(I’ve hosted a few “Pastoral Chats” with Grace Fellowship folks over ZOOM™ in these days. It has given me the opportunity to teach on some issues that I believe we have needed to think about together at our church, but haven’t quite found where to fit it in the normal routine of things. A couple of weeks ago, I shared some thoughts on loneliness. Here is, essentially, that material adapted for the written form.)
Loneliness is endemic in the West. This is an unintended and difficult consequence of living in the most individualistic culture the world has ever known. Loneliness often results from a trade we have made: face-to-face interactions for pseudo-interactions. It is well noted that the ubiquitous nature of, and shift to, screen-mediated interaction has yielded extreme loneliness. Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman writes, “Cellphones help you stay connected to people who are far away from you. Cellphones allow you to stay connected…by keeping you at a distance.” Bauman is addressing a sad irony of late modern life: the more “connected” we have become the less connected we have become. The screen thing has somehow made us more lonely.
We also live in a culture that prizes the individual’s journey to finding disentanglement from all restraints (even the restraints of relationships). I’ll argue below that we would feel the aches of loneliness anyway, but our culture exacerbates loneliness, it seems. We want more than anything to be bound because we are made as social creatures, but we also have bought a lie that freedom is equivalent to being unbound.
It’s also more than a mental health issue.
I read a news story once, a report of Italian police that were called to an apartment when neighbors heard "weeping and wailing.” The police expected a domestic dispute. Instead, upon arrival, the officers found two elderly people, who were distressed by loneliness. So distressed that they were crying in pain. Reading this account made sense to me because it loneliness causes a pain someplace very deep.
Health researchers consider loneliness a public health crisis. Some say that the physical-health consequences of loneliness are akin to smoking cigarettes. Because we are whole people, loneliness does destructive things to our bodies’ functioning, also.
Loneliness is a pastoral problem, too. In my opinion, if you are a pastor and you aren’t thinking biblically, theologically, and pastorally-practically about loneliness, you probably should start doing so. Many folks in my own church struggle with loneliness and in my observation loneliness affects a wide range of people. Single people and married people. Successful people and struggling people. Spiritually mature people and less spiritually mature people. Busy people and those with ample leisure time.
I know about loneliness personally, not only because of the privileged access I have into the states of people’s souls, but because I’m also one of those who struggle. I think leaders of churches experience a particular kind of loneliness. (That might be another post for another day.)
All this to say that I’ve given a lot of thought to loneliness over the last 15 years. What follows is the most basic framework for thinking biblically and theologically about the reality of loneliness that I could muster. (Others have written very helpful pieces, and I commend them to you.)
It is helpful to me to think of this as a health condition. In this essay, I carry that way of thinking as a metaphor for clarity’s sake. Also, I work with loneliness-as-medical-condition because I am drawn to the way in which the Christian tradition has classically understood the work of the pastor as the “cure of souls.”
Loneliness: The Cause
Loneliness is a syndrome, “a group of symptoms which consistently occur together.”
In short, we suffer many symptoms and ailments as human persons. We make our homes in lands that are East of Eden where difficulties mix and create all kinds conditions; one of them called loneliness. Not all the factors are perfectly clear, but here is what we can know: things are not the way they are supposed to be and we feel this in our relational selves.
In the first paragraphs of the Bible, a portrait of shalom is painted. Everything works in harmony. Everything is properly ordered. All is well in the deepest sense. The creator Lord makes the world and everything in it and declares it good. At the pinnacle of this story, he makes a man and as that man begins to go to work in the world the narrative reveals this man is incomplete. He needs a corresponding partner who can provide things for him that he cannot provide for himself and things that even the Lord himself does not seem to provide for him. So, the Lord makes a woman. He gives them to one another and they live in harmony with one another, with the Lord himself, and with the world around them. All exists in perfect shalom and relational connection is part and parcel of this wholeness.
