Being in solitary confinement must be one of the hardest and most intimidating experiences that any human being can go through. Sometimes people are placed in solitary confinement for their own protection. Sometimes people are placed in solitary confinement because they have done something wrong. Other times, and all too frequently though, people are put in solitary confinement for political reasons – to break them down.
It sounds like an awfully negative thing to talk about on a beautiful Sunday morning, doesn’t it? And, sometimes we make light of solitary confinement, as if it is a joke. For those of us old enough to remember Hogan’s Heroes, people were thrown into what was called the “Cooler” and they came out just as they went in. True solitary confinement isn’t like that at all! And, particularly for political prisoners, it can be devastating.
Why am I thinking about that this morning? Because very recently, in fact just two weeks ago, there was an article on the BBC website about the problems of solitary confinement, and prisoners, particularly political ones, who have to endure it. They concluded that solitary confinement is probably one of the greatest, if not the greatest, punishment that anyone can face. In the article, it concluded the following:
For some people, there is something terrifying about being placed in an environment where you are completely alone, isolated from others, and where you cannot connect to other people. Those inmates not affected by this isolation panic may still slip into long term depression and hopelessness. Then, the environment takes its toll on cognitive ability as the prisoner’s intellectual skills begin to decay. They may suffer lapses in memory. At the most extreme end, prisoners may even undergo a complete psychological breakdown.
Why is this important? It is important because it tells us about human nature. Human nature is such that we require the presence of other human beings for the stability of our lives, for our intellectual acuity, for our strength of purpose, and for the very soul that we have. We require contact, and contact is one of the most important things that any of us can have. If we are deprived of contact, if we are completely isolated and completely alone, it has a devastating effect on us, one that can be lasting.
Human beings were made for each other. Human beings were not meant to be alone. Human beings were created in the image of a God who embraced us and continues to embrace us. Being alone, being isolated is simply not what human beings really need. From the very beginning of the Christian Church, the Christian community knew this. They had a word to describe the antidote to that isolationism: Koinonia, and this means “fellowship.”
From the very earliest, the Christians understood from the Upper Room, from the moment the power of the Holy Spirit came upon them at Pentecost, that they would not be alone. The New Testament writers and particularly John I, this fellowship is a triangular thing. On one side of it is our relationship with Christ. On another, there is another person’s relationship with Christ. And at the bottom, there is our relationship with one another in Christ. It is as if there is this triangle of relationships: us directly with Christ; Christ directly with others; and others being in relationship with us
At the centre of this triangle is Christ. Christ is the one who holds these relationships together. You can see that manifested in John I. Four times in these earliest verses the word Koinonea, which is the Greek for “fellowship” is used. On every occasion there is one of these links that is stressed. We have fellowship with one another through Christ. We have fellowship with the Father and the Son. We have fellowship with one another. We have fellowship in this wonderful triangular way. It is Trinitarian. It is communal. It is a relationship, and a relationship that is necessary for the Church of Jesus Christ to exercise its ministry.
One of the things that drew the earliest Christians into the Church was the manifestation of this koinonia, of the reality of this very presence. It drew them into a deep relationship with one another, and those who had worshipped in pagan courts or those who had a singular relationship with some divine somewhere out there, saw within the Christian community a bond and a power and a strength that was koinonia. It was the fellowship of the Holy Spirit!
This, I think, is something that we need to continually remind ourselves of, continually reclaim in our own walk with Christ. Why? First of all loneliness can often lead to a wayward road. One of the dangers of loneliness – loneliness and isolation both, they are somewhat different – is that we think that we live on our own: it is only our ideas, it is only our attitude, and it is only our singular will that matters.
When that happens, according to John I, we can walk in darkness. In other words, if we are the only arbiters of what is right and wrong, if in our isolationism and our loneliness we are independent from God, and if we decide we are the ones who are going to set the path, then there is the danger for us to walk in darkness. This was the temptation for the EarlyChurch. The Johanine community knew of this problem for people had grown up in a culture that was very individualistic.
