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Loneliness
Reverend Brian J. Kiely,
Unitarian Church of Edmonton, February 11, 2001
In the newsletter I asked for help in planning this sermon on loneliness.
One reply was particularly eloquent, and while I have permission
to share it, the author prefers anonymity.
Dear Brian,
With respect to your service on 'loneliness' I wondered if you
would like some thoughts from an expert?
Your comment that there is a great gulf between being alone and
being lonely (is true). In fact, they aren't even related. A
person can be alone without being lonely; they can be miserably
lonely and
still not be alone. Alone is a state of the body; lonely is a
state of the heart.
Alone is, very often, something that one chooses
for oneself. It
is peace and quiet, a time for contemplation and introspection,
a regrouping of inner resources.
Loneliness is a craving of the spirit for connection. When it
happens in conjunction with 'alone', the result is devastating.
Loneliness
comes about because of a need to express to another the joy and
wonder at the good things that happen during each day, and to lighten
by
sharing the burden of the not-so-good things. It is a need to
be touched so you know you're alive and to be acknowledged so you
know
you're real. Loneliness is a need for someone to hold special
who in turn treats you as if you are special to them. Loneliness
is an
empty depression of the soul that can't be alleviated by self-talk
(such as 'get over it', 'pull up your socks', 'this is temporary
- hang in there').
I was deeply moved when I read this letter. I am not a man who has
spent a lot of time alone, meaning I have spent more of my life in
relationship than out. I don't think I have lived completely alone
for more than six months at a time. Still, loneliness has not been
a stranger. As my correspondent noted, alone and lonely are not the
same.
There is nothing wrong with being alone. There are many people,
especially a fairly large number of older women, who seem to prefer
the solitude of living alone. I sometimes wonder if their solitude
is not a reward of a sort for the years of devoted mothering and
partnering that may have asked them to give more than they easily
could. It might be that raising families asks some women to do some
deficit spending from their solitude banks, and that the choice to
live alone in their senior years is a repayment of that long-standing
debt.
I can't help remembering the observation of a friend who after a
year in Greece speculated that the happiest women in the villages
always seemed to be the black-kerchiefed widows. There is a heady
sense of freedom available to those who live alone. Many prefer it.
But living alone does not mean being lonely. Oh sure, there are
lonely moments, just as there are lonely moments for those with partners
and families. It may be as our author suggested that alone and lonely
are a doubly devastating combination. But I have noticed that those
who choose to live alone avoid the crushing effects of loneliness
by cultivating a few close friends, keeping in touch with children
and grandchildren, becoming active as volunteers or part of a social
group and so on.
No, loneliness can affect anyone. Even in relationship, there have
been moments, most often late at night, when its demons have plagued
my spirit. It felt as if even the parents, friends and lovers who
cared about me didn't really understand who I was or what I wanted.
And what was hardest, in retrospect, was that either I could not
find the words- or the courage- to tell them about those deepest
needs and feelings, or they did not really want to hear them. As
my writer says loneliness is 'craving of the spirit for connection,'
but sometimes people don't want to connect with us on our timetable
or in our preferred way. This can make us feel 'lonely in a crowd.'
There are few greater hungers in human experience.
Several years Thomas Moore wrote Care of the Soul. Moore is a former
priest and current psychotherapist, but his approach to living is
different from most therapies. Like our anonymous writer, he argues
that the complaints we make, including those about loneliness, are
symptoms of soul pain, and that instead of dealing with the symptoms
one by one, we should start at the center, at the soul and work outwards.
Moore suggests that the desire for community, the desire to end loneliness
is soul work of the highest order.
One of the strongest needs of the soul is for community...Soul yearns
for attachment, for variety in personality, for intimacy and particularity.
So it is these qualities in community the soul seeks out - not like-mindedness
and uniformity.
We long for true intimacy, to have another know us and support us
and lean on us. We desire a real connection, but it's so very hard
to create and maintain, partly because true intimacy is scary. True
intimacy knows few limits, few boundaries, and that gives us pause.
We humans are paradoxical creatures. We say we want life to be a
certain way, but aren't willing to do what we must to make it so.
We long for connection and intimacy but demand degrees of independence
and privacy.
On the one hand we are communal creatures. We live in a web of interdependence
with one another. Few of us are truly self-sufficient. We need work
partners and housemates. We need family and friends. We live in communities
and share workloads. Most of us even dream of a soul-mate of some
sort to whom we can unburden ourselves in times of stress, and with
whom we can share ordinariness in times of calm. We are by nature
storytellers who must recount our days and our lives in order to
make sense of them. For this we need listeners...but listeners who
are genuinely interested in us as people.
On the other hand, we are also solitary figures, physically independent
of one another and ultimately and finally alone with our thoughts.
There is so much that goes on inside each one of us, so much that
we could never communicate to another even if we wanted to do so.
I suspect I am not alone in wanting to preserve a little of my mystery,
to keep my few secrets to myself. I think we all have parts of ourselves
we would prefer to keep private.
At some level we are unknowable to others, solitary figures as Rilke
suggested. The sum of our essential selves will never be shared or
communicated, only parts of the whole.