Then, sin enters the world. Shalom is exchanged for shame. Adam and Eve are ashamed in each other’s presence (Genesis 3:7) and ashamed in God’s presence (Genesis 3:8). Their relationship to the world is fractured (Genesis 3:15-19). Their relationship with one another is broken (Genesis 3:16). Loneliness is born.
East of Eden, we must learn to grieve that our relational lives will be marked by moments of relational dissonance instead of relational harmony. Our relationships will simply not be all that we wish they were. We must reckon with this also: even in the most intimate of human bonds, we sometimes feel the sting of loneliness. In short, it is a universal reality and is part of the human condition. It is caused because we are less human than we used to be. Everyone feels it, though we must recognize that some people experience this syndrome more deeply and more destructively.
Loneliness: The Treatment Plan
Loneliness cannot be cured on this side of a new heavens and a new earth; it is not the kind of condition that has a cure. It is more akin to a cancer. In the absence of a cure, a treatment plan must be enacted to manage its symptoms, perhaps move it into remission, to bring the effects of the ailments into proper balance, and to live a normal life in spite of its presence in our souls. To think of it in terms of a long term treatment plan, I think, is deeply hopeful and realistic.
(It should be noted that it is especially counterproductive to expect a friend or spouse to “cure” it for you. That is simply too much pressure to put on one human being.)
There is hope for the lonely. Loneliness can be treated and the Scriptures’ treatment plan for loneliness is belonging.
In the Old Testament, God creates a covenant people, a redeemed community that would be a conduit of blessing to the world. Among God’s unique actions in a post-fall world is to, “set the lonely in families” (Psalm 68:6).
In the New Testament, this covenant community becomes known as the church. Again, a fellowship of sharing burdens, mutual provision, and a display of the love of God to the world. In the church, each individual person finds meaning by owning his or her identity as a vital member of a living body, underneath the headship of Christ. Finding belonging, fellowship and family, using one’s gifts given by the Spirit, in the church becomes a vital course of treatment for the sting of loneliness we often feel. As pastors, we must think carefully and critically about the ways our expressions of ministry address the ache of loneliness. We must ask ourselves, “Do the things we do and offer promote loneliness rather than help heal it? Are our church’s gatherings, programs, and events a balm rather than an irrritant? I have no easy answers on how to mangage this, but this is a question we must ask.
Further, the Holy Spirit dwells inside the Christian, making comfort, companionship, and friendship with God a thing that can be experienced on this side of a new heavens and a new earth. We await the fullness of these things, but we have them truly, even if partly, now. It is worth noting that time alone with the Lord is good antidote to loneliness. Solitude and loneliness are not the same thing.
Though this treatment plan does not “cure”, it does offer a degree of healing. It soothes, it mitigates affects, and creates a way forward, even now.
Loneliness: The Prognosis
Medically speaking, a prognosis is, “the likely course or outcome of a disease or ailment.”
It’s important to know that though loneliness is pervasive, it is temporary. The story of the Scriptures demonstrate a move from the shalom of the beginning, to the fall, to a higher harmony—a deeper shalom—that is coming. Easter reminds us that the process of all things being made new is already underway.
For the condition of loneliness, in other words, the prognosis is that there will be an eventual cure. This isn’t a wish-dream, but a certainty. The Scriptures teach us, “They will see [Jesus’] face, and his name will be on their foreheads (Revelation 22:4).” In the words of the poet Scott Cairns, it will be “the face you looked for in all the best and worst moments of your life.”
You will be fully known and enveloped into the life of God himself. On this day, tears will be wiped away and this ailment called loneliness will simply be placed in a bucket with a label called “former things” and these things will have passed away (Revelation 21:4).
Loneliness will be cured, from that point onward. But something will happen backward, too.
In the center of the city that is to come will sit something like a garden. There will be a new tree of life in it and, “the leaves of the tree [are] for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2).
Loneliness will be cured one day, but not just that: the current pains you feel now will be healed.