Not Wholly Alone

I don’t think anyone is a stranger to loneliness, especially in times such as these. Loneliness has plagued my life. And that is probably evident now by much of what I’ve written on this blog. It has always been there scratching away at the inner recesses of my heart, and throughout the years I have found it to be an uncanny companion. The words of Soren Kierkegaard seem to do it justice:

“Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.”[1]

In times such as these, the loneliness of life is a difficult thing to keep at bay. For some of us, we are locked at home alone, for those more fortunate we may have friends or immediate family to keep us company, but the reality of our situation is that we have been stripped away from many of our “kin and friends.” Most of us long to be back at work, to be back with friends and teachers, to embrace and be embraced by those in our community, and to be taking the Lord’s Supper together again. Our lives and routines have been violently disrupted. Our coping mechanisms have been altered. And this time for many of us, I imagine, has awoken an old and frightening loneliness.

I was reminded recently in a friend’s newsletter of the distinction between solitude and loneliness,[2] the former being a good thing that we can cultivate out of the rough soil of loneliness. Similarly, Henri Nouwen in his journal confronting the most despairing year of his life wrote that there are two temptations in the spiritual task of addressing loneliness that “you are inclined either to run away from your loneliness or to dwell in it.” And that “when you run away from it, your loneliness does not really diminish, [but] when you start dwelling in it, your feelings only become stronger, and you slip into depression.” To avoid despair in these feelings while avoiding escapism is no easy task, but we will all in some shape or form be forced to reckon with them eventually.

The cultivation of solitude is a task that we all must learn quickly. Hannah Arendt wrote that “solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. [While] Loneliness comes about … when I am one and without company’ but desire it and cannot find it.”[3] Now more than ever, we must learn how to cultivate our loneliness especially for those of us who find ourselves without company right now. Doing the hard work of this cultivation may help us retain our sanity now while it may also help us find a newfound equilibrium on the other side of this quarantine—one we did not know before.

Nouwen likened the wound of loneliness to “the Grand Canyon—a deep incision in the surface of our existence…” All of us know that in some capacity, we are not as known as we would like to be nor as loved as we would like to be. If loneliness is simply the desire for intimacy, all of us should be familiar with this wound. We feel an emptiness that we would like fulfilled entirely. We want the incision filled, and there is something deeply right about that longing.

We have all been created for companionship. We were intended to live life alongside others in friendship and family and community. And it is in companionship that some of us may feel the most alone. That which was given to us to be a salve for our loneliness can often be the very thing which provokes it the most. Sometimes we feel this most profoundly when we lose someone, whether temporarily or permanently. Sometimes we feel this most insidiously in a bad marriage or toxic friendship. We have an idea of what the fulfillment of intimacy may look like, and to see it not achieved is the realization of loneliness. Neither single people nor married people are immune to the sting of loneliness—though we both may feel it differently. And right now is a time for many of us in which we feel this sting profoundly.

For Thomas Merton, there is a companionship that should precede natural companionship. Rather than Arendt’s summation that solitude is a companionship with the self, for Merton the goal of solitude is different for it is only the man or woman “who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God.”[4] The Christian life does not eliminate loneliness. Rather, as Christians, we may be those most fitted to endure it honestly and begin the painful work of cultivating it into something promising.

One of my favorite passages in Scripture is Jesus’s promising of the Holy Spirit to his disciples. He tells them “I will ask the Father and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever… You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (John 16,18). I am reminded in this passage that even as those who wait for our Savior’s return, we are not left wholly alone. We have for ourselves an invisible companionship through the presence of the Spirit, and sometimes it is only when we are alone (whether by choice or consequence) that we are reminded of it.