The Greek culture when John was writing was stressed absolutely the moral imperatives that the individual determines, and in fact with different philosophies and theosophies around it, people would embrace this “me” and “my” walk. But, the “me” and “my” walk can be a dark thing. It can be an independent thing. So independent that it lights up the imagination! And, from the imagination we dream all kinds of things: things that are not always of the light; things that are of the darkness; things that are only self-serving. We become absorbed with ourselves even to the point of forgetting the needs of others around us.
The answer, as far as John I was concerned, was fellowship. It is fellowship that reminds us that we do not do this walk alone. We do not and cannot walk in the light of Christ on our own: there is the need for us to be supported in the fellowship both with Christ and with others in this life.
A number of years ago I was privileged to preach in North Carolina. Some of you will remember that I went down there in a December and actually got stuck there for four days because there was an ice storm. All the power went out in High Point and Greensboro and Winston Salem. Flights were cancelled and there was ice hanging everywhere. It was interesting that after the storm was over there was tremendous damage done.
As you know, North Carolina is a very verdant and green state, with magnificent trees, and those arborists that went back and looked at the effects of the ice storm came to the conclusion that those trees that had this heavy, hanging ice on them, those trees that were close to one another, where the branches were interlocking, were able to survive the pressure of the ice. But trees that were standing on their own, even if they seemed healthy, had the weight of the ice and snow, break their limbs and crush them.
Is that not what it is like to walk alone and to walk in darkness? Is it not one of the great dangers of life that we live like that? But when we have the interlocking support, when we have the encouragement and the nurture and the protection of others, we have strength. I say this to people when they ask me, and I get asked a lot of times, why do I need the Church, why do I need the bother of everybody else, why do I need all the challenges of living in a Christian community with all its imperfections and its flaws. Can’t I just be my own person and be with my own God?
This is one of the great challenges of our time, because the Scriptures make it abundantly clear that is not the nature of the Christian walk. The nature of the Christian walk is, yes, to live in fellowship with Christ, but to live in fellowship with one another. Then, Christ is in the centre. Then, Christ is the one that holds us together. It is he, and he alone, who helps us walk in the light.
There is also a sense in which another danger of loneliness is one of abandonment. I see this as a pastor all the time. We run into people who feel that they have been abandoned by God. When you feel that you have been abandoned by God, the overwhelming feeling is loneliness and isolation. Hard times, illness, death, difficulty, unemployment, pain, disappointment: all of these things have their way of making us feel that we have been abandoned by God, and that God is actually no longer in fellowship with us.
One of the ministries of the Church, it seems to me, is to remind those who feel abandoned, both people of faith and people who have yet to have faith, that in fact that reality is not true. In that sense of abandonment and loneliness, in fact Christ can be present. Søren Kierkegaard once said: “Silence can be as God’s word to us, and you O Lord speak even when you are silent.” What did he mean? He meant that when it appears at times that God has abandoned us, God has not. The reassurance of the community of faith, the reassurance of other believers who have gone through those moments of abandonment, but have maintained their faith gives strength and support and encouragement to those who feel broken by that abandonment. Do not take God’s silence to mean God’s absence.
It also works the other way. In the clamour of the world, in all the demands of the world, the noise of the world, we sometimes feel alone, don’t we? We sometimes feel that it is too much change, too many people, too many issues, too many problems, too many injustices, too many natural disasters, too many things that crash upon us, and we feel like lone individuals standing against this torrent of things that are coming at us.
The great writer, Michel Quoist, who quoted on Monday night, and I think this quote touched a lot of people who were at Sunshine on Monday night, said that when we are faced with the troubles of this world, and when we feel alone in the midst of them, we need to hold on to our faith. He put it this way. I don’t usually read things at length, but just bear with me. This is one of the great prayers of a French Roman Catholic priest from the twentieth century:
Lord, why did you tell me to love all men, my brothers? I have tried, but I have come back to you frightened. Lord, I was so peaceful at home, I was so comfortably settled: I was well furnished and I felt cozy. I was alone. I was at peace: sheltered from the wind and the rain and the mud. I would have stayed unsullied in my ivory tower, but you, Lord, have discovered a breach in my defences. You have forced me to open my door like a school of rain in the face. The cry of people has awakened me. Like a gale of wind, friendship has shaken me. As a ray of light slips in unnoticed, your grace has stirred me, and rationally enough, I left my door ajar. But now, Lord, I am lost. Outside, men lie and wait for me. I did not know they were so near. In this house, in this street, in this office, my neighbour, my colleague, my friend, as soon as I started to open the door, I saw them: with outstretched hands, the burning eyes,
longing hearts, like beggars on the church steps.
