Nouwen on loneliness

… 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)