#MastersofSocialIsolation #13. “The Way of a Pilgrim,” published in Moscow in 1884, recounts the experience of an anonymous pilgrim of peasant origins who undertook a fantastic journey in the midnineteenth century, traversing the whole of Russia and Siberia on foot.

Seeking from a monk the meaning of St Paul’s instruction to “pray without ceasing” he learned of the ancient Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.” He began to recite this mantra 3000 a day—which required considerable effort.

Within weeks the pilgrim had increased the observance to 6K, then 12k times a day. Soon, he wrote, “my whole desire was fixed upon one thing only—to say the Prayer of Jesus. As soon as I went on with it I was filled with joy and relief...I lived as though in a different world.”

The contemplative “is not the man who has fiery visions of the cherubim carrying God on their imagined chariot, but simply he who has risked his mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust….

#MastersofSocialIsolation #12. In 1941 #ThomasMerton entered the strict cloister of the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani. In the Trappists his heart was captured by the image of men “on this miserably noisy, cruel earth, who tasted the marvelous joy of silence and solitude."

Henceforth he would serve the world by his prayers. Yet even as he longed for even greater solitude, his attitude toward the world was changing. On an errand in Louisville he had a mystical epiphany in which he saw his deep connection with the mass of human beings.

“I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation..."

His sense of his vocation and his solitude changed. God’s grace was not concentrated in the monastery. “I must see and embrace God in the whole world.” He began to write about the moral issues of the day, while networking with a range of likeminded thinkers around the world.

His solitude was not an escape from the world but a point of solidarity, a watchtower from which he could survey the world with all its illusions and pathologies and join in the struggle “to make the world better, more free, more just, more livable, more human.”