Solitude and seclusion give life to the spirit. A life seeking and being sought by spirit is, even in the midst of community and action in the world, necessarily a solitary and even lonely life. How else to blunt the power of the many distractions that seem to consume us? We are good at marshalling distinctions: solitude, being alone to the Alone, is not loneliness, we say. Distinctions are helpful. But experience is never as tidy as our intellect would like it to be. Deep meditation and prayer, that profound communion when one is present to the Presence that overwhelms as it embraces, is a kind of lonely experience. One might feel amazingly close, where one truly belongs, and at the same time, amazingly far—from others, from the daily world, from what—we cannot say.
Reflecting on the variety of our experiences of loneliness can be a helpful guide through this inner territory.
Howard Thurman, a mystic rooted in the Christian tradition who embraced many traditions in friendship and co-founded the
Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, points the way. In
The Inward Journey, one of his many books of meditations, he writes about loneliness. His words, written in 1961, seem even more apt for our age, caught up as we are in a social media feeding frenzy.
#96. Your Loneliness
What do you do with your loneliness? One of the massive results of the invasion of privacy so characteristic of our times is the increasing fear of being alone. Loneliness is of many kinds. There is the loneliness of a great bitterness when the pain is so great that any contact with others threatens to open old wounds and to awaken old frenzies. There is the loneliness of the broken heart and the dead friendship when what was full of promise and fulfillment lost its way in a fog of misunderstanding, anxiety, and fear. There is the loneliness of those who have absorbed so much of violence that all hurt has died, leaving only the charred reminder of a lost awareness. There is the loneliness of the shy and the retiring where timidity stands guard against all encounters and the will to relate to others is tilled. There is the loneliness of despair, and the exhaustion of the spirit, leaving no strength to try again, the promise of a the second wind can find no backing. There is the loneliness of death when silently a man listens, one by one, to the closing of all doors, and all that remains is naked life, stripped of everything that shields, protects, and insulates.
But there is loneliness in another key. There is the loneliness of the truth-seeker whose search swings him out beyond all frontiers and all boundaries until there bursts upon his view a fleeting moment of utter awareness and he knows beyond all doubt, all contradictions. There is the loneliness of the moment of integrity when the declaration of the self is demanded and the commitment gives no corner to sham, to pretense, or to lying. There is the loneliness in the moment of creation when the new comes into being, trembles, then steadies until the path takes them out beyond all creeds and all faiths and they know the wholeness of communion and the bliss of finally being understood.
Loneliness is of many kinds. What do you do with yours? (130-131)