The most intimate dimensions of our beings need solitude and the
safety of privacy. The most social dimensions of our beings need
sharing and contact and even love. It is a difficult balancing act.
Loneliness is the result of balancing too far into privacy and independence.
Loss of self and identity results from overbalancing into connection.
Both possibilities can be frightening. There are some who see the
ache of loneliness simply as the price of emotional safety.
It is easy to look at loneliness as something inflicted upon us
by a cruel and unfeeling world. If we are alone and lonely, it is
easy to fall into the self-pitying feeling that we have been mistreated
by the universe, that it is our fate to never meet someone with whom
we can bond. But that empty and frustrating feeling may be the fault
of our need for solitude and protection working overtime. Many of
us have more say in our loneliness than we think.
Thomas Moore suggests that because of our need for some protection,
we build walls that block us from participating in true community.
He tells a story of a woman who was always busy, always helpful and
had many friends, but who in the night often couldn't sleep because
of the racking pain of her loneliness. He believed that she had a
highly structured idea of what deep friendships should be, with very
carefully devised and overly moralistic standards. Because no one
ever quite measured up - could never measure up, really - she never
let her guard down. She was so in love with her idea of perfect friendship
that she never allowed herself to experience one for fear it would
not meet her expectations.
Loneliness is at least partly a function of past hurts and slights.
Every person experiences pain or betrayal. Whether it was an abusive
parent, a lover who hurt us badly or a friend who betrayed us, we
have all experienced these battering rejections and destruction of
trust. No one likes being hurt. So we learn wariness and caution.
We become a little more careful about our friendships each time we
get zinged. Even those of us who seem to form one bad relationship
after another build a gradually hardening shell until one day this
intimacy stuff loses its attraction. For awhile we are fine on our
own, maybe even feel free, until the demons find us.
Loneliness is the price of being safe from emotional hurt. It is
the tax for living behind walls. Some of us chose to erect those
walls. Others had them built for them by natural disaster, sexual
abuse, violent crime, illness or deformity. My heart goes out to
those who have been forced behind walls by unfeeling or even evil
people.
Well, if loneliness is a result of tipping the scales (or having
them tipped for us) too far onto the side of privacy and self-protection,
how can we restore the balance? How do we become un-lonely? Moore
says this is the wrong question. This is soul work , and soul work
is not about addressing the symptom, but about attending to our whole
selves through attending to the needs of the soul.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh,
a family woman who also loved her solitude said much the same thing
when she concluded that the difference between
chosen solitude and loneliness lies in self-awareness:
"When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged
from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one
cannot
touch others...Only when one is connected to one's own core is
one connected to others, I am beginning to discover."
We first have to make peace with ourselves, learn to like ourselves,
befriend ourselves before we can build real and intimate connections
with others. This is no small task, but it is an important one.
So what do we do if we are plagued by the demon loneliness? 'Lonely'
is a continuum of feeling and depression. Sometimes it is an aching
in the night that passes with the sunrise. We can often talk ourselves
out of that and ease the feelings by going out and being with people.
Thomas Moore writes, "A person oppressed by loneliness can
go out in the world and simply start belonging to it, not by joining
organizations, but by living through feelings of relatedness - to
other people, to nature, to society, and to the world as a whole."
Our writer acknowledged that some loneliness is a depression beyond
our ability to order ourselves to 'get over it'.
Those more deeply affected may benefit from a connection with a
therapist or, dare I say it? even a minister. That lonely feeling
can often hide a fairly easily removed self-built wall. The wall
is strong enough that simply being with people can't bridge it, but
having a deeper conversation with a good listener about feelings
sometimes can. I have often found talking to a therapist helps. Saying
the words, sharing the pain makes me feel not so very alone anymore,
and often what comes back helps me regain balance and insight. It
may not work for everyone, but it can help a great many. The problem,
is that real connection involves emotional risk. As Ficinio wrote, "The
one guardian of life is love, but to be loved you must love." And
that is risky. Starting with a listening professional can minimize
the risk.
There is one last alternative I would suggest, and it may sound
strange coming from a Unitarian Universalist minister. You could
try praying. I have spoken of this before. The act of praying might
reach the ears of some external god, but that is not so important.
The act of praying or meditating reaches deep inside us to a very
deep source of strength and wisdom. It can sweep one up and bathe
them in healing energy.
That kind of activity is soul work, for it attends to the whole
self instead of the symptoms. Meditation and prayer is a great gift
to our solitary selves. It is a self-blessing, an act of acknowledging
ourselves as hurting beings without being self-pitying about it.
Try it. If you don't know how, talk to me.
Loneliness is a fact of life. We will each experience it from time
to time, and that's fine. If nothing else it reminds us of our need
for connection, and sometimes points out to those of us in relationship
that we need to keep that connection in tune. Without the sad we
can't appreciate the happy.
But when loneliness becomes a constant companion, it is calling
us to look deeper inside, calling us to work on tearing down the
walls that isolate us, whether self-built or outwardly imposed. In
order to be loved, we must find ways to love. In order to find engagement,
we must find ways to engage. The first step, is to go inside our
walls inside ourselves and tend to our soul work. If we do this the
soul warms and grows until it expands through and beyond our suffocating
walls of loneliness. Then can we start building the bridge towards
others.
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