The Great Alone

Well, here we are again, dick-foath with the stories to make sense of it all. And boy, if we ever need something to make sense of it all, it's now, it's in these weeks. We're just a couple of days before the transfer of power in the United States of America at the highest political levels. And we've had upheaval all year between COVID-19, economic crises, deaths, mayhem in a lot of places. And what happens when you have upheaval is oftentimes that just precipitates the feeling of being alone. And with the pandemic, it's the reality of being disconnected in the alone. And fascinatingly, I don't even know if that's a word, but in a fascinating way, the first chapter of the book that Ruth and I published a couple of years back, known, finding deep friendships in a shallow world, the first chapter is called the Great Alone. So I'm going to be reading that. We are going to be reading that to you and for you. And along the way, in a few minutes, I want to pop in and introduce you to a friend. We're just going to have a little conversation about this idea of what it means to be lonely. So here we go, chapter one, the Great Alone. First things, recognize what's true about life. Chapter one, the Great Alone. The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved. Mother Trace of Calcutta. On January 26, 2014 at New York City's Presbyterian Hospital, Pete Seeger laid dying. The 94-year-old iconic singer and composer of, if I had a hammer and wear of all the flowers gone, had been the face of folk music and social commentary since the day he dropped out of Harvard in 1938 to write his bicycle across the country. When the phone rang, it was Arlo Guthrie, son of his old friend Woody. Pete and Arlo had played many concerts together all over the country. After the call, he posted this to Facebook. I simply wanted him to know that I loved him dearly, like a father in some ways, a mentor in others, and just as a dear friend a lot of the time. At 3am on January 27, Pete breathed his last. He died a man known and loved. Who wouldn't want that? No rational person would choose to die alone or unloved. Nothing could be emptier than that. Between us Ruth and I have lived in California, Oregon, India, Missouri, Illinois, Washington, DC, and now Colorado. We have met thousands of people and invested thousands of dollars in homes, cars, causes, travel, children, grandchildren, food, and a myriad of other things. We've discovered something in our nearly 150 combined trips around the sun. Apart from the great ideas that move us, life revolves around two things, relationships and money. And only one of those makes us rich. When we say, boy, she had a rich life, we're not talking properties or portfolios. Those things can evaporate overnight. What creates real wealth is friendship. A rich life shows up in a phone call to a dying man, letting him know one more time. How much he is cared for. The question is, how do we begin to build that kind of friendship? You'd think it would begin with knowing what we want, but sometimes we move forward by knowing what we don't want. When my parents divorced in the early 1960s, I had a choice to make. I could submit to my fear, which entertained the idea that the patterns leading to the collapse of their marriage were genetic, which meant that I must expect what happened to them to happen to me. Or I could do something else. I could say to myself, whatever I need to do, not to end up there, that's what I want. I think we respond to many traumas that way. Disoriented, our emotions shattered, we say, whatever we need to do, never to let that happen again. Let's do that. We frame a positive action from a negative experience. We say no to the thing that steals life and yes to the thing that gives it. From negative to positive. Is God doing that very thing when He uses not in the first pages of the Torah? The Grand Sweep of Design, Covenant, and Truth are all there and worthy studies in themselves. The Genesis account is punctuated six times. With the phrase, it was good. The last verse of chapter 1 even says, God saw all that He had made and it was very good. But 18 verses later, in chapter 2, the subject of relationship is brought into focus with this sentence. It is not good for the man to be alone. Adam has been created from the dust of the earth and the breath of life. Chapter 2 verse 7. He looks good and whole, but Yahweh says in effect, we're not done yet. So Eve is created. Together, they reflect who God is. Here's the deal. It is clear that relationship existed before Adam and Eve. God was always about relationship. When He says let us make man in our image, He's talking about relationship, which is in the very DNA of the Creator. So when we hear it is not good for the man to be alone, our gut says, aha, that's true. But why tell us what we are not created for? Because it's simply impossible to misunderstand those ten words. It is not good for the man to be alone. From childhood to old age, we all know what a loan feels like. In February of 2015, I interviewed three friends at a breakfast for business leaders in Charlottesville, Virginia. In that room of 200 bright minds and lots of success, we explored roots and vision and faith. About two thirds of the way into the interview, I asked the three, John Ashcroft, former Attorney General of the United States, earned