Rather than ridding ourselves of loneliness, the path to solitude at very least must begin with addressing our loneliness. And for many of us who have spent a good deal of our lives doing as much as we could do avoid it, this may be the hardest step. This is a scary thing because it often requires us to come to terms with much of what we have stowed away within ourselves and to deal with the thoughts we would rather not think about. Frankly, I don’t want to be alone with myself like Arendt imagines, I do not make a good conversation partner with myself. But I do know I need to be alone at times. I need to confront my own thoughts and feelings and to bring my sad and sometimes scary thoughts to the one who knows them and can console me before I can utter them. And I want to be honest.

There is a loneliness that can destroy us, but there is a loneliness that can be cultivated and made into something of worth. This cultivated solitude may bring about greater creativity in our lives, it may help us be less insecure in our relationships, and it may help us to grow more intimately aware of the Spirit’s intimate workings within us. I don’t want to pretend that for some of us now this will be an easy task, it may take baby-steps for some while for others we may be thrust into it without any say in the matter. During these strange and scary times, I want to remind myself and you all, wherever you are at, that you are not wholly alone in this world no matter how isolated you may feel now. And I pray that we would all come to know and be reminded, especially on this Good Friday, that we have one who knows our loneliness and will not leave us alone in it.

Vito Aiuto of The Welcome Wagon puts it better than I ever could:

Up on a mountain our Lord is alone
Without a family friends or a home
He cries
Will you stay with me?
He cries oh oh oh
Will you wait with me?

Up on a mountain our Lord is afraid
Carrying all the mistakes we have made
And he knew
It’s a long way down
Do you know?
It’s a long way down

Up in the heavens our Lord prays for you
He sent his spirit to carry us through
So it’s true
That you’re not alone
Do you know?
He came all the way down

Be well friends,

Jeb

---

 

[1] Journals VII 1A 363

[2] https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-convivial-society-vol-1-no-6?r=3ezfo&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy

[3] Taken from https://aeon.co/ideas/before-you-can-be-with-others-first-learn-to-be-alone

[4] Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island.

Human Connection and the Pattern of Life in Netflix’s “Maniac”

Is there any reason we should expect not to be alone?

Netflix’s “Maniac” (with Emma Stone and Jonah Hill) seems all about that question.

Human’s crave connection. We’ll do anything for it or an artificial form of it. Give us online video-games, and we will talk with strangers all over the world. Give us a good book and we will get connected with fictional characters. Construct a coffee-shop and we will go to it to sit near people even when we damn well know we can make our own coffee at home. At our core is a desire to be with and among people (yes even us introverts).

But what if this connection is illogical?

If the origin of the universe is chaos, should we expect to discover a pattern that may lead us to connection? Or what if as Owen (Hill) insists “our brains are just computers that make our life stories make sense”? Should we expect to find meaning in connection?

“You were the only one who knew all my stories. You are the only one who knew about mom.”

Every significant character in this show has faced grievous relational loss. Death, severance, romantic falling outs, abuse… all have felt the weight of a disrupt or deformity of relationship. And all the main character’s in “Maniac” have felt what it is to lose someone.

“Sometimes people leave and we don’t know why.”

The better part of half the show is watching these characters face life while trying to stuff that enigma in their back-pocket. All of them cope with something, with drugs, with despair, with masturbation, with their life’s work. Some want a fix, and some have conceded hopelessly to there not being a fix able to take their pain away.

But this show is eccentric. It has a whimsical humor to it that seems okay to exist alongside its profound melancholy.

“The pattern is the pattern.”

There are plenty of explanations for certain occurrences in the show, but at the same time, explanations aren’t good enough. Just because we can explain why something has occurred does not mean that we can give that something meaning. While two wires getting soldered together may explain why two people’s consciences temporarily interacted with each other’s, it does not tell those two what they are now to do given what has occurred… or why these two so coincidentally, so fortunately, so perfectly managed to have this happen to them.

An experiment started in the hopes of curing people’s pain once and for all, but no pain was cured. Yet in the process, connection was found for several of these lost and lonely people.  Connection doesn’t cure pain, but it does make it easier to live with. In a strange sort of way, the experiment worked, but not in the way that was intended.

