The experience of solitude is necessary because only in solitude and silence is the living God revealed as the binding source of all that is. The veil is lifted, and we begin to see the wonderful possibilities of life together that surround and inhabit us. This means that, at our worst and darkest moments, we can affirm that we are God's handiwork, that God's image has marked us forever, that the most real thing about us is the Spirit who dwells in every human heart. We may be fundamentally and utterly nothing, we may be creatures marked for death, but we are peculiar beings whose very emptiness has been designed to be inhabited by nothing less than the living God. And it is in the living God that we meet one another. The life of prayer revolves around two poles: solitude and community. God is encountered in both places.
Humility is indeed a basic spiritual virtue. It comes to us when we do not know how to proceed, when all previous teachings and certainties have been found to be unavailing. When we are in the suffocation darkness of our own hell, we are suddenly confronted by a light of radiance that illuminates our total situation. We at once accept its glow and loving warmth with relief; but as it leads us on to the fuller light, it makes demands on us. It requires nothing less than a complete change of heart, so that we may take up the darkness of the world around us in the light that had so recently lightened our own darkness ... As our depths are illuminated, so we take our place in the light of God. It is then that we know the meaning of love ... and then, it radiates to the entire cosmos as a beam of the love of God. The light of God in this way releases the love that is native to the soul but usually imprisoned in it ... To learn this love, not merely intellectually, but also in experience, is the object of all life.