Two Kinds of Loneliness In the spiritual life we have to make a distinction between two kinds of loneliness. In the first loneliness, we are out of touch with God and experience ourselves as anxiously looking for someone or something that can give us a sense of belonging, intimacy, and home. The second loneliness comes from an intimacy with God that is deeper and greater than our feelings and thoughts can capture. We might think
This experience explains what Rainer Maria Rilke meant when he said, “Love . . . consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other”· and what Anne Morrow Lindbergh had in mind when she wrote, “I feel we are all islands in a common sea.” It made me see that the togetherness of friends and lovers can become moments in which we can enter into a common solitude which is not
To Live the Question (Part II) His own personal experience taught Merton that solitude not only deepens our affection for others but also is the place where real community becomes possible. Although Merton himself lived as a monk first in a monastic community and later in a hermitage, it is clear from this and other writings that what really counts for him is not the physical solitude but the solitude of the heart. Without the
By slowly converting our loneliness into a deep solitude, we create that precious space where we can discover the voice telling us about our inner necessity-that is, our vocation. Unless our questions, problems and concerns are tested and matured in solitude, it is not realistic to expect answers that are really our own. How many people can claim their ideas, opinions and viewpoints as their own? Sometimes intellectual conversations boil down to the capacity to
Meditation: Why Did He Come? This Word who now becomes flesh is the very same God before Whom the Seraphim in the vision of Isaiah covered their faces with their wings and exclaimed in fear and trembling: “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord Sabaoth!” The creature did not dare to look up. Such was the overpowering greatness of God. No man could see God and live. It is this transcendent, unapproachable, unfathomable, mysterious Word who
The word solitude can be misleading. It suggests being alone by yourself in an isolated place. When we think about solitaries, our mind easily evokes images of monks or hermits who live in remote places secluded from the noise of the busy world. In fact, the words solitude and solitary are derived from the Latin word solus, which means alone, and during the ages many men and women who wanted to live a spiritual life
But what then can we do with our essential aloneness which so often breaks into our consciousness as the experience of a desperate sense of loneliness? What does it mean to say that neither friendship nor love, neither marriage nor community can take that loneliness away? Sometimes illusions are more livable than realities, and why not follow our desire to cry out in loneliness and search for someone whom we can embrace and in whose
It is this most basic human loneliness that threatens us and is so hard to face. Too often we will do everything possible to avoid the confrontation with the experience of being alone, and sometimes we are able to create the most ingenious devices to prevent ourselves from being reminded of this condition. Our culture has become most sophisticated in the avoidance of pain, not only our physical pain but our emotional and mental pain
Loneliness is one of the most universal sources of human suffering today. Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists speak about it as the most frequently expressed complaint and the root not only of an increasing number of suicides but also of alcoholism, drug use, different psychosomatic symptoms-such as, headaches, stomach and low-back pains-and of a large number of traffic accidents. Children, adolescents, adults and old people are in growing degree exposed to the contagious disease of loneliness
It is far from easy to enter into the painful experience of loneliness. You like to stay away from it. Still it is an experience that enters into everyone’s life at some point. You might have felt it as a little child when your classmates laughed at you because you were cross-eyed or as a teen-ager when you were the last one chosen on the baseball team. You might have felt it when you were
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