"Lonely, But Not Alone"
Alone in a crowd.
Sermon Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Text: John 16:25-33
I had just finished a pastoral visit in a 14th floor condo apartment. I was waiting for the elevator to come and take me down to the lobby when around a corner came a lady. She stood next to me, also waiting for the elevator. She seemed eager to enter into a conversation, and started talking about the condominium and how it was being run, and what the Board was doing. She said she would have preferred a lighter shade of carpet in the halls, and maybe more money spent on emergency lighting. I concurred, and we got on the elevator together.
On our way down, she leaned towards me and said, “I must tell you, you are the quietest neighbor I have ever had.” She continued, “Every now and again, you do play Vivaldi and Wagner a little loudly.”
I thought, “Clearly, this is not an accurate statement, because I have been listening to Hoobastank and U2' s Vertigo, recently” but I nodded knowingly and said, “Oh, thank you.”
We got to the lobby, and she said, “It's amazing, you know, that all the time you have been in this building, we have never met until right now.”
Not wanting to cause her any embarrassment, I bid her a good day, and we went out separate ways. The encounter got me thinking about a poem that describes urban life at the end of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st. What many people experience in their lives today is proximity without community.
In other words, we are surrounded by people in a growing metropolis, but in the midst of it, community is breaking down. We might be rubbing shoulders with people, but we do not know who our neighbours are, as was the case with this woman. We might feel that we are surrounded by a great crowd of people, but in reality, community, love, nurturing, communication, shared events and experiences, common goals are often dissipated. We have proximity without community.
Over the last week, there have been numerous tributes to the great playwright Arthur Miller. Why is it that Arthur Miller is so well loved and respected? What is it about his plays that makes him so winsome? I think one need only look at the most famous of them, Death of a Salesman, to realize that Arthur Miller was able to capture in a dramatic form much of the alienation that exists in this Western, capitalist society. Willy Loman was someone who was alienated from his work; he was alienated from his wife and son; and ultimately, he was alienated even from himself.
Here was a man who, in an urban world, had much proximity, but very little community, and when he faced a crisis in his life, the crisis of identity, he was alone. He was a lonely and pathetic figure. Arthur Miller made this story almost universal in its application: Anyone who watches this can see some seed, some germ of his or her own experience of the world.
Now, agreed, during the 1950s and into the 1960s, some of the existential philosophers almost glorified this sense of loneliness. They romanticized these victims of a growing capitalist society, where people were experiencing the alienation of the world around them, and so in a Marxist analysis, were alienated even from the means of production and from their source of work. In many cases, these lonely figures were picked out as romantic examples of all that was wrong with our society.
The fact is, there is no romance in this degree of loneliness. There is nothing wonderful, nothing to celebrate, nothing to suggest that loneliness is a glorious state of affairs. On the contrary, this kind of loneliness is a terrible experience for the one going through it.
Our text today from John is part of a long series of events leading up to the last days of Jesus' life, his death and his resurrection that John's Gospel lengthens and expands beyond any of the other gospels. In this passage from John 16, which probably took place on the Mount of Olives or somewhere in that vicinity, Jesus is sharing with the disciples the fact that he will not only be leaving them, but that they themselves are also going to experience this very sense of loneliness. He says, “All of you are going to be scattered.”
The word in Greek is “skorpizo,” and this is the equivalent of an Old Testament Hebrew word that describes the dispersion of the people of Israel during the Exile. Jesus is likening the experience that the disciples are going to have with that of the tribes of Israel during the Exile and the conquest. He tells them that they are going to be scattered just like them.
In other words, the community that they have with one another and with him is going to come to an end. What they now know as community is going to subside, and they are going to be alone in their own homes - scattered! Not only that but, Jesus too is going to be alone. He will bear the Cross, because only he can go there - they cannot go where he is going. Only he can do this. Then, Jesus says, “Yes, I might be alone, but the Father will be with me.” In other words, it might look like I am alone in going to the Cross, but somebody will be with me.
