LONELINESS IS NOT ISOLATION; IT’S INSULATION.
Loneliness is more than the absence of people. What comes to your mind when I say the word lonely? What’s your image of loneliness?
Careful—Loneliness is a much more universal emotional condition than that. We all feel it at times. Some people we’d least expect to feel lonely are seldom free from the gnawing pain. It lurks under many a jolly mask, and pulses in the hearts of the most gregarious and outgoing.
Loneliness has little to do with the absence of people. We can feel lonely in any crowd of people Loneliness is the anxiety of unrelatedness, the disturbing realization of our separateness. It is an aloneness in which we feel an acute, chronic, nondirected sense of alienation. It’s when we realize that we are unique, distinct persons with centers of individuality which we long to share, and yet fear exposing, all at the same time.
“Loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon peculiar to me and
a few other solitary men, is the central fact of human existence” (Thomas Wolfe).
Sometimes to get out from under loneliness we get ourselves too busy. Our time is overloaded with endless activities because we fear having to be alone. We long to have friends; then, when we have them, we are alarmed because the feeling of loneliness persists. I am constantly amazed at the loneliness I hear expressed in otherwise adjusted and competent people. It comes out in an unguarded comment, a look in the eye, or undeniable body language.
We never need to walk it alone. The God who created us has come to walk it with us. In Jesus Christ he has come to heal the essential cause of loneliness. If we define loneliness as the anxiety of unrelatedness, then we can affirm a basic purpose of the incarnation as God’s reestablishment of our relationship with him and one another. He came into a lonely world where people were estranged from him and one another, and revealed the way of intimacy with him and others as the cure for loneliness. From Bethlehem to Calvary—God offered love as the antidote for our loneliness.
Loneliness is none other than homesickness for God. It’s inbred in us. We cannot escape it. Nothing or no one in this world can fill it. The Greek root of this word is made up of two parts: nostos for “return home” and algos for “severe pain.” There is a pain of loneliness in all of us to return home.
Lord, Thou art life, though I be dead;
Love’s fire Thou art, however cold I be:
No heaven have I, nor place to lay my head,
Nor home, but Thee
—Christina Rosetti
Our loneliness is a “homing instinct.” Just as animals, birds, and fish have a homing instinct capable of leading them back to their original habitats, so we have a loneliness to be home with God. We’ve all heard of dogs or cats that have found their way home after being lost at great distances. God has placed the same instinct in us. And intimate communion with him is our home. God came himself to show us the way. That’s the impact of Jesus’ I am declaration: “I am the way…no one comes to the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). Yahweh himself came to heal our loneliness.
It was on the night before Jesus was crucified that he gave the secret for overcoming loneliness. His disciples were feeling the loneliness of impending separation from him. They feared what was about to happen. Jesus’ somber predictions about his death were about to come true. What he said to give the courage is our hope in loneliness.
Jesus came from the heart of God to show us the way to the heart of God. That’s the secret of healing loneliness, the homesickness for God. The healing of loneliness begins with Christ’s leading us home. Christ is not only the way to God, but the way to our true selves.
There are several ways of living with other people which will banish loneliness that Jesus often talked about: 1) Jesus’ way is nondefensive—People feel our insecurity and read back to us in their attitudes what we are feeling about ourselves. And so we continue to be shut up in the prison of loneliness. 2) Jesus’ way is acceptance—People long to be with a person who accepts them as they are. 3) Jesus’ way is nonjudgmental—He made it painfully clear that judgmentalism always boomerangs: “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get” (Matthew 7:1-2). 4) Jesus’ way is the way of forgiveness—His promise of our forgiveness has a burr on the end of the hook: “For if you forgive men their trespasses your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:14-15). 5) Jesus’ way is vulnerability—this dynamic ingredient means openness about ourselves and a willingness to share both the difficulties and joys of our lives. 6) Jesus’ way is the way of initiative love—most people are so insecure that they will wait to be loved before they are free to love. 7) Jesus’ way out of loneliness involves being part of a movement that is following him in changing the world. He wants to give us the gift of solitude in which he can transform those things in us which keep us from satisfying relationships with people, and he longs to enable us to be people who conquer loneliness by being wound-healers in others.
