Only
the Lonely
Laura
Wallace
July
23, 2006
I don’t
know if any of you know this feeling, but it’s very unsettling what you can
find in filing cabinets. I think that’s one reason I prefer to file things in
piles, or sometimes spread out like a fan of cards, or in a wing-like spray of
paper across the desktop. (And I suppose there are some on the floor.) I have
files on several UU churches I’ve been involved in. But my first sermon was
June 28, 1987, right here at TJMC, before I moved away for a while. This is my
second. At this rate, if I live to be 94, I could do two more. (You do the
math.)
The
first reason I mention that Sunday is that when I found my old sermon again the
other day, and re-read it, I recognized it was also about loneliness. I thought
back then that I was only writing about being single again…what the label does…
how even if you feel mostly fine about your life the word “single” can still
bite into your self-image if you don’t want to be, or how, single or coupled,
we might unconsciously view the widow or widower beside us as “a little ghostly
but certainly not quite single”, or what it would be like to call
yourself “single” because that’s the only way to get by in a culture that won’t
tolerate your relationship. Then there was a really poignant passage about the
death of my dog. The rest was a lot of bucking-up stuff about how it’s safe to
be whoever you are in this community. But I think what was really on my mind
was that I was lonely, and wanted an analytical way to talk about it. That about covers it. If I’d known I could have done it in a
paragraph it could have been a lot shorter.
The
other reason for my nostalgia is that Freyda Epstein, whose gorgeous voice you
just heard, was here that Sunday, and she is gone now. I had asked Freyda if
she’d like to create a service together, and what she did she was magical. She
sang a solo, and she led the congregation in a harmony so sweet and moving that
we were spellbound. Connie Cheatham, Carolyn Silver and some others were
blowing their noses. Then for the postlude Freyda played her enchanted fiddle
some more to accompany our exit from the sanctuary, but the congregation would
not move. They would not get up. They wouldn’t budge. She tried encouraging
them by waggling her eyebrows and titling her body and gesturing with her bow
until finally she gave up and led them out to the parlor like the Pied Piper,
still playing, walking backward. (This may strike a chord. Given the faces around
this piano on Sundays, it’s not hard to imagine a team of us grabbing Scott’s
bench and shoving him and the piano up to the social hall so he won’t stop.
Let’s form a committee to talk about that!)
I am
avoiding my topic. And that really is my topic. Loneliness is an
inconvenient truth. Generally, loneliness gets a bad rap. It’s not a word you
just sling around. You can say you’re so lonesome you could cry if you’re Elvis
Presley or Roy Orbison or Bonnie Raitt, but nobody else gets away with it. It’s
embarrassing. Sometimes it carries a whiff of something toxic. It’s almost like
saying you’re unpatriotic. Loneliness is a very un-American emotion. Usually
what comes right on the heels of naming it, if you even allow yourself to call
loneliness what it is, is shame.
What if
you just went around saying “I feel lonely” any time you actually felt that
way? Right out loud. It doesn’t happen very often, does it? What holds us back
from that simple piece of honesty? You can say, “I’ve got a hell of a cold,”
can’t you? I know what holds me back. People might think: That person is…CLINGY. A
WET RAG. DEPENDENT. CO-DEPENDENT.
WEAK. Or the worst epithet of all, the most
humiliating: NEEDY.
I think
most of these terms are relatively new accusations, and that they come from
lives that are too pressured and fast and ambitions that are too strenuous to
allow us to encounter and abide with each other, most days of our lives, in the
graceful rhythms of community.
Haven’t
we all had some friend or acquaintance, sometime or other, say to us, “I’m
depressed. I’m bummed out. I’m in therapy. I’m in one of the stages of grief. I
had a panic attack. I’m an alcoholic.” It might be a sobering moment to share
with someone, but it’s probably not a very rare one. Any of these admissions
are more likely to come from someone we know, even someone we know very well,
than the words: “I am lonely.” One of the most remarkable phrases I read in a
self-help book that described a man who sounded pretty lonely to me was that he
was “walking around with his umbilical cord in his hand, looking for an outlet
to plug it into.”
Ow!
What’s up with that? It sounds like perfectly reasonable behavior to me. Isn’t
this the sort of world that occasionally makes you want to climb a ladder back
up into the womb? Even when we’re running from one thing to the next, busy all
day long with work and family or this cause or that one, aren’t there times
when we’re just struck cold by another dire piece of horrible news? There are
times when the state of the world is so overwhelming to talk about that we just
don’t. We stand limply in place saying “How are you?” and answering, “I’m
fine.”
Friday
night on the PBS show “Faith and Reason” with Bill Moyers, Moyers was
interviewing Richard Rodriguez, the author of Brown, an amazing book on
culture and identity. Rodriguez is deeply religious, exalted by the rituals and
mysteries of Catholicism, even though the church rejects his sexuality. He
knows loneliness when he sees it.
Most of
us don’t have abuelas, grandmothers, sitting by the door in the sun
shelling peas. There are nursing homes or assisted living communities for that.
Most of us can’t walk to visit our friends. There are cars for that. Most of us
don’t play the guitar and sing together at the drop of a hat. There are CDs and
radios for that. Most of us don’t sit outside every evening, just talking to
each other, or telling stories. There are televisions and movies for that. Most
of us don’t grow food. There are stores for that. And once our children, if we
have them, finish high school, we most likely drive them off to college, come
home, and put more stuff in our houses that are often too big for us.
Another
thing Richard Rodriguez also remarked on was the insanity of cell phones. About
all the people who are with other people and say when their cell phone
rings, “Excuse me, I’ve got to take this call!” as though they’re thinking,
“THAT might be the person who will change my life!”
