"The basic revelation of the Gospel is the overwhelming, penetrating presence of God. It is a call to encounter God, and God allows himself to be encountered only in solitude.
It would seem that this solitude is something that those who live among the people of the world have to forego. But this would be to believe that we precede God in solitude, while on the contrary, it is He who waits there for us, to find God is to find solitude, because true solitude is spirit, and all of our human solitudes are merely relative approaches toward the perfect solitude that is faith.
True solitude is not the absence of people, but the presence of God.
To place our lives before the face of God, to surrender our lives to the movements of God, is to roam free in a space in which we have been given solitude.
If the eruption of God's presence in us occurs in silence and solitude, it allows us to remain thrown among, mixed up with, radically joined to all of the people who are made of the same clay as we are."
