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March 18 - March 18, 2017
If you are a very sensitive person, who feels things deeply, you are probably, to some degree, lonely all the time.
realizing that loneliness is the ultimate threat, the final terror that can relativize all else.
Because of our loneliness, we often find it hard to make ourselves present to the moment.
I once met a nun who told me: “My vocation is, at each moment, to make the
person in front of me the most important person in my life!”
Would the complaint be as frequent if, when families and religious communities actually were together, the members really were present to each other? Too frequently, I feel, the problem is that even at those times when we are physically together, sharing a meal, a holiday, or a few hours of quiet or television, our minds and hearts are elsewhere and there is no real presence to each other.
our loneliness keeps us in a perpetual state of motion and does not allow us to stop our activities long enough to journey inward.
before being born, each soul is kissed by God and then goes through life always, in some dark way, remembering that kiss and measuring everything it experiences in relation to that original sweetness.
When we feel frustrated, angry, betrayed, violated, or enraged, it is in fact because our outside experience is so different from what we already hold dear inside.
In that place we are holy.
Is not all love simply a question of being respected for something we already are?
When we are in touch with this memory and respect its sensitivities, then we are feeling our souls. At those times, faith, hope, and love will spring up in us and joy and tears will both flow through us pretty freely. We will be constantly stabbed by the innocence and beauty of children, and pain and gratitude will, alternately, bring us to our knees. That is what it means to be recollected, to inchoately remember, to feel the memory of God in us. That memory is what is both firing our energy and providing us a prism through which to see and understand.
And it is in this deep center that we often feel wrenchingly alone.
More deeply than we long for a sexual partner, we long for moral affinity, for someone to visit us in that deep part of us where all that is most precious to us is cherished and guarded.
Anyone who deeply and honestly shares with us the struggles of her heart, her pains and fears, helps to make us more free. This is so because her story is really, in some way, our story. It is everyone’s story.
In a sense, all these stories make up one story, namely that of a people struggling to see the face of God, to pierce the riddle of loneliness, the mist of unreality, and to come to full meaning of life. Because it is a story of struggle, this story can shed much light on our own struggle to break out of the slavery of loneliness and to meet others and God in intimacy and love.
Alienation results because human beings speak the same language only when they appear to each other as they really are, vulnerable, without impressively constructed towers. Vulnerability is that space within which human beings can truly meet each other and speak the same language. Sin and pride serve to destroy this space and drive us away from each other, leaving us to babble in our own language as we scatter to our respective corners of the earth.
Unfortunately, we all have a propensity for building towers.
The Loneliness That Is Caused by the Transitory Character of All Things
“Vanity of Vanity! All is Vanity!” With these words, the Hebrew scriptures give a second reason for loneliness, namely, that all with which we come into contact in this life will eventually pass away. Ultimately nothing endures. Because of this we live in constant loneliness.
Again, this hints at a reason for our loneliness, namely, our potentialities and desires are much greater than we can ever fulfill in a lifetime.
This universe exists in time and is ordered according to certain laws. We, however, exist partly outside of time and, thus, are partly out of tune with this order. We perpetually experience a rift between ourselves and the order of things.
From this comes a certain loneliness, a certain restlessness, and a constant disquiet.
For a certain type of loneliness, the Hebrew scriptures do not have any answer. In essence, they see certain types of loneliness that can’t be satisfied. The best we can do with some types of loneliness is to bear them as best we can.
This answer for loneliness is to fully live each moment.
Rather, what is being advocated here is honesty, a realistic facing of reality, and an acceptance and enjoyment of each moment of life for what it really is, a great (but passing) gift.
This presupposes some pretty astounding capabilities on our part.
We are living in the final age of history, but are destined to be partly lonely until Jesus returns.
Our loneliness will be fully satisfied by our coming together in a radical union with God, others, and physical creation itself;
We are never more ourselves than when we are most in love.
Until that time, or until the time of our own deaths, we will always be partially lonely as we wait for the full kingdom.
The whole Christian life (that which has classically been called “the spiritual life” and which today we generally call “spirituality”) is nothing other than this, an attempt to strip aside the veils and mirrors, riddles and walls, barriers and shadows, fears and fantasies, facades and mists, and selfishness and unreality that separate us from God and each other.
really nothing other than our thirst and restlessness to return to God,
Complete rest for our lonely hearts will, according to him, come only when we are in full union with God and with each other and with all of reality.
Loneliness is what makes us dynamic beings.
We are built for the infinite, to be in perfect intercommunity with God and others. We hunger for this, long for it, and constantly and thirstily reach out for it. But, when we do reach out, we can meet and touch only particular persons and objects.
Our nature is built for more and it demands more.
It is the force that keeps us dissatisfied with pseudo- and partial solutions, with hedonistic and short-term answers. It is the force that keeps us dynamic, making us restless and dissatisfied when we are stagnant, and making us constantly second-guess all of our experience in the light of the very reason for which we were made.
Loneliness is God’s imprint in us, constantly telling us where we should be going.
surprised at ourselves. Far too often we are surprised at the powerful tensions inside us, surprised at the cataclysmic forces that so often stir deep inside our minds and bodies, surprised at our inability to be quiet and satisfied, surprised at the strength and unyieldingness of our sexual urges, and surprised simply at how much complexity and tension there is in being a human person. Thomas Aquinas was not surprised. Unlike Pascal, he did not marvel at the fact that a human person cannot sit quietly in his room.
According to John, if our loneliness is not handled meaningfully and channeled creatively, it becomes a highly dangerous force within our lives. It leads to what he terms “inordinate affectivity”13 and a corresponding selfish and unhealthy pursuit of pleasure. This, as we saw earlier, if not recognized and checked, can ultimately be destructive of our personality. 14
However, for him, the refusal to enter into our loneliness can condemn us to superficiality, to a life outside of our own depth and richness. Again, he employs a metaphor to explain this.
It means that, to the extent that we go through life running away from our own loneliness, we put a cellophane covering over our own depth and riches and live instead at the surface of our minds, hearts, and personalities.
The canyons of our minds and hearts are so deep and so full of mystery that we try at all costs to avoid entering them deeply. We avoid journeying inward because we are too frightened: frightened because we must make that journey alone; frightened because we know it will involve solitude and perseverance; and frightened because we are entering the unknown. Aloneness, suffering, perseverance, the unknown: All these frighten us. Our own depths frighten us! And so we stall, distract ourselves, drug the pain, party and travel, stay busy, try this and that, cling to people and moments, junk up the
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Eventually this journey leads to a deep peace, but in the early stages it causes intolerable pain. Why? Because we have stopped using anesthetics. We have stopped numbing, drugging, distracting, and deflecting our lonely thirst. Thus, deprived of anesthetic and of the cellophane covering of superficiality, we can enter and feel fully our own depth. We face ourselves for the first time. Initially this is very painful. We begin to see ourselves as we truly are, infinite caverns, satiable only by the absolutely noncounterfeit, infinite love. We see, too, how, up to now, we have not drawn our
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