Occasionally I find myself wondering if living the contemplative life outside of a community, be that a monastic community of some kind, or merely a community of faith – a sangha, or a eucharistic community of some kind – is somehow second best; if, in effect, I am missing out on a vital component of the spiritual life. After all, one is continually reminded in every other email newsletter that the sangha is the third of the Three Jewels, or that “there is no such thing as a freelance Christian.”

But for some time now I have been convinced that, for me at least, however reassuring a framework formal religion can provide for contemplative practice, the stifling effects of  dogma and the scriptural imperative can seem to weigh on the spirit like a heavy woollen hood. Of course there is always the strong, and conventionally approved, temptation to declare oneself a member of some religion or other, and even of some tradition within that religion, but AC Grayling uncannily nails my own experience when he describes the humanist as one escaping to “cool waters and green groves.”

As I recently quoted from Rodney Smith (in an excellent article in Tricycle Magazine a few years back):

For a few people, a full lifetime as a monastic or living many years on retreat is a wise direction. Each of us has a unique spiritual design that pulls us toward freedom. The problem arises when we listen to others for our direction, or think we “should” do something because others have done it in the past. Spiritual growth is a fine-tuning of our ear to the needs of our heart.

Hardening of the oughteries – the sense that one life, one’s actions, are never enough, that one “must try harder” in the words of the old school reports – is a well-known occupational illness in the spiritual life. To truly pay attention in practice will, sooner or later, reveal our own iteration of Smith’s “unique spiritual design”; and open awareness will lay bare the treacherous thoughts of inadequacy and weakness that give rise to the oughteries, and they can be left be the roadside like any other thoughts.

It sounds easy; it isn’t. Millennia of conformity and obedience, centuries of misdirected authority vested in the structures of religion, stand in our way, muttering of heresy and disobedience, exclusion and damnation. Who are we to question such “thrones and dominions”? Each of us must find the path our own feet were built for; but the way of the “cat who walks by himself” is an ancient and honourable way, whatever the guardians of the faiths may say. As I said once before here, I think perhaps we should recognise the Einzelgänger or Einzelgängerin as a distinct and proper calling in themselves. I don’t mean by this literal loners, nor hermits in either the religious or the colloquial sense; but contemplatives who find that they are temperamentally unsuited either for formal membership of some church or meeting, or for the particular relationship of personal discipleship; those, in fact, who can only thus be true to their “unique spiritual design”.