Clark former Chief of Naval Operations, and Kurt Richardson, co-founder of Otter Products, this question, at what moment in your life and career did you feel the most alone? The room went absolutely still. Dead silent. Slowly their responses came. One had twice endured undeclared bankruptcy. One had to fire a subordinate effectively ending the young man's career. One had suffered through a family tragedy. As each man answered, you could hear murmured ascent. Everyone knew alone. To be clear, alone is not the same as solitude. Alone just happens. Solitude is a choice. Theologian Paul Tillic articulated this distinction beautifully when he said, language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone, and it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone. One is toxic while the other is life-giving. So we're going to pause right there for just a moment to engage a friend in conversation. I wanted to bring this friend in to sort of give us a current moment point of clarity to the whole idea of loneliness. Here she is. So here's my friend, Chris Bassett, who has been a counselor in Northern Colorado for 20 years. Good morning, Chris. How are you? Well, I'm good for an older dude. I want to talk with you because you're a person who deals with folks across the spectrum in lots of kinds of situations. When I say loneliness, what do you see or what do you think of? I think people can feel lonely for so many reasons. I meet with children who feel alone because they feel like other people don't understand their circumstance. And I see teenagers who feel like they are missing out because other people are doing things that they're not a part of. I think people feel lonely because they're disconnected from other people. So we have folks, let's say, who are an assisted care center. I have friends in their 90s across the country, various places who literally, both virtually and literally, have not been out of their rooms. It's not just out of the facility in nine months, 10 months, whatever it is. Their question is, do I die of COVID or do I die of loneliness? That's a brutal assessment, but it really is true, isn't it? It's brutal. Yes, that's so hard. Just tossing this question out, you haven't expected this, but talk to me about how do we, how do we let this be a, this too shall pass thing? How do we help that? That's part of the beauty of what we get to figure out in counseling is people find words for things that sometimes they've never shared with another human being on the planet. And it's a really beautiful process that I'm so thankful for that we get to do in the counseling offices. I've just read from the book, just for this moment, yeah. Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone. You know what loneliness feels like. How about solitude? You're going a thousand miles an hour. You getting the solitude? I do. And how do the solitude do for us? Interestingly, the the timing of life in August, my husband and I had registered for a class on and it's the School of Contemplative Life. We went down to Colorado Springs for the School of Contemplative Life and have begun to learn about solitude. And that has never been part of my life. It's been really wonderful to watch God work in the process of solitude as we learn to quiet ourselves and become less busy and be more present with people and with ourselves and with God. And solitude is really amazing. I'm going to continue reading the chapter on the great alone, but I might say this, I think it'd be a good idea to have a podcast on solitude. We sort of touched on it with Chris, but down the road will work on that. So back to the book. The alone we speak of here is the toxic kind. That alone is unpredictable. Almost anything can trigger it. A loneliness unchecked turns us in on ourselves and destroys perspective. The gathered pain is an inch by inch, accelerating slide off an emotional cliff. It is isolating. Left unresolved. It is a cancer. That's why isolation is used for punishment. Emotional pain is the teacher. Alone is a timeout when I disobey as a little guy. Alone is what happens when I behave badly as a teen and get suspended from school. When I break the laws in adult, I'm separated from society and go to prison. And if I am disruptive in prison, they put me where? Solitary confinement. Who chooses to be alone and disoriented in the dark? No one. Who really wants to experience moments of unbridled joy or great hardship by themselves? No one. Human contact is life itself. Flying home to California from the East Coast in the spring of 1992, I watched the young man sitting next to me grade English papers. Turns out he taught literature at a high school near our home and he was returning from an event where his retired Navy officer father had been honored. He told me that his dad, a Navy flyer in the Vietnam war had been shot down and spent several years in the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp held in isolation for weeks and months on end. Prisoners used a tapping code for talking through the walls. Massaging through stone saved them. Life was found in another person in another universe only 12 inches away. I asked the young man, how was your father different when he came home after those years? He looked at me and simply said, I loved him. When he left, he was a hard driving high-tech fighter-jock and