We don’t
even call them cell phones any more, we have given
them a nickname: Cell. “Call my cell,” someone says, and you can imagine them
marching along a sidewalk inside an invisible cell, eyes out of focus, gazing
through the bars, unaware of anyone passing and looking at their face. “Call my
cell.”
What’s
up with that? I think many of us are more lonely than
we like to own, even when among other people and their cell phones, and more
often than we like to recognize.
You
might be wondering when I’m going to talk about the healing joys of solitude. Soon, but not yet. I believe what most of us do most often
when despite our avoidance and our busyness, the subject of loneliness, our own
or someone else’s, rises right in front of us, is to deflect it as quickly as
possible and change the subject with a brisk elevator speech about solitude.
I
love being alone. I like solitude. You’re born alone and you die alone so you
might as well get used to it. I’ve got to have my Me-time. I’m not married
and-I’m-just-fine-by-myself. True enough. I
don’t know a writer, a musician, a mother, a father, a wife, a lover, an
employee or a boss, or almost anyone, in fact, who doesn’t literally crave
solitude—time alone, time to think—with an intensity that can backfire into
exhaustion, irritability or despair if the need is not met.
One
strange thing that can happen, though, when you feel lonely, because it is not
well-accepted to say so, is that you might decide you had better stay alone
until you get over it. You’re feeling really blue, alone in the universe, and
somebody calls to invite you to do something. “I’m sorry,” you say, “I wouldn’t
be good company right now.” Or you unplug your phone so nobody can call in the
first place and you won’t have to pretend you’re not lonely.
Well,
for Pete’s sake, people! That’s exactly
when we need to say “I am so glad you called. I was just feeling lonely.”
Forbidden feelings tend to expand, and grow, and spread into the crevices of
our nature.
There’s
another dangerous thing about loneliness when it goes too long unattended. It
can morph into self-pity after a while because what you really want is somebody
to go, Poooor YOU. POOOOOOR You. Would you say that
with me, please?
“POOOOOOOOOOR
You.”
That is so
nice. One more time, please, with feeling:
“POOOOOOOOOOR
You.”
The
appetite for sympathy varies from individual to individual although personally,
I like plenty. But after enough of that, some instinct pops up and says, Wait A Minute. It’s not that bad. You start thinking about
other people, who live in starving or violent places that are not a small green
city in
But if you tell the truth and get a little Poor-YOU? Then you’re done and it’s
time…to fill the birdfeeder. Or read to a child. Or get back to work. Or pay
your bills. Or take a slow walk with an elder. Or come to church for something
or other. Or call someone, or go visit somebody else whom you think is probably
lonely, even if they haven’t said so. You turn your caving in to the truth of
your feeling into a reaching out.
In my
old sermon, it was when my dog died that I felt the loneliest, because I had no
shoulder to cry on. Since then, especially since the year 2000, watching the
news alone is what most makes me feel that way.
And then
there’s wintertime. I almost always forget not to take the dark and the cold
personally. But I have more friendships now, more rooted than before, most of
them the gifts of this community. So these days my bouts of loneliness don’t
last as long. They still happen though. And I’m as newly stunned by how painful
loneliness can be as I am by the start of every winter. It’s really going to be
this cold? This dark? This is taking
forever! I can’t stand it.
But what about you? Or if not you on this beautiful summer morning, what
about someone in a nearby pew? What do you think the chances are that a person
within ten feet of you has felt or is feeling a piercing loneliness that they
haven’t really described to anyone?
The
single image from 9/11 that broke my heart and gave me hope at the same time
was hands. People who stood at the edge of life, accepted that there was no
place to move except forward, and at that instant of ultimate existence and
ultimate humanity, reached to hold each other’s hands.
What
would happen to us if we held hands more before we stand at the edge of
our lives? What might happen if we acknowledged the truth of loneliness, the
reality of it that lingers just outside the firelight? What
if we looked at it together now and then, and not just at the moments of
ultimate danger or loss, when love and friendship are most precious and most
appreciated. What if we reminded ourselves often--this is a state of
being? What if we befriended our loneliness the way the Mexicans befriend their
dead? Invited it in, beguiled it with ritual and flowers and its favorite
foods, stayed up with it all night when the occasion demands? What if we took
it to meetings, to work, to friends?
Does
that sound frightening? The thing is, like most feelings, loneliness passes
once it’s released. Maybe what we need to do when we’re lonely is not hold onto
it so tightly. Let someone else know about it when we’re feeling it, or invite
someone to tell us how it feels whenever they are.
What if
everyone at coffee hour, just once, took a vow not to say the word, “Fine.” What if you asked yourself to come
up with at least one unusually authentic adjective to offer when someone says,
“How are you?” You don’t have to run. Coffee hour is not an encounter
group. You might be feeling really happy this morning (or, you were before you
came here). There’d be no penalty for happy adjectives. Just think of the
possibilities! Even if this is all too feely for you at the moment,
promise you won’t boycott coffee hour. I’d never hear the end of it. You can
just practice your adjectives if you want to.
If we
really belly up to our loneliness, within it we might find our own loveliness.
And that is when loneliness turns to solitude, and comfort can come from
anything, anywhere. If we name loneliness when it strikes, and stop being
ashamed of it, within our communities we might find deeper comforts, greater
joys and happier company. And courage. With loneliness
named and thereby tamed, we might be able more often to think of other people,
silent in the next room, a few miles away in a housing project, hundreds of
miles away in the debris of a disaster, or thousands of miles away in a war or
a famine. We might be able to think about them, “Poor You”, and remembering the
comfort it has brought us, and how essentially simple it is, answer their
loneliness more effectively, with something more than words.
We might
feel the need to change our lives by answering their loneliness with our own.
Bring it on! we could say to loneliness. I can speak
your name, I can learn what you have to teach me, I can let you come, and let
you go.
So may
it be.