LONELINESS

“Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.” (Henry Rollins)

I am basically a lonely person. I have a lot of good friends, my family all lives here and we get together regularly, my wife and kids are great, I like to laugh and have a good time, and I think that I am pretty funny and warm, but by nature, I am a lonely person. I always have been. When I was younger I used to interpret my introversion and self-reflection as rejection. As I have gotten a little older I have started to appreciate my melancholy disposition, but there is one area where I have not quite been able to find peace with this part of me. My attempts at connecting with God are often full of frustration and disappointment. This frustration will usually lead me down the road toward some form of nihilistic doubt that will, at least temporarily, cause me to feel isolated. This sense of spiritual loneliness was never appreciated very much in the church, especially when I was a youth minister. Youth ministers shouldn’t struggle with spiritual loneliness. If he does, he should not bring it with him the youth group. Youth group is expected to be energetic, fun, and wild. Bible studies are expected to be morality-driven relevance. Worship can take a tone of seriousness, but it needs to quickly be followed by something upbeat. And mission work should cause one to be humbled, but by the time the youth returns to the church, the youth minister should have prompted the youth to reflect on the whole experience positively. This modern idea about how one should feel about their spiritual identity can also be found in other areas of the church as well, but my time as a youth minister only made my loneliness that much worse.

In “Reaching Out”, Henri Nouwen addresses loneliness and put it on a continuum with solitude. I will confess that I always have hoped that my spiritual loneliness was just a personal misunderstanding of the discipline of spiritual solitude. Nouwen argues that, “The spiritual life is that constant movement between the poles of loneliness and solitude.” The goal of this critical movement in spirituality from loneliness to solitude is from feelings that I have described in myself to ones of deep intimacy with God marked by contemplation, insight, and intimacy. But the point is that the two are related and that in order to move to deeper levels of solitude then one must periodically return to loneliness. The modern church packages faith as a constant and steady movement from sinner to saint, but the truth is that spiritual maturity is erratic and often static. The movement forward often requires regular movements backward. Growing in one’s faith usually requires a constant struggle with where we came. Ironically, the modern church’s conviction that maturity is constant leads many to feel that they are not maturing at all and misunderstand their struggle. I do struggle with (and will likely always struggle with) loneliness, but I can’t dismiss the work God is doing in me in those times and neglect to experience the solitude that I am beginning to embrace.

Soren Kierkegaard writes that the knight of faith must accept isolation as he strives to make sense of the constant paradox in which he exists. I have no illusion about being a knight of faith, but I would like to think that my experiences with loneliness position me for such a transition.