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. 

Not fade away

We have a person suffering from dementia staying with us at the moment. We have not known her long. In fact, we only met her shortly before her illness began to manifest itself. She is by no means old, especially by today’s standards, and until recently she led a full and successful life. Yesterday, she and I went for a walk in the woods near us and I began to get to know her and empathise a little with what she is going through. By empathise I mean experience a fraction of her suffering with her for a few minutes, rather than simply observing it from a safe distance without knowing what to do or say.

As we walked, communication was patchy. It was a case of being ready to grasp the opportunity for understanding without holding on to it too desperately, as that would have created more anxiety for both of us. So we had to make the most of her sporadic moments of lucidity and my very nominal powers of intuition.

I have no experience of people with dementia, and I sense from being with our friend that it is experience which matters most, rather than simply knowing what to do.  Nowadays, thanks to the internet, we can find out what to do in almost any situation we are likely to be faced with in life, along with a good many others which will probably never happen. Instructions are not difficult to come by. But even the best instructions are no more than generalised pointers to help us deal with various situations or ‘conditions’.

Instructions mean nothing until they are literally fleshed out in an encounter with another person who is in need of that deeper understanding we call empathy. Empathy is not something one can work at or develop. It is not a moral virtue. It is given to suit the need, our own and that of the person who in that particular moment is in need of unfading love.

On our walk in the woods my friend who has dementia reached for my hand as she tried to speak of what she was going through, to hold on to feelings, to stop them fading away. I was encouraging her to describe, in whatever way she could, what life is like for her now and what hurts most. I do not know if this was the correct thing to do, but she continued to hold my hand as she articulated ‘with sighs too deep for words’ (Rom. 8:26) her sense of loss and of powerlessness. Until relatively recently she had held a highly successful career. She had travelled all over the world. And now we were walking in the nearby woods which must have seemed to her like an alien universe in which she occasionally glimpsed a fading, but once familiar past through the larch and coppices around us.  

Perhaps because the woods were strange to her, I sensed that it was important that my friend not feel that she was alone or lost. I sensed that she needed to know that she was part of a wider fraternity, the fraternity of all of us who are getting older and having to come to terms with being bereaved of those years in which we have been productive, or in which we wish we had been more productive and hence more valuable.

In today’s world when a person’s value is measured according to their success and productivity, coming to terms with the sudden loss of a successful career means having to resist the inner voice that tells us that we are no longer of value. But given that we only understand the concept of value in material terms, it is almost impossible to re-configure it so that we can understand it for what it really is. Our real value consists in being loved for who we are, not for what we have been, or might yet become.

It might seem at first that ‘religious’ people have a ready made solution, a cure, for this modern malaise of believing that we are without value and, one might suppose, of all the depression which comes with it. But people who are assumed to be ‘religious’ (whatever that is supposed to mean in the minds of those who use the word ‘religious’ as a convenient category to place people they do not understand) also experience this loss of value, this sense of disconnectedness from a God who has until now ‘held them together’. Forgetting the words of the Lord’s Prayer when you are well on in your nineties leaves you momentarily, but completely, disorientated. You are completely lost.

Here, it is worth bearing in mind that depression is a syndrome which must be especially frightening and incomprehensible for people with Alzheimer’s. If you cannot make memory connections, you cannot always know what it is you regret and, in less lucid moments, why these feelings of loss and of powerlessness are so acute. So there is an overlay of depression which, for dementia sufferers, must literally defy description.

God speaks love into the ‘lostness’ and disconnectedness of dementia, and of depression itself. He speaks it through silence more than through words.  He speaks it through the gift, or ‘grace’, of empathy which is sometimes given in surprising ways to unlikely recipients, but always recognisable for what it is. 

Dealing with Depression - Letting go and letting be

On Sunday I had one of those ‘low’ days, the kind of day everyone has from time to time when it’s hard to tell the difference between what’s good in our lives and what isn't. The day gets ‘lower’ as we dig ourselves ever deeper into a generally negative view of our self, our current situation and other people. In the end we just become resigned to it all and, depending on temperament, will either turn to some form of palliative overlay, usually in the form of activity or ‘busyness’, or try to get a grip from within, through denial or self-enforced cheerfulness. Somewhere in between lies acceptance. We have to accept that the situation just is. We have to step back from it, at least in our heads, if not in our emotions, and take stock, by appreciating it’s being as it is and that it might even go on being that way for some time. We let go while at the same time accepting the reality of the pain itself.

In the sense that most day to day suffering is, of its very nature, tedious and repetitive, pain blocks our sensory perception of the possibility that we might be surprised by something new. So, as I have found in my own low moments, it is important to do everything possible not to allow the pain to block the way we might perceive things differently. Sensory perception gets blocked when we allow the pain to be artificially reduced or trivialised (in telling ourselves that it’s not all that bad really and that we should ‘snap out of it’) or, on the other hand, allow it to completely overwhelm us, mentally, spiritually and sometimes physically.

Taking control in low moments is not a matter of deciding on a course of action, or willing oneself into a different frame of mind by minimising the significance of our pain in sweeping it back to where it came from, wherever that was. It is a matter of sighing it out, of letting it go. It is the equivalent of ‘breathing through’ a contraction during labour, in order to relax the mind and body for the next one. The technique works in a similar way for dealing with depression. We breathe through it by a process of acceptance and sighing.

But accepting our feelings does not automatically entail unquestioning acceptance of our situation, as I know in regard to my own as a woman in the Church. Rather, it allows us to get out of the situation and look at it objectively, as well as looking objectively at the way we are feeling about it, especially as those feelings affect the way we relate to other people. Accepting negative feelings, with or without their being associated with unhappy memories, is the first step in taking real control of ourselves and of the situation which is causing us grief. Being simply passive to the pain is the quickest and surest way to allow whatever darkness we are experiencing in any given situation to overwhelm us. So we have to ‘labour’ through our feelings by sighing them out. The sighing is important because it obviates the need for words. But we still need someone to listen and be with us. With low days and low moments it is important to allow our sighs to be directed to someone who can show us how to get through the whole process of being ‘low’ and emerge intact, and not only intact, but a new person. This is part of what it means to be re-born in Christ. 

This happened to me on Sunday. I was sighing (yet again) about my situation vis a vis the Church. I was sighing into God and into his Christ. This was made easier by the fact that I was in the congregation rather than leading the service. It was a most refreshing change made possible by a cycle race which obliged me to take a major detour so that I arrived too late to be ‘up front’ with the other clergy. At the end of the service, having chatted to a few of the parishioners there, I was reminded of my great love for them all. Later, a colleague came up to me. I apologized for being late on account of the cyclists (I was pretty annoyed with them too which didn’t help the ‘low’ feeling) and she responded with a hug and something along the lines of ‘lovely that you’re here with your people’. Generosity of spirit, grace and goodness in a colleague who shares her ministry with me (when she doesn’t have to) with those particular words, ‘your people’, dispelled the low feeling in an instant, along with all its attendant bits of baggage relating to the Church and my situation in it. Her smile and those words were the answer to my sighing. Sighing out our pain into God opens us up to hearing him, or recognising his presence, in surprising ways. He makes himself felt from within the pain, often through the sheer goodness of others.