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The Peculiar Gift of Loneliness

by Christian Huebner 

Earlier this year, I did what thousands and thousands of my peers did. It was the same thing that thousands of my older friends and peers did last year, and the same thing that thousands of my younger friends and peers will do next year: I moved out on my own.

In my case, this meant finishing school and taking a job in a new town, Houston, Texas.

There’s a certain thrill of adventure in moving out on one’s own. Touching down at Bush Intercontinental Airport this summer, I was downright giddy. The world didn’t know what was about to hit it.

That feeling lasted until the rental car counter. After the friendly girl there gave me directions and pointed me out the door toward my car, everything changed. The world, all at once, hit back. Wait, I suddenly wanted to beg the girl at the counter, you’re the only person I’ve met here!

By most estimates, well over a quarter of all Americans today live alone. This is up from less than 10% midway through the last century.

Beneath the stats are untold numbers of stories like mine. I’d certainly seen it before: in reports from friends who, like me, finished school, found some apartment in some city and set up life. There was often a note of sadness in their accounts. After a lifetime of readymade community at home and in the academy, the shock of starting from scratch was profound. They felt confused; they felt isolated; they felt a little desperate and they also felt sheepish for feeling that way. 

In a word, they were lonely.

A wise friend and priest once told me that he thought one of the great spiritual scourges of our days was loneliness. Whereas earlier eras had to battle different kinds of fears and trials, it seemed to him that loneliness was a preeminent affliction for our time.

My hunch is that he’s right. In some ways, loneliness is a natural consequence of many of the new traditions of modern living.

For us in the younger set, the custom of striking out solo and postponing families may set the stage for loneliness. Among the middle-aged and elderly, the prevalence of divorce and the rise of nursing home culture are similarly isolating.

It would be naïve, however, to suppose that loneliness only afflicts those who live by themselves. As my priest friend pointed out, the dominant narrative of our age says, on the one hand, that we are orphaned refugees on a little speck of rock on the outskirts of an unspeakably vast universe, and on the other hand, that our best hope is to sink ourselves in pleasures – physical, emotional, relational – which, while often good, cannot ultimately alter a basic sense of separateness. That narrative of aloneness and false escapes reaches us whether we spend our days by ourselves or in community.

That is not the last word, however. Loneliness may be an epidemic on the large scale, but for an individual Christian the disease can be transformed into medicine.

That, at least, was my experience this summer. 

The first week was rough. The feeling of anonymity and distance from those who loved me was downright oppressive. 

But at the same time, I noticed something. Or rather, I noticed someone: Jesus. Through the lens of loneliness, He was more visible than perhaps any other time in my life before or since. I could see Him in the dirty, mumbling man asking for drug money; I could see Him in the businessman waiting at the crosswalk with a weary face; and I could see Him, oh-so-familiar, on the crucifix in church. I could see Him because He was the One who took all loneliness into Himself, and having even just a little taste of loneliness of my own, I could recognize Him better.

The English poet William Blake said this much more beautifully, back in the 18th century:

O! he gives to us his joy
That our grief he may destroy;
Till our grief is fled & gone
He doth sit by us and moan.

Blake saw the peculiar gift of grief: the close presence of Christ. When we are lonely, Christ is lonely with us. And that, strangely, is the best sort of cure, because it opens us to unity with the Lord, in our private hearts and in other lives where we see Him.

 

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)