In Good Company

The pressure to be at the cutting edge of what is inappropriately termed social networking can leave little time or emotional energy for real engagement with others. It is hard to survive, let alone thrive, in a culture of relentless communication, or at least in what passes for communication, because the kind of communication being offered is not sociality in the fullest sense. Millions experience loneliness on a daily basis, even if they possess a smart phone, and loneliness amounts to failure, especially if you are young.

Real sociality begins in the textured relationships of family and in deep friendship. It is in these contexts that trust is learned. Trust involves knowing another person and allowing ourselves to be known by them. We can only do this by engaging with them in real time and as real people. In the contexts of family and of deep friendship we learn the truth about ourselves and, as a result, learn to understand and have compassion for others. The most valuable friendships are often trans-generational. Older people have much to teach and much to give, and the same is true in reverse. Older people want to learn and receive from younger generations because in so doing they remain connected to society. Older people are often excellent listeners and on the whole pretty un-shockable. They know that human nature does not change all that much over time and that we all make the same mistakes, usually for the same reasons. This giving and taking of wisdom across the generations is real sociality.

Through understanding and compassion, learned by spending real time with another person, in real life, rather than ‘following’ ‘friending’ (or unfriending’) them in a virtual world, we also learn what sacrificial love entails and why it is necessary. Sacrificial love is not about making oneself into someone else’s passive listening post. It is about actively ministering to the loneliness in that person by hearing them in their humanity. In other words, by knowing how to befriend them in the fullest sense. In the social world of networking, we are consumers of a fabrication of friendship but seldom the beneficiaries of the real thing. Fabricated friendship does not minister into loneliness. It helps to briefly assuage it at a certain level but loneliness returns when the iphone or computer is turned off.

There is nothing new about loneliness. In one sense it is part of the human condition, which is not to say that we should try to ignore it in ourselves, or be indifferent to it in others. It is just that most of us don’t know how to deal with loneliness – our own or anyone else’s. Our unconscious response to the loneliness we sense in ourselves is to go online as quickly as possible, so as to reassure ourselves that we belong through the familiar but delusory panacea of emails and social networking sites. When it comes to the loneliness of others, if we notice it at all, we often have nothing to say – other than a quick facebook comment. Deeper connectedness can be hard to establish or maintain if we are not used to doing it in real time. Relating to the lonely person is like not knowing what to say to someone who has been recently bereaved. Lonely people are in a state of permanent bereavement. Like the suffering servant in the book of Isaiah, they are ‘cut off, from the land of the living’ (Is.53:8). What can we do to connect with them?

I do not think we can do much to lift the burden of loneliness from another person until we have learned the value of solitude and silence. Solitude is not loneliness. It is the way in to a deep connectedness first, with God, and subsequently with others. In actively embracing solitude, and in valuing silence, we learn what it means to be in good company, the company of God himself. Silence is not about the absence of noise, any more than solitude is about the absence of people. They both are a way of making space for God at all times and in all places. We carry this rich silence around with us, along with the steadiness of mood and purpose brought by solitude. Silence and solitude are within us. They teach us to communicate, so that we can hear and be with the lonely, even if we have never met them. They transform the way we engage with social networking because they allow the loving kindness of God into its loneliness.