Now this has been part of a great debate in Christian theology for 2,000 years: Did God the Father abandon God the Son? Was Jesus really alone, or, did he only feel that he was alone? Did he simply experience the sense of loneliness, or was he actually discarded by the Father? John makes the case that Jesus might have experienced loneliness through the loss of the disciples around him, but he knew even on the cross, even when he cried out, that God the Father was with him.
This is important. He felt lonely, but he wasn't alone. He felt as if somehow he was isolated, but he was not. Then he said, “I will have the Father with me, and eventually you will have the Father with you. I am going to leave, but the Father will be there to care for you. You might experience loneliness when you are scattered, when you have had the breakdown of the community that you now know, but you will not be alone.”
This makes me ask this question: “What does this encounter between Jesus and the disciples say to people who are experiencing loneliness?” A couple of years ago, I dealt with this in the context of the church's mission, but now I want to go a little deeper. I want to go into the very heart of the lonely person, and into the mind of the lonely soul. I want to affirm two things. The first is that loneliness is a state of suffering: It is not something to be trivialized; it is not something to be washed over as if it is not important; it is a profound experience.
Sometimes I encounter, as I am sure that my colleagues Bill, Jean and Rick, and anyone who provides pastoral care do, lonely people who think they have done something wrong, that their loneliness is their fault. They think that because they are religious people, they shouldn't be lonely. Religious people, people of faith, should somehow snap out of it, and rise above it, and be better than that.
However, loneliness has many, many causes, among which is just a profound sense of alienation. Even from earliest childhood this sense of loneliness can be very powerful. Edgar Allan Poe, hardly someone that you would pick up for light and cheerful reading on a day like this, wrote in the opening stanza of a poem titled Alone:
From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
“And all I loved, I loved alone.” From the very earliest years in his life, Poe had this profound sense of loneliness. Sometimes, this loneliness is either created or compounded by the relationships we have with other human beings.
Sometimes, our loneliness is due to the struggle and strife of living with others. The German philosopher, Schopenhauer, has a wonderful example of how this feels. He says that lonely people are like porcupines. When we are cold, and living in that dark, isolated, “winter of our misery,” as he calls it, we are like porcupines. We like to huddle together with other porcupines to feel warm and embraced and cozy.
However, the closer porcupines get to one another, the more they feel the prick of the quill; the more they huddle together the more they experience the pain that comes from getting close to others and the sorrow attached to it. So, what do they do? They move away! They lose themselves in other things. They go out on their own. They abandon their community because of the pain they have been feeling. They cover themselves with their work; or with abusive situations - with many different things and they end up more alone than ever in the winter of their life. And then they simply die, never having really connected with others.
Sometimes people are lonely because of cruelty, and sometimes they are lonely because of broken relationships and experiences. It is not always easy to live in community, and sometimes people think it is better just to be alone, to go into isolation to keep themselves safe.
Sometimes people are lonely because of physical circumstances. Sometimes they are lonely because they are grieving the loss of a loved one. Sometimes it's because of broken relationships. Sometimes it is by being apart physically from the people they love, and so loneliness is a product of actually being alone. Whether you have done anything right or wrong has no bearing on loneliness. It is simply a product of losing the people that you love.
Sometimes we are lonely because of our own guilt. We would rather just run away from problems than face up to them. When I was watching a cricket game on television this week, I recalled how I used to get my friends together to play cricket with me. The only nice, wide-open space where I could get my friends to play was in the parking lot of the church where my father was the minister. I felt that being the minister's son, I had the divine right to do whatever I wanted with this parking lot - that it was mine by default!
My friends would set up a couple of wickets and we'd play our cricket match right in the middle of the church parking lot. I will never forget one day. It was a particularly good game, and one of the star players from our school was having an outstanding match. One of my friends bowled the ball, and this fellow hit it so hard, it went off the edge of his bat and flew up into the air. Now, a cricket ball is a very hard object. The ball flew through the air, heading towards a window. It hit the window, and as glass began to fall, I prayed: “Dear Lord, may that glass be clear!” But I watched as red, green, yellow and blue shards of glass came cascading to the ground.
