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The freedom from the need to be important, the freedom to be part of a team of people and to look for the good of the advancement of the kingdom of God—to whatever extent that's been true for me, it has come through spiritual practices like the discipline of solitude. This helps you learn that you are not the center of things, that God is in charge, and that your task is to work in cooperation.

How do you hope spiritual disciplines will shape you in the next 10 years?

To learn more about joy in the midst of suffering. I don't mean necessarily my suffering. I mean the kind of suffering that goes on when you're with people, because you take on their burdens and carry that, but carry it in such a way that it doesn't destroy you, so you can have joy in it.

Evangelicals, among others, have been reading your book for 30 years. What is the discipline that you think we need to be exploring more at this point?

Solitude. It is the most foundational of the disciplines of abstinence, the via negativa. The evangelical passion for engagement with the world is good. But as Thomas à Kempis says, the only person who's safe to travel is the person who's free to stay at home. And Pascal said that we would solve the world's problems if we just learned to sit in our room alone. Solitude is essential for right engagement.

I so appreciated in Bonhoeffer's Life Together the chapter, "The Day Alone," and the next chapter, "The Day Together." You can't be with people in a right way without being alone. And of course, you can't be alone unless you've learned to be with people. Solitude teaches us to live in the presence of God so that we can be with people in a way that helps them and does not manipulate them.

Another thing we learn in solitude is to love the ways of God; we learn the cosmic patience of God. There's the passage in Isaiah in which God says, "Your ways are not my ways," and then goes on to describe how God's ways are like the rain that comes down and waters the earth. Rain comes down and just disappears, and then up comes the life. It's that type of patience.

In solitude, I learn to unhook myself from the compulsion to climb and push and shove. When I was pastoring that little church, I'd go off for some solitude and worry about what was happening to people and how they're doing and whether they would get along without me. And of course, the great fear is that they'll get along quite well without you! But you learn that's okay. And that God's in charge of that. You learn that he's got the whole world in his hands.

You've spent your whole life focused on spiritual formation. Do you ever want a vacation from it?

When I wrote the book on prayer [Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home], of course, it was a really intensive time. And I remember I wrote the last sentence on New Year's Eve. I got up the next morning, and I didn't want to pray. I was sick of it.

That week I met with my spiritual formation group. There were five of us. One of the questions that we would ask each other was, "What experiences of prayer and meditation have you had this past week?" So I had to tell them: "I don't want to pray."

Our rules for the group were to give encouragement as much as we could, and to give advice only once in a great while; we gave rebuke only when absolutely necessary, and we gave condemnation never. This was one of the times when they gave a little advice. They said, "We think you shouldn't pray. We will become your prayer for you."

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September 2008, Vol. 52, No. 9