The Spiritual Condition of Loneliness
Thomas Wolfe once wrote, “The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the assumption that loneliness, removed from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to just a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”[1]
For Wolfe, loneliness is the spiritual condition of humanity. For most of us, nevertheless, loneliness amounts to little greater than an issue of physical health. As is typical of a culture that sees spirituality as a purely private phenomenon, we’ve translated loneliness right into a matter of public health, selecting to think about its deleterious effects on an individual’s physical well-being. Those physical effects, amongst them hypertension, heart disease, obesity, and anxiety, are indeed harmful, but they continue to be symptoms of an underlying spiritual condition.[2] Why is loneliness at “epidemic” levels in an age that’s more connected than ever? If email represented a drastic recent infringement on our privacy, the arrival of smartphones and social media has only exacerbated the difficulty, further blurring the road between private and non-private life. In short, it takes serious effort to get away from the constant clamor of voices. Not even an airplane offers the reprieve it once did. Yet we remain desperately lonely.
The spiritual character of loneliness becomes clear once we recognize that it’s possible to be lonely in a crowd and content in seclusion. Think of the experience of being on a busy commuter train and still feeling lonely and isolated. Conversely, the novelist Marilynne Robinson speaks of her childhood in Idaho, where the word lonesome describes a sacred state of solitude that enlivened the mind and quickened the senses.[3] If loneliness were merely a physical problem, surely proximity to other human beings can be sufficient to mitigate its most severe effects. In fact, social proximity has left the issue of loneliness in our society largely untouched. Why? In a word, because we’re treating spiritual symptoms in purely physical terms. If we wish to confront the challenge of loneliness that’s wreaking such havoc in our culture, we must go to its spiritual roots—namely, our estrangement from Christ.
The Foundation of Relational Spirituality
In Conformed to His Image, I argue, “In the deepest sense, Christianity shouldn’t be a faith but a relationship that’s born out of the trinitarian love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”[4] In a time of great loneliness, fear, and isolation, we might all do well to dwell on the character of God’s love for us: “God’s loyal love for us is causeless (Romans 5:6), measureless (5:7-8), and ceaseless (5:September 11).”[5] Such abundant love is a mystery within the deepest sense of that word—namely, it’s a reality that exceeds our full comprehension. To make certain, this doesn’t mean that understanding the matter permanently evades us. Rather, it implies that we will never plumb the depths of God’s love for us. No time is ever wasted on contemplating the extravagance of our Lord’s love for us.
Because He first loved us, we must begin by dwelling on God’s love after which learn to see ourselves and others in the sunshine of it. If we fail to acknowledge the initiating motion of God’s love toward us, we cannot love properly. If it’s possible to be lonely on a crowded train, in a busy office, in a church, or in a wedding, it’s also possible for God to rework our loneliest moments into times of profound intimacy. This doesn’t mean that each one sadness is straight away eradicated from our lives, nevertheless it does mean that a significant relationship with our Lord grants us the steadiness of resting in His love slightly than continuously depending on others for affirmation and success. At its heart, loneliness is a spiritual problem, and as such, the one strategy to address it’s to deal with crucial relationship in our lives. Treating physical symptoms alone will offer temporary relief at best and ongoing despair at worst.
How can we prioritize our relationship with Christ? Ours is an age obsessive about methodology and technique. For this reason, we’re more inclined to read books or take heed to podcasts about the Bible, prayer, and church than we’re to truly read God’s word, pray day by day, and serve in our local congregations. Precisely because we’re at a moment of spiritual crisis in our culture. However, we must return to basics. In short, if we wish to cultivate a vibrant relationship with our Savior, we must recuperate the time-tested practices which have served God’s people down the ages. We must read our Bibles and commit generous portions to memory.
To those that object that memorization doesn’t come easily to them, think of the vast amounts of song lyrics, movie quotes, and other popular culture trivia that the majority of us carry around in our heads. We remember what we decide to dwell on. Sometimes, that’s a sobering thought. The problem is commonly that our imaginations have been nourished more by the broader culture than by Christ, His word, and His people. For those of us who follow Christ, prayer should be as routine as brushing one’s teeth. If that statement runs the danger of trivializing something as profound as prayer, let’s also guard against the tendency to raise our spiritual lives into irrelevance. If prayer is difficult, pray God’s word, starting with the Psalms. In God’s word, we have now all we’d like, whether it involves words of praise or lament. Finally, we must return to the pews and do greater than be consumers of “spiritual goods and services”—Eugene Peterson’s pungent phrase. We should be lively members in our local congregations, serving others, and helping to wash up the various messes, ours included. People are messy, but we serve God whose church prevails despite our shortcomings. In sum, start addressing your relationship with Christ by reading His word, praying, and attending church. Basic as all these practices could appear, they’re in desperate need of recovery.
If all of those practices are integral to at least one’s life, loneliness will stop to be an all-consuming problem. Naturally, we live in a fallen world and can proceed combating facets of loneliness. But we’ll not be in bondage to it. The tragic try and treat a spiritual malady in purely physical terms is a recipe for frustration and, ultimately, despair. By prioritizing our relationship with Christ, we can be liberated to like ourselves and others well because He first loved us.
[1] Thomas Wolfe, The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe ed. Francis E. Skipp (New York: Scribner, 1989), 492.
[2]Available online: https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/what-doctors-wish-patients-knew-about-loneliness-and-health#:~:text=Loneliness%20%E2%80%9Ccan%20have%20serious%20mental,memory%20issues%20and%20even%20death.%E2%80%9D
[3] Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 88.
[4] Ken Boa, Conformed to His Image: Biblical, Practical Approaches to Spiritual Formation (Revised Edition) (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2020), 16.
[5] Ibid., 14.
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Kenneth Boa equips people to like well (being), learn well (knowing), and live well (doing). He is a author, teacher, speaker, and mentor and is the President of Reflections Ministries, The Museum of Created Beauty, and Trinity House Publishers.
Publications by Dr. Boa include Conformed to His Image, Handbook to Prayer, Handbook to Leadership, Faith Has Its Reasons, Rewriting Your Broken Story, Life within the Presence of God, Leverage, and Recalibrate Your Life.
Dr. Boa holds a B.S. from Case Institute of Technology, a Th.M. from Dallas Theological Seminary, a Ph.D. from New York University, and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in England.
