I haven’t told Diane, so please keep this just between you and me. I’ve decided to sell our house in Collinsville and move to a secluded log cabin in the mountains, away from people. Yup, away from people. I’ve had it with society’s insanity.
I’m going to have mentors. “Since the beginning of the pandemic, Paul Fredette and Karen Karper Fredette have made some changes to their lives: Ms. Fredette stopped attending her local exercise class, and the couple whittled their interaction with their neighbors down to waves. But in many ways, seclusion comes naturally to them. From a house they call Still Wood, nestled in the slope of a mountain surrounded by hundreds of acres of wild woodlands, the Fredettes live their lives ‘oriented towards solitude,’ which is their preferred way of saying that they’re hermits: devoted to simplicity, silence and prayer. The nearest town, Hot Springs, N.C., is 18 miles away and has a population just under 600.” (New York Times, November 29)
I don’t know how Diane will react when I get up the courage to tell her, but I expect criticism from my Sem students. They’ll put in my face what our old Lutheran theologians wrote. For example, Martin Chemnitz: “Many people in all ages have given great approval to the solitary life, and it has seemed logical that a man should be freed from the cares and burdens of life in society and be able to devote himself entirely to the exercises of private piety.... But to these extravagant praises, we must place in opposition this fundamental and immovable fact, that the worship which is pleasing to God…is summed up in the Decalog. In the Second Table (commandments 4 through 10), not even one word calls attention to the solitary life….” Most succinctly, Martin Luther’s associate Philip Melanchthon wrote, “The works of the Second Table are truly the worship of God.” (“Loci Theologici, II, 716-717)
So, should I be a hermit or a meliorist? A what? Wrote Peter Medawar, “I prefer to describe myself as a ‘meliorist’—one who believes that the world can be improved by finding out what is wrong with it and then taking steps to put it right.” (in William H. Danforth, “Thanksgiving Letters, 1974-1995”). Why not escape to a secluded cabin? Maybe the answer is the will of God expressed in His Ten Commandments. Remember, reader, Diane doesn’t know about this. Our secret.
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