Three Takes on Our Lonely Hearts
Three Takes on Our Lonely Hearts
This blog is adapted from my email newsletter.
Loneliness hurts. We all know that. But I’m not sure most of us think of it as deadly.
Yet the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, called our social isolation a “public health crisis.” A lack of belonging can harm your physical health, inflicting the same damage as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, leading to strokes and other debilitating illness.
Lonesome is more, then, than an uncomfortable feeling. More than the pangs of the lovelorn coping with long-distance phone calls. (Not that that’s a picnic, as I can look back on and attest.) Loneliness springs from more than the packed schedules that crowd out time for friendships. It’s more than feeling awkward at a party when you scan the room for a conversation partner. It’s more than a loved one’s rebuff that leaves an occasional inner bruise.
Take One: Lonesome Is All Over, Everywhere
A feeling of emotional distance is a universal part of being human. But it seems more pervasive than ever. An “epidemic,” Murthy said.
And it’s not easily going away. Young people are twice as likely to say they are lonely compared to those over 65. Baby boomers say there are fewer folks in their lives now whom they depend on emotionally.
Even with people in our lives—family, friends, neighbors—we sometimes feel a dull ache, a restless yearning for warmth, a yearning to connect more deeply with those we love and feel loved by (or rejected by). We long to belong. Loneliness feels especially acute when we’ve lost a loved one to death or chronic disease.
But I’m still not sure we know why we feel not just lonely, but lonelier, especially when our lives seem so crowded with people, bustling streets, noisy neighbors, and maybe some days, it seems, too many folks. It’s possible to feel friendless when a crowd surrounds you. It’s possible, as someone cried out online during his pandemic lockdown, to be lonesome in a houseful of people. I don’t think the pace of life or the after-effects from COVID restrictions explain fully what we experience. The source of our malaise here has more at root, and at stake.
Take Two: We Don’t Do Community So Great
We have a habit, for one thing, of overestimating the resources of our own singular selves. “I’d rather do it myself” is more than an advertising jingle from when I was young. We may have a resistance (or at least reluctance) to admit how much we need the help and presence of others. We sense a stigma attached to our longing, a tinge of shame if we haven’t found the resilience we think we should in our own little selves.
And we think we can expertly curate the essentials of our lives. So, writes David Zahl, “Much of life these days involves being inundated with formulas and fixes. Login to Instagram, or simply talk to peers at a dinner party, and you’ll hear about new ways to consolidate your energy, organize your priorities, maximize your property value, get bigger, stronger, faster, younger, happier.” Just by trying harder, in other words, you’ll feel soul-satisfied. No wonder Build the Life You Want is the title of Oprah Winfrey’s latest book.
Is it that simple, though? Relying solely on self-determination sounds pretty solitary, on the face of it.
Our wisest mentors tell us that we are not ourselves by ourselves. A “we” has gone before any “me.” I’m no more self-made than anyone else who was brought into the world through birth—a process that needed from me no input. And I won’t find what I most need if I just “do me” while “you do you,” each of us cramped by our perpetual silos. We are created to live in community, not autonomy.
Take Three: It’s about More Than Being Fixed for Friends
To be sure, life is more whole when we acknowledge a debt to family and dear ones. But we are more than made by and for people; we are also formed by a larger Relational Reality. So I’m seeing even deeper rumbling under our wants—especially given the work and study I’ve been doing lately with the resources of a seminary library. There’s a cosmic dimension at play: We carry on our lives through a self that has been made by and for the Divine. There’s more tugging at us because, as the biblical tradition has long argued, we are created by God. We are fashioned by one who made us, in turn, to relate back.
God made us? That would open all kinds of possibilities. Might not living each day with that conviction change everything--especially if the one who called us into being also cherishes us?
I’m seeing, as I immerse myself in ancient sages and talk to some wise folks right at hand, that some thinkers have so stressed the grandeur of God that they’ve neglected the warmth of God. We might forget that the One who inspires also invites. Awed reverence is vital, yes, but so also encounter—even conversation.
All this explains my interest in God as Trinity, the focus of much of my reading lately as a Visiting Scholar at Princeton Seminary. A God overflowing with communal richness at the foundation of the universe? An infinite love that offers to become intimate?
When we take walks in our southern Virginia neighborhood (or during these couple of months at the Seminary, the lovely tree-lined streets of Princeton) I sometimes tell my wife, Jill, how I’ve been moved by the picture of God as a warmly interpersonal Being. I know: not necessarily what you think of as typical domestic conversation. “You’ve always had higher intimacy needs than me,” Jill once said when I was talking about my friends, my fascination with a highly relational God, and we laughed at that, recognizing how I bring a need for connection to everything, even to my praying.
And I’m also seeing insight in Jill’s comment. A transcendent and yet close-by Presence can loosen the steely grip of feeling alone. A personal God helps with all kinds of loneliness, including the cosmic kind. The vast Deity becomes One whom the poet John Donne the named the “three-person’d God.”
And so in the church’s and the Bible’s vision of God I’m catching glimmers of more than a remote heavenly vagueness. This Ground of Our Being becomes an interrelating Presence.
In the portrait of Father, Son, Holy Spirit emerges a love that will go to any length, as Princeton prof Daniel Migliore said to me in conversation, to invite us to share in the heavenly community and communion. This God keeps at it even through God’s own costly sacrifice—a Cross extended as a bridge.
So I’m mining the realities (and struggles) that people like me routinely have—life’s grubby (and sometimes heartbreaking) particulars, placing all that against a backdrop of spiritual possibilities. I’m piecing my way in lonely moments toward a relatable God who sees what we lack and what we long for most. Who sees and wants to help.