Solitude. Who hasn't experienced it? Or at least thought about it?

Yet not until I was asked by Sister Brigit Carol, S.D., to preach at her life profession as a solitary religious did I begin to face the paradoxes of the solitary life.

"One is the loneliest number," says the pop-song lyric of a few years ago, yet what I had seen and been a small part of with Sister Brigit's formation was just the opposite: anything but lonely. In fact, a community of sorts kept widening as her profession took shape and as formation guides, spiritual directors and episcopal oversight came into alignment through the three years of annual vows and religious formation.

An amazing number of people from Sister's diocese, the church at large, indeed, the Anglican Communion, were being linked up, through prayer, spiritual guidance, letter writing and the like. A wonderful sister from England who has lived the solitary life for 30 years of her 60 years as a religious agreed to write weekly, even sharing insights from her own spiritual director.

I was a bit startled at first when I learned that the service was not to be a small, private affair but rather a diocesan-wide event, to be held at the mother church of the Diocese of West Texas, St. Mark's, San Antonio. Yet when many of her supporters and friends, priests and bishops, gathered on Sept. 14, the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, to witness her life vows of poverty, chastity, obedience and solitude to Bishop James Folts, all seemed "meet and right."

The one among many. After all, her vows were being taken to her diocesan bishop, not in the more usual context of a religious community, for which a bishop serves as visitor. She was being set apart for a life of prayer, especially for the bishops of the church, and solitude - in, for and by her diocese. Her religious community, as it were, is the diocese and her smaller "family" at St. Luke's, Cypress Mill, Texas, the lovely rural church just three miles from her hermitage.

Linked to the communion of saints through her patronage of Blessed James DeKoven, the American embodiment of the Oxford Movement whose feast day is March 22 on the Episcopal calendar, Sister's post nominals are "S.D." that is, Solitary of DeKoven.

As director of the DeKoven Center in Racine, Wis., the retreat center that continues the 144-year heritage of education and spiritual reflection promoted by Fr. DeKoven, I was asked to preach at the beautiful and solemn liturgy of profession, a liturgy in which four bishops participated.

There we all were - companions who live a modified rule of life in our own lives, laity and clergy from all over Texas, and the invisible company of saints and angels, called together in community around one taking vows of solitude.

Religious solitude has little to do with loneliness, and ironically much to do with community. Just as our Lord, solitary on the cross, draws all humanity to himself.

(The Rev.) Travis Du Priest, book editor