… like Jesus, those who proclaim liberation are called not
only to care for their own wounds and the wounds of others, but also to make
their wounds into a major source of healing power.
… Maybe the word “loneliness” best expresses our immediate
experience and therefore best expresses our immediate experience and therefore
most fittingly enables us to understand our brokenness.
Personal loneliness
We live in a society in which loneliness has become one of
the most painful human wounds. The growing competition and rivalry that pervade
our lives from birth have created in us an acute awareness of our isolation.
This awareness has in turn left many with a heightened anxiety and an intense
search for the experience of unity and community. It has also led people to ask
anew how love, friendship, brotherhood, and sisterhood can free us from
isolation and offer us a sense of intimacy and belonging.
All around us we see the many ways by which the people of
the Western world are trying to escape this loneliness. Psychotherapy, the many
institutes that offer experiences with verbal and nonverbal communication
techniques, summer course and conferences supported by scholars, trainers and “huggers”
where people can share common problems, and the many experiments that seek to
create intimate liturgies where peace is not only announced but also felt—these
increasingly popular phenomena are all signs of a painful attempt to break
through the immobilising wall of loneliness.
But the more I think about loneliness, the more I think that
the wound of loneliness is actually like the Grand Canyon—a deep incision in
the surface of our existence that has become an inexhaustible source of beauty
and self-understanding. Therefore I would like to voice loudly and clearly what
might seem unpopular and maybe even disturbing: The Christian way of life does
not take away our loneliness; it protects and cherishes it as a precious gift.
Sometimes it seems as if we do everything possible to avoid
the painful confrontation with our basic human loneliness and allow ourselves
to be trapped by false gods promising immediate satisfaction and quick relief.
But perhaps the painful awareness of loneliness is an invitation to transcend
our limitations and look beyond the boundaries of our existence. The awareness
of loneliness might be a gift we must protect and guard, because our loneliness
reveals to us an inner emptiness that can be destructive when misunderstood,
but filled with promise for those who can tolerate its sweet pain.
When we are impatient, when we want to give up our
loneliness and try to overcome the separation and incompleteness we feel, we
easily relate to our human world with devastating expectations. We ignore what
we already know with a deep-seated intuitive knowledge—that no love or
friendship, no intimate embrace or tender kiss, no community, commune or
collective, no man or woman, will ever be able to satisfy our desire to be
released from our lonely condition.
This truth is so disconcerting and painful that we are prone
to play games with our fantasies than to face the truth of our existence. Thus
we keep hoping that one day we will find the man who really understands our
experiences, the woman who will bring peace to our restless life, the job where
we can fulfil our potentials, the book that will explain everything, and the
place where we can feel at home.
Such false hope leads us to make exhausting demands and
prepares us for bitterness and dangerous hostility when we start discovering
that nobody, and nothing, can live up to our absolutistic expectations. Many
marriages are ruined because neither partner was able to fulfil the often
hidden hope that the other would take his or her loneliness away. Many
celibates live with the naïve dream that in the intimacy of marriage their
loneliness will be taken away.
…
A Christian community is therefore a healing community, not
because wounds are cured and pains are alleviated, but because wounds and pains
become openings or occasions for a new vision. Mutual confession then becomes a
mutual deepening of hope, and shared weakness becomes a reminder to one and all
of the coming strength.
(From The Wounded
Healer by Henri Nouwen, pp. 88-91, 100)
