from the edge

Friday 28 October 2016

Aloneness

Source: twitter.com
‘You’re never alone with a Strand’ ran the once popular ad. Today, its haunting ambiguity lingers on, inviting reflection on the sociality of the human condition, or the lack of it. Can we, or should we, seek to be alone? Does being alone invariably mean we are lonely? Or is being alone our natural state? After all, we are born alone and we ultimately die alone. In the moment of death we return to that primal moment of separation from whatever it is that we have come from, both physical and spiritual. The last sound we make in this life will be an echo of the primal cry of birth, a cry of protest shaped by desire for something left behind, for some other being. We protest in the face of our aloneness in death as in birth.

To be alone is not necessarily to be lonely, although it is often thought of in that way. To be truly alone is to embrace solitude. Solitude is necessary for human health whereas loneliness destroys the human spirit.

To experience loneliness, a person needs to have known what it is to be left to themselves before they have come to know their true self, as can happen with rejection in childhood. The abandoned child will have left a great part of themselves in the place from which they have been banished and perhaps with the person who has rejected them. Bereavement in early childhood can also be felt as abandonment or rejection, leaving that person feeling inwardly naked and often angry.  Lonely people are vulnerable because they go through life in a state of inner nakedness – as naked souls, perhaps.

Loneliness is never chosen. But solitude must be chosen and then learned. It is a free choice. Unlike loneliness, it does not impose itself and it never cheats those who embrace it. It never cheats them of the joy it promises. It is always its own reward.

Making the jump from aloneness, and the loneliness associated with it, to the kind of solitude in which life gestates and yields creativity in the true sense of the word is not something achieved through will power. Neither can we try to effect solitude, because we are curious to know what it is like to experience some sort of higher spiritual state. Solitude is not about being in a higher state. It is about acceptance of the present moment in the full knowledge that it is as it is, and in the expectation that it is also something deeper and greater. Solitude allows the moment to be inhabited by Love itself, a Love which re-clothes us in the nakedness of our loneliness.

Since solitude is not chosen and yet never fails to deliver what it promises, it is essential that a person simultaneously seeks and waits for solitude to come to them, that they wait for it to happen. This is a question of disponibilité, to borrow from the French philosopher Simone Weil. To be disponible is to be fully available, permanently ‘on call’ to the one who promises. It is a state of mind and heart which can take a lifetime to reach, especially if a person has experienced real loneliness and depression. For one thing, someone who has known the kind of loneliness which comes with emotional banishment is often distrustful of what might seem to be a ‘self help’ method for depression, especially if there is a religious tinge to it. They do not trust religion or its methods. Depression is, among other things, an acute state of vulnerability and abandonment, possibly including a sense of having been abandoned by God.

Re-generative and transforming solitude does not come about through self-enforced loneliness, in the belief that we are dealing with our depression without the need for outside help. It comes about as a gift in its own right. It is the antidote to the causes of depression, although it will not cure depression itself. Depression, we are learning, is a chemical disorder as much as an emotional one and needs to be treated accordingly.

The gift which comes with solitude simply makes it possible for the one suffering from depression, and the loneliness it brings, to step outside that particular state of mind and view it objectively as something other than themselves. Their true self remains inviolate waiting for the gift which solitude brings. So solitude involves being available to having something given to us which is both unconditional and life-transforming.

Solitude changes the way we see things and people. It places them within a wider framework, one which can usefully be seen as having been constructed around them, like a picture surrounded by a frame. This conceptual framework contains us, and our situation in regard to them, as it would a painting. It allows us to see things as they are in the general scheme of things. When we see a person in that ordered context it sometimes becomes possible to meet them in a new and different way and hence to forgive them if we need to.

 People who have hurt us are not integral to who we are. Neither are they part of our loneliness. They exist on their own. They have their particular pain and responsibilities in regard to themselves and others. The gift which comes with solitude makes it possible for us to see such people objectively, and eventually to forgive them without feeling that in so doing we have allowed them to expose us once again in our naked vulnerability.


Instead, we are vulnerable to Love itself, which is not the same thing as saying that we become prey to our emotions, seeing ourselves and others through the mist of our own indulgent tears. The riches of solitude are the riches of Love incarnate, love which is flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, hard, tough and resilient. It is love as we see and know it in the person of Jesus Christ. 

Thursday 20 October 2016

Goodness

Yesterday, I was told about a sudden and unexpected family
'The Lady in the Van' Independent.co.uk
reconciliation. It stayed with me all day. Later, I watched the early evening news and then an excellent film, The Lady in the Van – Maggi Smith at her best. The film was about goodness, as was my friend’s story. Both were good news in the fullest sense. They held, or contained, the events of the day. They held them together.

My friend’s story was a quiet interruption of the treadmill rhythm of world events, the continual downward thrust of life. The same is true of the story about the man who took in the van lady, in the film – and also in real life. Both are an interruption of the normal course of events. In each of these situations something good is working into the less good aspects of human nature, and thus of life as we know it.

This good must be energised by something or someone, in order for it to work. Something must enliven it, like the goodness of the created world, whatever scientists may say about the universe creating itself out of nothing. Goodness is not a created thing. It simply is. It works in the immediacy of the moment.

Something that works must have a purpose. Goodness is worked as love, which is its purpose. This is not to say that it has demonstrable reasons for working, especially in situations where goodness seems unwarranted and therefore incomprehensible to most of us. The neighbours in the film, all good people in their way, did not know how to respond to unwarranted goodness, goodness which goes beyond ‘doing the right thing’.

Goodness proceeds from something, or someone, greater than the person who is doing good to someone else. It effects a transformation. A single good act done without duplicity, or kind word spoken sincerely, effects permanent change, even if its permanence seems hard to believe in at times. Its effect does not even depend on another person’s willingness to receive it. Neither does it wait on gratitude. It is unconditional.  Goodness, or caring, as Alan Bennet tells the social worker, is about dirt, to put it politely. Or, as seems the case with the family I was told about, something which comes under the heading of revelation, a moment of truth or understanding about the way things really are.

This suggests that goodness derives from some form of original truth. Something is given which enables someone to recognise that another person or situation is in need of unalloyed goodness.  Recognising this need can take a person unawares. It effects change in the most cynical mindset. Perhaps goodness, and the change it effects in both giver and receiver, has to do with prevenient grace, the goodness lying dormant in people, the God-shaped space in their inner being.

Perhaps the good person understands at depth the reality of that grace, or re-creative goodness, which also lies waiting in the mind or heart of the suffering or angry person. They sense that it is there, waiting to be touched into life and transformed by the author of all goodness, through whatever they are about to do or say to that person.

At the same time, the purpose of any good act or kind word can also be obscured by the sometimes pre-conceived view of the person saying it. Good people are not always likeable – think of the whisky priest in Graham Green’s The Power and the Glory. Good people seldom think of themselves as good, especially when being good takes them way over their tolerance threshold for ‘doing the right thing’.


The purpose of goodness is to bring ‘life in all its fullness’ to others, or to awaken them to what they are missing when grace, as it is sourced in Love, is refused or ignored. This was the purpose of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.