John and I saw and learned many interesting and amazing things on our trip to Russia in late May, but one has particular meaning to me as the summer deepens.
When one visits St. Petersburg, a required stop is at the world-renowned Hermitage Museum. Built on the banks of the Neva River in the heart of this historic city by the Tsarina Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, it is a magnificent building which was Elizabeth’s winter palace and which became a museum after the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917. Housed in it are many of the great works of the European masters which had been accumulated by the royal and noble families of Russia before the revolution. We were there for only two hours, a minute fraction of the time it would take to do nothing more than walk all the rooms and halls of the place without ever stopping to examine or admire any of its contents. I’m telling you, it’s huge!
We began our tour in the public rooms of the palace which have been restored to their former opulence after the damage inflicted during the siege of the city, then called Leningrad, during World War II. The rooms are beautiful in an ostentatious kind of way…especially if you’re really into gilt, but the tour of the artworks themselves began in a gallery that was probably twelve or fifteen feet wide and at least as long as the distance from the altar wall in the church to the outer wall of the parish house. In it were some of the furniture, objects and paintings particularly loved by Catherine the Great who lived in the palace some years after Elizabeth did. It’s from this gallery that the museum takes its name.
The story is that only Catherine used this room, and that she regularly went there to rest and recollect herself from the rigors of ruling her vast empire. She called it her “little hermitage.” In other words, it was a place of retreat so she borrowed the name for a monastic place of retreat. It was neither plain nor simple like a monastic hermitage, but it was readily available to her and it was a place in which she could find solitude.
Living as we do in more modest homes, many, if not most, of us find it very difficult to carve out a space which is set apart for solitude. And living at the hectic pace we do with no ministers of state or servants to take care of business and the daily necessities of life, we probably find it equally difficult to carve out the time to actually use such a place. But Catherine, in her own privileged way, was on to something the great spiritual guides throughout the Christian age have known and encouraged. All human beings, even the most extroverted, need time in solitude which doesn’t always necessarily mean time alone. We need such time to regroup and focus and restore ourselves for the life God has given us to live.
I encourage you to think about the times and places that may be acting as little “hermitages” in your life already. I challenge all of us to seek the times and places where we can reconnect with God and with ourselves. Solitude, in the end, is as much about a state of mind as it is a time and place. God grant you summer blessings.
+RPM