The first ones came in, Lord. There was, after all, some space in my heart. I welcomed them. I would have cared for them. With my very own lands, my little flock, you would have been pleased, Lord. I would have served and honoured you in a proper, respectable way. Till then, it was sensible. But, the next one, Lord, the other people, I have not seen them. They were hidden behind the first ones. There were more of them. They were wretched; they were overpowering me without warning. We had a crowd come in. I had no room for them. Now they come from all over pushing one another, jostling one another. They have come from all over town, from all parts of the country, of the world, numberless, inexhaustible. They don’t come alone any longer, but in groups, bound to one another. They come bending under heavy loads, loads of injustice, of resentment and hate, of suffering and sin. They drag the world behind them with everything rusted, twisted or badly adjusted. Lord, they hurt me. They are in the way! They are everywhere! They are too hungry. They are consuming me. I can’t do anything more. As they come in, they push the door, and the door opened wider.
Lord, my door is wide open, but I can’t stand it anymore! It is too much! It is no kind of life. What about my job, my family, my peace, my liberty and me, Lord? I am losing everything! I don’t belong to myself any longer. There is no more room for me in my own home.
Don’t worry,’ the Lord says, ‘you have gained all, for while man came in to you, I your Father, I your God, slipped in among them.’
With all the crises in the world, and all that sense of loneliness and inability to handle it, Christ slips in. Is that not the Father and the Son and the Spirit breaking into our world? Never let those who see the calamities of the world make you believe that Christ is not there. Rather, go see Christ in the middle of it.
Loneliness has its deflections, thank God! There is more. There is hope. John I makes it abundantly clear: if we have fellowship with one another we can walk in the light. If we have fellowship with the Father and the Son, we can walk in the light. For the earliest Christians, after the Ascension of Jesus, something we have been looking at the last couple of weeks, they were assured that they were not alone, that in fact Christ was with them, and they were not just an ordinary community, not a human community like every other community, but rather a community that was rooted in koinonia, in fellowship.
This was the comunitati dei, the Community of God. The earliest Church understood that. John I is writing to hold on to that: you are not just like everybody else; you are not just a fellowship that exists like everything else; you are a fellowship in which Christ is at the centre; you are a fellowship in which you live in a bond of community with one another.
I think one of the great tragedies that we sometimes buy into, and one of the reasons perhaps why the Church has had a crisis is that we have gone along with our fellowship and our community with a belief that the end of it all is to go on to the community, to join the community, to be present in the community, as if that is enough. It never was enough. It never will be enough. It is much more! It is a fellowship. It is a fellowship of the Spirit. It is living and walking in the light of the presence of Christ. It is the assurance of his presence, and our fidelity one to another.
Does this mean that we are perfect? Does it mean that koinonia means that as simple human beings we all live in some sort of nirvana of protection and innocence and of peace? No! But John knew that we are forgiven. He says that if we walk in fellowship with one another, then the blood of Christ that forgives our sins is our strength and our power. Koinonia is not an ideal human state; it is a divine state created by God’s grace and God’s forgiveness. When we feel the loneliness and we feel that the powers are too great for us and when we are just lonely, we must not forget the fellowship of the Spirit.
When he was in prison, Dietrich Bonheoffer was put in isolation. He was put in a cell on his own with the hope that it would break him and that he would deny his God and lose his faith. In the midst of it, he has a personal crisis. So, he decided to sit down and write a poem about the crisis of loneliness and of isolation and being deprived. He starts to question himself. In one of his most famous poems, his last stanza, entitled Who Am I? says it all:
Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, 0 God, I am Thine!
Whoever we are, we are Christ’s – the complete antidote to loneliness! Amen.