“The Hermit and the Explorer” – Clifford Williams

Picture two people, one a hermit and the other an explorer. The hermit shuts herself off from contacts with other people and also, let us suppose, from feeling and thinking. She displays few signs of vigor. When she ventures out for supplies, those who encounter her notice her reticence and indifference. She responds to queries with an ambiguous head movement, makes no eye contact, and initiates no conversations. In the privacy of her self-constructed cage, she sits and stares. Hardly anything interests her, and nothing moves her to action except necessities. When she does move, it is with sluggishness. She is a perfect specimen of the living dead.

The explorer, however, is open to what the hermit has closed off. She has an animated interest in the people she encounters and asks about their hopes and dreams. When she listens, her face lights up. She displays spontaneous delight when making new discoveries. She does not wait for adventure to happen to her; she seeks it out, sometimes with a bit of fear but always with anticipation. No cage can hold her. Perhaps she travels, but she does not need to go far, for she finds treasures everywhere. Her inner life is also rich; she has an extensive array of thoughts and feelings. If Socrates or Kierkegaard had encountered such a person in one of their daily excursions, they would have exclaimed, “Aha! Here is one who is fully alive!”

Real hermits, we should note, are often more like the explorer than the above depiction suggests. They may cut themselves off from others in order to probe their inner selves. Or they may do so to pray or pursue wisdom. This is especially true of the early desert Christians. After a dozen years alone, they returned to civilization transformed. That could not have happened if they had simply stared dully at the sand on which they sat.

Real explorers, too, often have some hermit in them. Though they are open and active in some respects, they may be minimally open in other respects. They may, for example, energetically explore the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming but be somewhat reclusive, or they may be exceptionally approachable but unresponsive to art and poetry.

The truth is that we are all partly explorer and partly hermit. We go after new experiences, but only in certain ways. City life may strike us as attractive, but love may seem fearful. Or we may like to dip into classic fiction but avoid sorting out our emotions.

One way to think of the larger life God desires for us is to see it as a way of minimizing the hermit and maximizing the explorer in us. God invites us to feel, love, act, and think. To do so, we cannot sit and stare. We must get up and look around. I do not mean that we must go places and take in new sights, for we can be explorers wherever we are. Those with whom we live and work possess depths that can be endlessly plumbed. Our backyards are unexplored wildernesses. Books contain inexhaustible riches, and so do our own inner selves. Explorers track down fresh life, love, and thought wherever they are.

From The Life of the Mind: A Christian Perspective (Baker Academic, 2002), pp. 86-87. Copyright 2002 by Clifford Williams.

from http://www.cliffordwilliams.net/lifeofthemind.html