Alone Together
“ ‘We pray for the old and the lonely’ - words heard quite frequently in intercessions, implying that loneliness is an unfortunate condition which some people suffer from, like diabetes or color-blindness. But what about the loneliness of each one of us? It has little to do with what we do or where we do it, whether we’re married or unmarried, optimists or pessimists…
One thing loneliness does teach us, after all, is the falsity of imagining that we possess any wholeness in ourselves. Loneliness uncovers for us the tedium and the poverty of our own private worlds; it lays bare what has been called the ‘raw surface’ of our need for others and our need for communication… I am not a whole person, and there is no such thing as a whole person…
And this is why loneness has to do with truth, why the impulse to seek truth drives some people into deserts and hermitages. Loneliness makes us confront the mysteriousness, the elusiveness of our own reality, makes us recognize that it is never exhausted in our relations and our words and our acts. The truth of our selves, the foundation of our selves, is something baffling, toughly resistant to all our efforts to bring out into the open, into our sight or other people’s sight…
Suddenly to experience one’s isolation, then, is to know what is in us can never be spelled out in public terms, a dimension always behind and beyond. And because it is so bewildering and unsettling, we try very hard to avoid or gloss over the moments of sharpest solitude - to smooth away the misunderstandings, minimiz
Solitude teaches us about our truth; but it teaches us too that our truth is not our own… and if we see Jesus as the ultimately lonely person becau
From Rowan Williams’ sermon “Being Alone”
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Dear Alex,
I have no plans to write tonight but Rowan Williams’ sermon on solitude and truth has been lurking in my thoughts since I read it a few month ago. His words emerged into shape from something bland and random in my passing of this night.
Earlier this evening a fatal truck/pedestrian collision led to a 30-minute detour on my drive home. My daughter whom I had just picked up from school sat next to me, groaning in disbelief at the congested traffic rarely seen in our small rural town. This was indeed an anomaly. Lanes were fatigued from motorists and impatience. Twilight was inflamed with the injustice of feeling inconvenienced and vulnerable by a stranger’s accidental death.
This is taking forever, my kid whined. She had already forgotten about the reason for this delay just minutes after I had told her.
A curiously lonely aura hovered over us in metal cages among idling vehicles bumper to bumper, to and from, there and where as beads in spillage. Appetites spoiled behind and beyond tinted closed windows, blood shooting up the jugular, a shock of solidarity among strangers longing to know and be known about how things and beings might have prevailed and relented before fatality. Could I possibly know you through glass, fumes, insecurities?
As the night aged I realized I had left my wallet in my work office. Could I have known myself better? So I dragged my pathetic self back to work campus before midnight simply to retrieve tangible proof of truths about me, my driver’s license and credit cards.
On my way to the office he was the first I saw by the entrance, hunched over a shiny trash bin with a replacement bag and cleaning cart. Much of his labor in scrubbing over these solitary private hours would soon be visibly announced in the reality of the next morn awaiting another wave of narratives awash with individual partial truths and fears. The man whom I had not seen before was obscured in the secret folds of routine tucked and filed away benignly beneath consciousness. I wanted to say something to him. He did not notice. The words escaped me.
Down the dim corridor I approached the presence of another on graveyard shift. A-ha! This could be the moment to reclaim the desired brief exchange lost just seconds ago.
Hello... how are you? I greeted him.
He gifted me with the kindest smile of Winter, one hand gripping a mop and the other pushing a similar cart. I like your jacket, he told me.
Good night. We turned towards and then away from one another on divergent paths, my worn-out self shriveled in a big black jacket odiously frayed from years of decent and dysfunctional use unknown to him.
The remnant of night would soon disperse quietly in neglect and if you were to ask me its details tomorrow I would likely not recall. What I do know is I have met two beautiful figures in the strangeness and solitude of tonight, a plain encounter contradicting
And looking back to the first image of the man I had seen by the shiny trash bin, I imagined he might have pitied me in my hurried hollow strides towards nowhere in the same space and time he and I occupied separately and synchronously without words or signs sufficient in piecing together our discordant selves in our shared loneliness divisibly dark and dejected apart from returning Home.
Yours, Kate
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Dear Kate,
You picked a long quote, of a passage I love, from a person I live to live up to. It's all too convenient for me to write about it now.
Solitude. That's the topic, isn't it? I shall take this word out of the context of Williams' writing and find myself around it.
We stay alone so that we can plunge back into human chaos. We gather ourselves, try to find some anchorage deep within, so that we won't lose our Selves when we are out in the open all over again, going through another round of explaining to others what I can't even explain to myself about myself, putting on a reasonably honest face and trusting the other party is both willing and able to reciprocate in good faith.
I call it a trust. But it is more like a suspension of disbelief.
The problem exacerbates when others do not know how to deal with you, which usually has to do with a new reality they see in you, especially one that they don't want to see, don't want to take part to deal with, not in public domain anyway.
Everybody gossips. Sometimes with others, always with oneself. Let me self talk some common sense into something/someone that is not common and makes no sense. Our instinct is to do the best we can to stay out of the gossipy chatters in others' head. It's better to remain nameless, faceless, a non-issue to others than to provide free fodder for the wild animals in them. Please don't "pray" for me because your words sound like curse when you don't know me at all.
The good news is such a precarious moment is when you would know who is your real friend, who is generous enough to include you too in her little private universe and do the hard work of moral gymnastic, who has been faithful in getting his hands dirty, "stirring up a great deal of mud in the neighborhood of chaos" and seek to find himself there, in more than one sense of the phrase. So it is a precious moment too. I must trust others are doing their best to be my friend, but I shan't put my faith in it.
Solitude is not necessarily a retreat, but more often than not a reconnaissance, giving the field another honest, thoughtful survey. Friendliness, warm handshakes, even hearty hugs and long talks might not lead to camaraderie. There is no mechanism to attribute shortfalls and explain the brokenness within us and how it manifests in our relating to others. Solitude is a rite of passage to rid our heart of the illusion that such mechanism is tenable, even less worthwhile.
So I'm done here. Done writing. Now I am gonna put this message in a bottle and send it away, to the wilderness. Soon enough water, muddy water will get into the bottle and make my writing illegible, at least murky. "But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord's."
Yours, Alex
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