One way to approach this is the way Henri Nouwen does in his book, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. These three movements are from Loneliness to Solitude, Illusion to Prayer, and Hostility to Hospitality. These movements relate, in order, to ourselves, God and other people. In classes I have taught and retreats I have led on spirituality, I title these three approaches: My Heart; The Heart of God; The Hearts of Others.
Earlier I explained that spirituality always begins in humility, as opposed to self-righteousness. From humility it moves to honesty. So, let’s be honest. We spend a good deal of time in life running from the truth, which means running from ourselves, from God, from other people. That’s why when we worship, we traditionally begin with the spiritual discipline of Confession, which calls for us to be brutally honest about all of our relationships, including others, God and yes, ourselves. Confession, in spirituality, is the bridge from loneliness to solitude.
It has long been argued
that one of the marks of the present age is loneliness. In fact, psychologists speak of it as one of the most commonly expressed complaint of clients. Nouwen writes: “The roots of loneliness are very deep and cannot be touched by optimistic advertisement, substitute love images or social togetherness. They find their food in the suspicion that there is no one who cares and offers love without conditions and no place where we can be vulnerable without being used.” [Nouwen, Reaching Out, 16]
This means we can be in a crowd and still feel lonely, or even in the midst of a group of friends or with family, and feel lonely. Whatever the source of our discomfort, the attempt to never be alone usually means we fear the opportunity (and it can actually be an opportunity) to explore what is going on inside of us. It may seem kind of strange, but in modern life most of us probably complain that we never have enough time alone, and then, when we are, we don’t really know what to do with ourselves. What I mean by that is that we don’t know what to do with Our Self, Our Soul. Oh, we may enjoy reading a compelling novel, or putting on headphones and listening to music, or watching a movie or tv show, but these can also be more ways to avoid “being alone” and do not automatically make us comfortable with our innermost self.
After our first child was born, Mary and I struggled with the family adjustment, as do many people. In fact, we decided to go to a marriage therapist. She met with us once, and then told us: "I don’t think you have a marital problem. You each have unresolved issues from growing up, and I think if we make progress with those issues your marriage concerns will also be resolved." Thus began months of long drives (200 miles each way) to Grand Forks, North Dakota for therapy. One Monday I would go, and the next Monday Mary would go. We had virtually no money, but our kind therapist kept a bill and told us to pay it when we could, which we did eventually, over a couple of years.
My issues, as I write about in my book, were around anger (at mom for having died, and at the world in general and God for the seeming unfairness of losing both parents and my first wife by the time I was 32), guilt towards dad (having avoided him as he was dying) and other forms of unresolved grief. At the time I was serving a small congregation in rural North Dakota where I could easily spend a whole day in the church office and never see a soul. As a result, extrovert-off-the-scale that I am, I made an office for myself in the parsonage. Meanwhile, when our baby would fall asleep in the nursery upstairs, Mary would go into the next room, where she had created a studio, to do art, enjoying the time alone, introvert that she is. However, when she would come downstairs to get a cup of coffee or a snack, I would run into the kitchen to see her so we could chat, which would interrupt her right-brain, artistic creativity as well as shortcut her sense of solitude.
One day Gail, my therapist, said to me: “So do you spend much time alone?” “Not if I can help it!” I retorted. “And why do you think you feel that way?” she replied. “I don’t know, I guess I just really like to be with other people.” “I know that,” Gail continued. “But what I want to explore is why you are so uncomfortable being alone.”
She then asked me to share one thing I really enjoy doing. I told her I like to golf.” “Ok, then,” she said, “This week I want you to go golfing alone.” “What,” I replied.” “I can’t do that. It is wrong to golf alone.”
“Oh,” she replied. “So for you this is a moral issue. If you see someone golfing alone, you think they are doing something wrong?”
I think you can see where this is going. In short, Gail kept asking me about things I like to do and then giving me the assignment to do them alone. Eventually this culminated in the assignment to go to our cabin in the woods of Minnesota and spend two days alone. You would have thought she had asked me to climb Mt. Everest.
These assignments were not easy for me, especially at first, but they became powerful learning experiences. What I soon discovered is that the reason I did not want to be alone is because it forced me to “think about my life.” And I didn’t want to do that: I didn’t want to think about mistakes I had made over the years. People I had hurt. People I had disappointed. Bad decisions I had made. I didn’t want to face the guilt and anger and grief. I did not want to face the extreme loneliness I felt whenever I was alone. And I would learn that the roots of my loneliness were not only psychological but, perhaps more importantly, they were spiritual.
I learned, as Nouwen puts it, “To wait for moments or places where no pain exists, no separation is felt and where all human restlessness has turned into inner peace is waiting for a dreamworld.” [19] And thus the first task in the move toward solitude is having the courage to face whatever is inside of us, and to be willing to live for a while with the questions that soon present themselves. And the way we begin this process is with humility, patience and trusting that we are loved and walk in grace every moment of life. Opened up in this way, we can then hear the instruction of Rainer Maria Rilke,
I want to beg you as much as you can to be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. [“Letters to a Young Poet”]
The bottom line is that if we are uncomfortable being alone it is because we are not comfortable with ourselves. As long as our pain goes unhealed and our feelings of anger and guilt and shame and fear not dealt with: well, being alone is likely to continue to be a time of loneliness that we avoid at all costs.
I once heard of a pastor who, as he was preparing for worship, received the news that his wife was planning to divorce him. His fellow pastors suggested that he just go home and they would handle worship. At that point he slammed his fist on a table and shouted, “I hope I die before I have to deal with everything inside of me.” Not long after that he had a heart attack.
Our spiritual lives will be much like our psychological lives when we refuse to face what is going on inside of us. As psychotherapist Sheldon Kopp once wrote:
And so it is astonishing that, though the patient enters therapy insisting that he wants to change, more often than not, what he really wants is to remain the same and to get the therapist to make him feel better. His goal is to become a more effective neurotic, so that he may have what he wants without risking getting into anything new. He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity.” [If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!]
And so, as we find the courage, strengthened by God and each other, to face the pain inside we begin the long journey to turn our loneliness into solitude.
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