pausing with a half smile, he said. But when he came home, he was a human being. There you have it. Human contact is the name of the game, a mirror reflecting who we are and what we might become. It gives our lives texture and depth. It gives hope to the future and perspective to the past. Face it. The need to connect with another human being is the place we all begin. Our earliest connection is mother and child. Studies show that as early as four months into a pregnancy, a baby in utero, here is its mother's heartbeat and is so comfortable in that watery womb world. Then comes the moment of delivery and the scary intense journey out the birth canal to that bright lighted new world populated by giants. A wise OB-GYN nurse places the newborn on the mother's stomach or at her breast. In that moment, a traumatized infant with ear pressed against the mom's chest. Here's the familiar beat once again and all as well. Scientists use the phrase attachment theory to describe the needed bond between a parent and child. While the phrase attachment disorder describes what happens when that connection is disrupted. John Bolby, a British psychoanalyst, first came up with attachment theory. He was trying to understand the intense distress observed in infants who had been separated from their parents. Bolby observed that separated infants would go to extraordinary lengths, for example, crying, clinging, frantically searching, to prevent separation from their parents or to reconnect to a missing parent. Might it be that all of us, because we're fallen, experienced some kind of attachment disorder? Wasn't that the consequence of being sent away from Eden? I find myself in one place when I belong in another. We all remember places where aloneness has grabbed us. October 17, 1989 at 5.04 pm, is timestamped in my psyche. Driving over Highway 17 in the Santa Cruz Mountains toward Oakland, California, where I was to speak at a fundraiser, the world exploded. 11 miles down in the Earth's crust, tectonic plates under gigantic pressure, shifted, three feet. That 6.9 Richter scale moment, later named the Loma Prieta earthquake, destroyed much of downtown Santa Cruz, flattened freeways in Oakland, set parts of San Francisco ablaze, and collapsed a section of the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge. With the road cracking, huge trees whipsawing, and landslides covering roads, I somehow made it off the mountain to the town of Las Gattas, hundreds of people milled in the streets bricks and glass littered sidewalks like confetti. One thought and one thought only overwhelmed me. I must get back to those I love. Finding a payphone I dialed home, the aftershocks made the pavement shake under my feet as sirens wailed and people shouted, and the great alone had me by the throat. When Ruth said, hello, tears came. You've been there, haven't you? When a phone call didn't just change your day, it changed your world. When what you had feared for months really did come upon you. When some failure of yours caused people to stop talking or turn away when you entered the room. And the ground shakes. No one is impervious to feeling alone. Any trauma at any age can disorient us. When it does, the great alone waits in the wings. And this is not a religious or moral phenomenon. The dilemma is not a function of ethics or art or politics or age. It happens because we're human. American author John Steinbeck reflected, we are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. Leanne Payne put that reflection in context when she wrote, we are lonely then because we are separate. Born lonely, we try hard to fit in to be the kind of person that will cause others to like us. Craving and needing very much the affirmation of others, we compromise, put on any face or many faces. We do even those things we do not like to do in order to fit in. We are bent toward the creature attempting to find our identity in him. Fallen man is trapped in the continual attempt to find his identity in the created, rather than the uncreated. When fractured relationships are the expected, and alone becomes the order of the day, the distance and separation we feel is like leaving Eden all over again. As Adam and Eve walked out of the garden, the great alone was waiting. Okay, that happened. We get it, but that's not how it needs to stay, and that's not where we are meant to stay. Well, that's almost the end of the chapter. There's one more part, and that's the most important part. It's Ruth's part. It's a piece of free verse that she wrote some years ago, sort of an exclamation point to the thoughts we've been sharing this morning, and I've often said that Ruth can say more in six lines than I can say in six pages. I'll let you judge for yourself. Ruth's thoughts. Well, that's it for today. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with chapter two of known finding deep friendships in a shallow world. And until then, we pray that in this season of a people that your heart and your emotions will not be a part of that, that you will not have those sense of loneliness or the feelings of aloneness, but that in the solitude, you will find peace and rest for your spirit. And at the end of the day, know that there's a sovereign God who has his hands on things, even when we don't think it feels like it. So I'll catch you later. Bye bye and God Bless.