Loss can make everything feel random and meaningless. Loneliness can compound our despair and make life seem fundamentally incoherent. But in “Maniac,” and in reality, human connection and re-connection is a critical part of the pattern.

We need people to know our losses. We need people to fight for us. We need people to help us cultivate hope. We need friends to help us make sense of all this.

“Annie, why are you here?” “Because I’m your friend. And that’s what friends do.”

A Quick Review: “The Soul of Shame” by Curt Thompson M.D.

It often feels like to be human is to live with the ever-present, often insidious disease known as shame. According to Curt Thompson in his newest book, The Soul of Shame, shame has been at work within the whole of humanity’s collective and individual stories extending back as far as Adam & Eve’s.

Shame, Thompson says, is at its fundamental level a spiritual & biological plague with consequences as dire as increasing isolation & disconnection, chaotic states of mind and behavior, and diminished vocational and interpersonal creativity (among a multitude of other symptoms). These of course are all assumed to be relating to only individual persons, but Thompson, in the latter half of his book, commits to discussing how shame when left unchecked can bring about disastrous results in our churches, communities, and homes.

This discussion I found to be particularly helpful as much of what Thompson assumes in talking about shame is that it exists to rupture our God-bearing reflection as relational beings. To put it another way: shame would not exist if we were not relational. It is not to say that shame does not start personally, it certainly does, but it always involves another(s): “humans tend to experience no greater distress than when in relationships of intentional, unqualified abandonment- abandoned physically and left out of the mind of the other. With shame, I not only sense that something is deeply wrong with me, but accompanying this is the naturally extended consequence that because of this profound flaw, you will eventually want nothing to do with me…”

Thompson makes the case that shame was present and utilized by the serpent to help bring about the disruption between humans and God and humans with themselves. When we doubt our connection with others, or doubt that God really, actually, likes us, shame is often at work. Shame was secretly at work during the temptation to eat the fruit, and it was noticeably present when Adam and Eve realized that they were vulnerable and needed to be covered. And in the act of covering themselves, a wall was erected between them, a wall that exists with each of us. Adam and Eve started in the garden perfectly vulnerable, perfectly without shame, and in perfect intimacy with God and themselves. With the presence of shame, their eyes were opened, they saw their naked selves as inadequate, their failures were magnified, and they resulted to hiding from each other by covering themselves and hiding from God in a literal sense.

Shame destroys our connectedness with others. Just as Adam and Eve sought each other or another to accuse after the Fall, Thompson reminds us that “shamed people shame people.” And here we have shame’s arrival into the world through friendships, families, and communities in a self-destructive and rampant progression.

Obviously this book is much more than just a diagnosis, but certainly the diagnosis is critical. One of the reasons I initially found this book unique is because of Thompson’s psychiatric expertise and insight into the neurological effects of shame on the brain. What most can only talk about abstractly, Thompson can talk about scientifically. Yet since I am not a scientist or a doctor, I can not verify what he says is true nor speak into it very well, but he certainly backs himself.

And like any good doctor, Thompson provides a treatment option to such a malady. The almost paradoxical nature of shame is that in an attempt to not be abandoned, we cover ourselves and hide, thus resulting in our own isolation and self-abandonment. We long for intimacy but are frightened by what others may really see when we begin discarding the fig leaves of our own social status, career achievements, perfect family, theological correctness, and the myriad of ways we try to cover up our utter nakedness.

Like a returning to Eden, vulnerability is the only means by which we can taste the intimacy we once had. However, it often feels like death. It leaves us open to hurt, to rejection, to betrayal, to pain, and, yes in an extreme sense, death. Often vulnerability is spoken of as an act, but Thompson rightly reminds us, “it is something we are.” It is how we were created. Thompson even says, “It begins in the beginning where we are introduced to a vulnerable God. Vulnerable in the sense that he is open to wounding. Open to pain. Open to rejection. Open to death.”

