I write this with sensitivity to the subject of loneliness. I ached with loneliness for many years. I recall my youth as one long loneliness, partially due to my being a clergyperson as a teenager and partly due to having undiagnosed ADD and depression.
A vivid memory, which keeps returning to me even now, at age 62, is of a day during high school. I am outside alone, leaning against a wall in the cubby of a walkway. Others are at lunch... a lonely boy, isolated, and in a "world" different from my peers.
A second such remembrance is of sitting outside my apartment near the campus. I was in college. Cars passed in the night on the highway leading into the college town. I seemed alone in my little world, the rest of the world - the big world - out there enjoying friends and family. The isolated, aching youth was still there, thinking of all the others sharing together that night.
This writing is not for sharing my story of what all led to that loneliness or how loneliness was transformed into a contented aloneness. Yet, the writing arises from some things I learned along the way that allows me to be at peace living alone.
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A hiker loses his way in a forest. For days he searches for a way out. He cannot find a way out. His loneliness becomes almost unbearable.
Another hiker loses his way in the forest. For days he searches for a way out. He cannot find a way out. His loneliness becomes almost unbearable.
After a few days, the two men come upon one another. They are enthused at this apparent good fortune. They search for days for a way out. They cannot find a way out. Their loneliness is almost unbearable.
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We are spirit reaching out to commune with, to love, spirit. These bodies are means for fellowship: often, I call this heart-with-heart communion. Yet, if we do not go to a place where there is aloneness but not loneliness, we use others to escape our ache for connection beyond the interactions of personalities with personalities.
The place is within - of course, to say "within" can be misleading. The place is no place. If there were "the land of spirit" on a map, it would be all over and off the map. The map comes out of it. We do sense a going within, a withdrawal from the world of forms.
Going within is intimacy with that you are - we together are - not your appearance or the others' appearances. We are not appearances; we are that in which appearances appear and disappear. Contentment within is found in discovering what is but is a nonappearance.
Could this be what Jesus points to, saying, "You are in the world [forms, apperances], but you are not of it"? Why not of it? You are not the world. You are that which has entered this world of time and space. You move about among forms, living embodied, to discover yourself in others through love.
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When coming from the True Self, spirit reaches out to others, not as an escape, but as sharing the fulness of being with others needing that grace. We sometimes perceive a sharing with someone or a group living from the fullness, also. This is likely to be rare in secular cultures.
Modern societies have alienated themselves from spirit, immersing in the world of shifting forms and losing touch with intangible Presence. Everything becomes about altering forms to produce bigger, faster, and more advanced forms. We lose ourselves in this incessant production mentality. We are not lost by being bad but by forgetting who we are, if we ever knew in the first place.
One reason we humans suffer from loneliness, though we think we do not by silencing it with indulgence in interaction and activity, is we do not know ourselves. We think we are persons: i.e., personalities. We mistake noise for fellowship. In true communion, there will always be some sense of it arising from the silence.
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Coming from the illusion of being an individual - one divided off, so separate - we cannot elude loneliness. We share loneliness with others in the bluster of the collective. For a time, we submerge awareness of loneliness in the crowd chatter, the group do-this-and-that. We are stimulated temporarily and keep returning to appear acceptable to others by our performance, showing we are not lazy or anti-social navel-gazers. If someone enjoys quiet and solitude, not needing to impress others by partaking in their mutual admiration club, there is a derogative label: a loner.
This is not to say such collective togetherness is wrong. I am not here speaking of right and wrong. Any togetherness is healthy for us. Yet, not all togetherness is equal. If someone is not prepared to address their innate loneliness, I would not advise them to sit alone and indulge in it.
Yet, at some point, one may be ready to inquire into why she or he cannot escape loneliness by engaging with others. Loneliness can be seen as a grace, an opportunity to ask who or what we are beyond existing as one self among a myriad of other one selves.
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We need time apart from others to address the illusion from which loneliness arises. We need to sit with the sense of loneliness, the urge to escape into the crowd, the doing, the talking. This withdrawal assists in detaching from using others to fill our sense of emptiness. Then, by a return to our True Selves - spirit, fulness - we can bring aloneness into the collective. This aloneness is not a scarcity; it is a plenitude sharing but not losing anything of its fullness. You become like a well others draw from to refresh themselves but without the capacity to give decreasing at all.
To say we are spirit is to say we are a single presence. Presence is not individual. Love manifests as presence sharing with presence.
*Use of photography is allowed accompanied by credit given to Brian K. Wilcox and title and place of photograph.
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse.
