05 October 2008

Solitude

The University concert is over, and I am alone.

Susan attends a course each year with Opus Dei. The subject is said to be theology, although this year the course is on church history. She went up to Auckland yesterday morning, Saturday the 4th of October, and won't be home until Thursday evening. In the meantime, there is her complicated and demanding paper delivery to be done on Tuesday and Thursday morning and I am going to do it. I will be on leave all this week as the Manukau Symphony has a concert to play next week-end and I need to practise as well as do Susan's work.

I think it was Cicero who said numquam minus solus quam com solus - 'never less alone than when alone.' It is not so for me. It should be a time of deepened prayer, it seems to me. If Cicero could say that - referring, I have always supposed, to some form of prayer or meditation - and he was a heathen! - should it not be so for me?

Prayer is never easy for me. I have to struggle at it. It does not come naturally - I suppose the proper quip there is that it needs to come super-naturally :-) I think one reason I find being alone so difficult is that I feel then more strongly the sense that I should be directly involved in prayer.

But of course it is in greatest part simply that I miss Susan. If I am away from her, that is all right - I will be going back. Now I simply have a total of six days and five nights (but two days and one night have already finished! Yay!!) to wait and can do nothing about it. She and I have been together since we met in September or October, 1969 - and married since the 20th of May, 1972.

I have a lot of horn practice to keep me busy, and a those newspapers to deliver - 737 of them on each of Tuesday and Thursday (she does it in about four and a half hours each time; I expect it will take me all day. It's a complicated job). I will do a certain amount of University work via the computer at home. And I will spend some time in turning my mind and heart to God - prayer, in other words.

But I look forward with such an aching longing to Thursday evening when Susan will be home again.

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