Shame wants nothing more than our own isolation and eventual self-destruction. In light of many recent studies on the lethality of loneliness, I do not find shame’s goals so far-fetched. If shame seeks our isolation then its greatest nemesis is intimacy – to be fully known & exposed and fully loved. And Thompson goes to explain that, “We can love God, love ourselves, or love others only to the degree that we are known by God and known by others.” He does not simplify this as just positive thinking either as some often do. As a psychiatrist, he recognizes that this work of being known requires immense difficulty and risk. It requires honest confrontation and soul excavation with God and friends and often therapists. But it also requires knowing the vulnerable God naked and crucified.

Without an incarnate Jesus stripped naked on a cross, we would have no assurance of being loved in our nakedness:
“Jesus’ literal naked vulnerability is a testimony to us that he knows exactly what it is like to be us. To truly be with us Jesus not only knows what it means to be vulnerable, he knows how painfully, frighteningly hard it is to live into it, given shame’s threat… To this God, whom we meet in Jesus, we must direct our attention if we are to know the healing of our shame. We must literally look to Jesus in embodied ways in order to know how being loved in community brings shame to its knees and lifts us up and into acts of goodness and beauty.”

Thompson with this theological framework leads into numerous practical applications of living lives of intimate connectedness with others and explains that when shame begins to lose its grip on us that we may find the energy we once used for hiding for creative purposes in our vocations, hobbies, and relationships. Like a falling back into Eden, once the head of shame is crushed (although not entirely vanquished in this life), we will again be able to create and live as we once did in intimacy with our God and our friends.

The Dignity in Our Loneliness

Loneliness is not an uncommon feeling to me.

For the better part of my sophomore year of college, I spent my time cramped up in my bedroom and frustrated by a lack of meaningful connection. During that time, I had to seriously wrestle with a stark and nagging loneliness that had been creeping around and was just beginning to show its terrifying face. I remember one-time sitting in a meeting with some others from my campus ministry’s leadership team, and we had begun to go around and share our high points and low points for the week. It was my turn, and I recall needing to confess that I had felt deeply alone. It was mortifying and not because of how people responded (which was actually incredibly well). I felt shame bubbling up in me to even release the words, “I feel really alone.” I don’t feel like I did it out of a desire for a pity party or just because I wanted the attention. I just feel like I had to. It had built up, and it felt as if without reprieve I’d surely just sink deeper and deeper into the mire.

It felt humiliating though to admit that to people. Though I remember a few approaching me afterwards and declaring to me those same words, “I feel lonely too.”

When people profess that they are lonely, we often pity them. There’s this underlying assumption that I often think about that goes sort of like this, “that poor soul must have no friends. Maybe they should join a church or Crossfit. Maybe they should get married. Maybe they should branch out a little more. Yet I still feel myself thinking those thoughts without often recognizing how much I feel their words myself.

I think the reality is that we are all lonely on some level.

We’re all on an even playing field. Happily married, mournfully married, unwillingly single, happily single, divorced, it doesn’t matter. Our estate is a lonely one.

At this point, you’re probably confused, maybe a little annoyed that I would make such a remark about you. You have your brunch friends and your date nights. You don’t wake up in a bed alone. You have at least a thousand Facebook friends, but yes, you’re still alone.

But hear me out, I only say that we are all alone, so that we might begin to recognize something beautiful.

Although we all feel alone, that feeling of loneliness is actually a God-given, God-reflecting, and good desire.

Ultimately, I believe there’s a point to the loneliness, and that despite the most intimate of relationships we still feel different degrees of loneliness but still feel lonely nonetheless. The most poignant definition of loneliness I’ve ever come across is simply this: “the want of [or longing for] intimacy“. It’s the state Adam was in in perfect vertical relationship with God, but still lacking closeness, horizontally, with another person even before there was the entrance of sin into the world. If loneliness is as previously defined, then can any of us truly claim to be in perfect intimacy with another? Do we ever cease longing for more closeness with another person?  There always a want for more closeness, for a friendship to be cultivated, for another to know us just a little bit more – this is to feel a little bit of loneliness.