Yes, it was a stained glass window in the little chapel. In horror, I turned to talk to my friends about what we should do, and realized they had all gone. There I was, wickets and bat in hand, ball through window, wondering if my life would now come to a sudden and ignominious end.
So, what did I do? I ran. I saw the deacon arriving for an evening meeting and I ran down the street as far as I could. I hid. I hid behind a fish-and-chip wagon down the road. I stayed there until very late into the night. There in the dark, not knowing what else to do, I felt alone. Finally, I gave up. The darkness spooked me more than my own fears, and I returned home. We will leave the details of what happened after that to another time… Suffice it to say, when you feel guilty, it's an awfully lonely place to be.
Many people experience guilty loneliness in their lives. No source of forgiveness, no hope, just loneliness. You see, my friends, loneliness is a state of suffering. There is nothing romantic about it. Whatever the source might be, and there are many others, it is a painful place. However, is that all there is to it, “loneliness hurts?”
No, there's more. Loneliness can also be a source of renewal. It can be argued that the greatest prophets of the Old Testament spoke when Israel was scattered. It was at the very moments when the Israelites were at their most vulnerable and their most alone that they grew in their faith. They looked into their hearts and realized that they could change. That exile was the coming of age for the people of Israel, just as Jesus' gathering the disciples before his departure was the coming of age for those disciples. Oh, they had their nice little community with Jesus and each other, but the reality was it couldn't last forever. They would have to go out into the world and perform their ministry. They would have to observe the cross; they would have to watch what God had in store. It would be difficult. It was their coming of age.
Sometimes loneliness can be our coming of age; it depends how we treat it. Alice Walker, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Color Purple, once wrote: “The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of one's people that has previously not been taken into account, a radical vision of the society in which you live.” Alice Walker says loneliness can cause us to stop thinking of ourselves and in our moments of loneliness, to have a greater affinity, a greater concern for the people, the society, the world around us.
Loneliness does not have to lead just to a spiraling decay. It can reignite within us a concern, a passion, and a love for the rest of the world. Loneliness can be a catalyst for creativity and action in our lives, just as it was for the disciples. They had to realize that they had a mission greater than just their own pleasure. They might be scattered, but their scattering was for a purpose: God's kingdom and God's will.
Sometimes our state of loneliness can set us free. The poet Sarah Teasdale once wrote:
A diamond in the morning
Waked me an hour too soon;
Dawn has taken in the stars
And left a faint, white moon.O white moon, you are lonely,
It is the same with me,
But we have the world to roam over,
Only the lonely are free.
Sometimes when we come to terms with our loneliness, we experience a new freedom. We realize that the things binding us that we formerly thought were important, in fact, aren't. Just being in proximity to our neighbors is not enough: We need community. To just gloss over life's problems is not sufficient. We need to deal with them. Simply saying we have a faith is not enough, if it is not a faith that breeds a living relationship. The freedom of being lonely can lead us to address those things that actually bind us.
Loneliness can be a source of hope, and even more so, it can cause us to seek out others who are lonely. If we don't get in touch with our loneliness, we simply live our lives at a superficial level. However, the moment you really feel that loneliness, you start to realize that there may be others who are lonely too, and being lonely alone, is not the way to be.
In his play “Camino Real,” Tennessee Williams has Don Quixote say, “When so many are lonely or seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone!” When we are at our most lonely, it is the time to reach out to those who are similarly alone. The church is at its greatest when those within it who are lonely decide they are not going to be lonely alone.
There is one other most important dimension. It is the dimension that Jesus offers. When he took his disciples to one side (and I am paraphrasing), he said, “You know, we might be lonely, but we are not alone. I might face the cross, you might face suffering, but the Father is with us.” What Jesus offered the disciples in their great despair, when all community was breaking down and all seemed lost, was the very hope, the reality that no matter how lonely they might be, they would never be alone. Although in the world you might experience only proximity, in the Kingdom you experience community: the loving presence of the living God.
Dag Hammarskjöld of the United Nations, one of the great men of the last century, said in one of his last interviews, “Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.” Jesus did exactly that. What he says to the lonely is: “Trust me. You are lonely, but you are not alone.” Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.