to follow his life and way’ and, as such, his life should ‘be our first consideration.’[xiv]
WHAT ABOUT US?
So what about us? Do we take time, during our busyness, to seek solitude with God?
To be clear, there’s no conflict between solitude and gathering with others. The Christian life is neither wholly solitude nor wholly communal. And Helen will talk about that more in a couple of weeks. Both are equally good, and both should be ingredients in our lives, just as they were in Jesus’ life.
Additionally, there’s no conflict between practicing an active awareness of God in every moment of our lives and with taking time out, alone, to be with God, without the distractions and the ‘doings’. Some people wrongly pit one against the other, thinking they are more spiritually superior because they excel in one or the other. Yet both are necessary rhythms that Jesus exemplified before us. In three weeks, we’ll talk about practicing the presence of God in every moment.
But for now, with this particular rhythm, how are we at prioritising the important over the urgent? Do we “withdraw” to be with God?
It’s a tricky question, I know. It’s made harder because, sadly, in the past, people have wielded it over people, placing oppressive demands on people that only drive people to guilt and not the loving arms of the Father.
I’m not going to do that. Throughout this series, we have been intentionally reluctant in being overly prescriptive, dogmatic or heavily structured in how to do any of this.
Even though there are many good examples that inspire us, one of the dangers in being prescriptive is that we try and take what works in the timetable of someone else’s life and apply it to our own. And when it doesn’t work for us, we end up feeling like failures or we wrongly condemn ourselves with a sense of guilt.
It’s about finding out what works for you. But for all of us, it’s not easy.
For myself, I’m not a morning person. Never have been—even when I was a paper boy. If you are, I’m thrilled for you. I used to be a night-owl and would grab some time with God then, just to be still and to reflect and pray. But I’m not much of night owl anymore, either. So, I grab time in the day.
Some days, that looks like turning the car radio off in the morning commute.
I can, of course, pray and read scripture here, at church—it’s part of my job! But when I was an engineer, I would take some time at my desk in my lunch break or go for a prayer walk.
One of my favourite things to do, when I get the time, is to leave our house altogether and go for a really long walk, especially down some quiet lane or through some woodland.
I have the YouVersion Bible app on my phone, along with the Lectio 365 app, and even the Anglican church’s Daily Prayer App. They’re handy and wonderful tools when I am out and about, that help me pause, ponder and praise. If you don’t have them, they’re free to download and I would highly recommend them.
However, the downside is that they are on my phone. So, when I can, and because I have no self-discipline at all, I’ll always pick up my physical, paper copy of the Scriptures and leave my phone somewhere else entirely. If I don’t, I only end up checking my emails, scrolling Instagram, or playing Pokémon Go.
To be fair, in my own life, how I have carved our time changes all the time. I’m not always great at it, either.
I am simply trying to take the time to create a space where God migrates back from the periphery of my focus to the centre of it all.
However it looks for you, be intentional.
Long ago, in a world drowning in the noise of bragging nations, surrounded by the clamour of the world, the sons of Korah wrote one of the best lines in all the Psalms, ‘Be still, and know that I am God!’ (Psalm 46:10)
As the poet, Wendell Berry described it, one of the best songs is bird song, in the quiet. But first you must have quiet.
Likewise, the best voice is the still small voice of God. But as Elijah discovered, first you must allow the furnaces of life, the tempests of distraction and the earthmoving events pass you by.
Be still.
‘In a noise-polluted world, it is even difficult to hear ourselves think let alone try and be still and know God. Yet it seems essential for our spiritual life to seek some silence, no matter how busy we may be. Silence is not to be shunned as empty space, but to be befriended as fertile ground for intimacy with God.’
—Susan Muto
‘Examine me, and probe my thoughts! Test me, and know my concerns! See if there is any idolatrous tendency in me, and lead me in the reliable ancient path!’
—Psalms 139:23-24 (NET)
[i] Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 (Counterpoint, 1999), p. 207
[ii] Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart: Desert Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry (Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1981), pp. 25–26.
[iii] Charles E. Hummel, Tyranny of the Urgent, 1967 (InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, 1994), p. 5
[iv] Ibid, p. 6
[v] https://www.domo.com/learn/infographic/data-never-sleeps-12
[vi] https://www.repricerexpress.com/amazon-statistics/#:~:text=14.-,Amazon%20Sales%20Per%20Second%2C%20Minute%20and%20Hour,averages%20more%20than%20%2417%20million.
[vii] ‘How do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul/life in the process?’ – Mark 8:36, NLT
[viii] Richard Ford, Canada
[ix] Blaise Pascal, Pensées (139) (Penguin Books Ltd, Middlesex, England, 1975), p. 67
[x] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, translated by David McI. Gracie, Meditating on the Word (Cowley Publications, Cambridge, Mass: 2000), p. 50.
[xi] See epigraph quote by Henri Nouwen
[xii] M. Eugene Boring, Mark: A Commentary, The New Testament Library (Westminster John Knox Press, Kentucky, 2006), p. 68. However, I will add, as Ben Witherington states, Jesus, as fully human, also tires, and requires solitude to rest [The Gospel of Luke, Amy Jill Levine and Ben Witherington III, New Cambridge Bible Commentary (Cambridge University Press, UK, 2019), p. 143)
[xiii] Some translations do not use the word often at all, as the Greek equivalent for often does not actually occur in the text. Some translations, however, like the NIV, NLT and MSG, do explicitly state what the Greek implies. The reason for this is because the Greek uses the reiterative imperfect verb wildernesses (ἐρήμοις) and not the singular wilderness. Hence, Jesus ‘would withdraw to the wildernesses’ only makes sense as an oft repeated act, referring to various wildernesses and not a sole occurrence. See, John Nolland, World Biblical Commentary, 35a, Luke 1—9:20 (Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, 1989), p. 228
[xiv] The Imitation of Christ (London, Penguin, 1952), p. 27
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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