To feel lonely isn’t to be inhuman. If anything, to feel lonely is to feel the desire for friendship and closeness that God has ingrained us with in which is nothing but a glorious reflection of Himself. Our desire for companionship isn’t bad, it’s beautiful. I am not saying the state of loneliness is good, but that the underlying desire within loneliness is. Tim Keller would agree:

“Do you feel like a wimpy, weak little people because you’re always lonely and you’re always needing people and you don’t feel like you don’t have enough friends. If you feel like that it’s because you’re like God. It’s not a sign of your imperfection. It’s a sign of your perfection.”

The problem is not that we feel lonely. The problem is how we have adapted to respond to those feelings of loneliness.

It’s no surprise to me that alongside our age of distraction which includes the rampant use of pornography, social media, shopping, and Netflix there is also a rise in feelings of isolation. Even with hundreds of friends available to us in a moment’s notice, we’re still aching for depth yet still settling for distraction. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard says this:

“…how often have men cried woe upon the solitary person or portrayed the pain and misery of loneliness, how often have men, weary of the corrupting, noisy, confusing life in society, let their thoughts wander out to a solitary place—only to learn again to long for community! …In the busy, teeming crowd, which as community is both too much and too little… the cure is precisely to learn all over again the most important thing, to understand oneself in one’s longing for community.”

When we feel lonely, running from it may be just prolonging the inevitable. If we’re afraid to feel lonely, we may be doomed to it. To a certain degree, it may mean that a good place to start is becoming a tiny bit more conscious of our desire for community, intimacy, and friendship rather than consistently running to an outlet to keep our minds away from those fears.

Imagine a broken world like this without this desire for intimacy, or to put it more simply, imagine a world where no one ever felt lonely. I’d imagine everyone would be content to themselves. There would be no community, no coffee dates, no netflix-binging with roommates, no marriage, no family unit, no friendship, no vulnerable conversations, no long walks together. An unredeemed* world without the feelings of loneliness would be a world of ironic isolation.

Feelings of loneliness are similar to feelings of physical pain. We need something like those feelings of pain to indicate to us that we are in an unhealthy or harmful place and need to move to something better – a place of isolation to a place of friendship. The pain itself is not bad. What causes it may be, but the pain is actually helpful if only we can find a way to respond to it properly. Numbing a dislocated shoulder won’t fix it but a painful relocation will. Like Kierkegaard said, “the cure is precisely to understand oneself in one’s longing for community,” but the cure often feels like it’s killing us.

To feel your loneliness is painful. There’s no denying that. We were created for intimacy with God and others. Vertically and horizontally, and it’s no surprise that after that intimacy was shattered with the Fall of man that Adam & Eve hid themselves from God and hid their nakedness from one another with their fig-leaf loincloths. We’re all terrified of exposing ourselves, and we’re all terrified of a life of isolation. In exposing ourselves, we risk rejection, we risk shame, and we risk our own comfort. In isolation, we lack the sort of companionship that encourages us to take risks, to journey, and to ultimately live.

But thankfully the story doesn’t end in isolation. Thankfully we have a God who knows our loneliness and won’t leave us in it. Thankfully there’s a redeemer who redeems by uniting all things in himself, in perfect intimacy. One who has known loneliness far better than we ever have and is with us in it. He who became lonely for the lonely came to draw us into His embrace.

This is the same Jesus who cried aloud to His Father in whom he was one with, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

From intimacy to isolation, He came to rescue us from our lonely position.

We won’t always feel lonely. Right now we often do, but this won’t always be the case, and until then, perhaps we may discover, as Henri Nouwen once did, that “what seemed primarily painful may then become a feeling that, though painful, opens for you the way to an ever deeper knowledge of God’s love.”