It’s important to clarify a few things from the start. While a spirituality of privacy can—and practiced rightly does—lead to creative and compelling engagement with public life, practiced wrongly it is self-orienting and disregards our shared responsibility to renew society in faith, hope, and love. On a more personal and existential level, there’s a way of privatizing spirituality to a degree that we unconsciously hide ourselves from God. It’s the primordial human instinct after the fall in Genesis 3. In the words of Thomas Merton, “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the person that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God—because Truth, Light—knows nothing about him. And to be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy.”
But there is something redemptive and socially integrative about privacy when aimed in a contemplative direction. It’s a direction found in the way of life of early Christian contemplatives, in the testimony of Holy Scripture, and most compellingly in the life of Jesus himself.
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