"Loneliness"

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 23rd of January 2000

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
as a deliberate community of peace
to worship with art and care on a winter morn,
to open like white roses before a silken sun,
to awaken to deep roots which connect us
to be alive to our complete interdependence,
and to give thanks for our heritage of freedom,
and our ways of reason, love and generosity.
Praise for another day of deepening and spirit!

The First Reading [Next] [back to top]
comes from The Accidental Tourist, a 1985 novel by Anne Tyler that was made into a rather successful film.

At Julian's suggestion, he was dining on the very top of an impossibly tall building. Inside, everything was pink marble and acres of textureless carpeting.

Great black windows encircled the room from floor to ceiling. He, however, was taken to a table without a view. Lone diners, he supposed, were an embarrassment here.

His waiter handed him a menu and asked him what he wanted to drink. "Dry sherry, please," Macon said. The waiter left. Then he looked around at his neighbors. Everyone seemed to be celebrating something. A man and a pregnant woman held hands, a boistrous group on the left toasted the same man over and over. The waiter returned with the sherry. After he gave his order, he rose and slid his chair in and took his sherry over to a window.

All of a sudden he thought he had died.

He saw the city spread before him like a glittering ocean, the streets tiny ribbons of light, the planet curving away at the edges, the sky a purple hollow extending to infinity. It wasn't the height, it was the distance. It was the vast lonely distance from everyone who mattered...Ethan, his dead son, Sarah his ex, his brothers and sisters going about their business. He was too far gone to return. He was isolated in the universe, and nothing was real to him but his own angular hand clutching a sherry glass.

The Second Reading [Next] [back to top]
is part of a thoughtful essay from an elegant little book called "Notes From The Song of Life" by Tolbert McCarroll which is a straightforward, tough and comforting book about the mystical life for moderns.

There are times when you will lose your way.

At those times you will wander lost and lonely. Each step takes you farther from your path. Frantically, you will thrash around in the wilderness. One thought possesses you...how can you stop the dull heartache?

After a while you may give up. You play a game with yourself. You change your opinion as to what is important. You try and forget your path. You go seeking money or respect or knowledge or power or some other distinction. You achieve your goal and stand out from the crowd. The more distinctions you have, the more separate you feel. You are lonely.

You look to people according to how they function.

Is this the right teacher to impart knowledge to me?

If I am in a relationship to this person, will I feel loving and warm?

There are simpler ways to live. Stop trying to find a ladder that will reach the sky. Stay still, and the sky will touch you. Feel the earth beneath you. All the plants and animals have this common bond. You do not know the person who stands before you. If you try and detach from any melodrama about the two of you coming together, you may actually see this person. At that moment, there is no separateness. At that moment, there is no loneliness.

Sermon: "Loneliness"  [Next] [back to top]

"All the lonely people, where do they all come from?"

I want to talk about loneliness today.
I want to grapple with the richness of the word.
I want to lift up its nuances and subtler meanings.
Although I cannot say for sure that it is a universally felt feeling,
I suspect it must be very close to being one.
I know at least that I have been lonely.
Despite my friends and family, lonely.
So, I would wager, have most of you.
Even if you yourself are one of those amazing people who rarely claims to feel lonely,
you will still admit I hope that you live in a universe where many do claim loneliness for themselves. Thus, I intend this sermon for everyone here.

Let's begin.

My beloved grandmother Carmella died almost 15 years ago. I miss her still, and think of her often. I remember the day my father called me to tell me she had suddenly died.

It was at 7:25 in the morning, just minutes before I was leaving to perform a wedding. It was a wedding for two widowed members of the church I used to serve. They wanted me to solemnize their marriage in San Francisco, in the awesome shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge at Fort Pointe.

That day proved to be one of the toughest days of my career. You see, because it was a wedding for church members, and because it was too late to find someone else to substitute for me, I had to suck in my tears so I could show up for the wedding at 10 AM without a streaked face. But I so loved my grandmother that my shoulders wanted to heave, and my eyes wanted to flood the world, and I fought against my nature.

Straining hard against what they wanted to do, I stuffed my grief till after the wedding. I camouflaged my sorrow. I don't know how I did it, but I did. And the wedding went off with smiles all around.

But as I knew I would, I paid dearly for such an act. My mind, my very deepest soul, was twisted out of shape for the rest of the day. I so gummed up my inner workings I found it hard to feel anything at all later, let alone deep sorrow.

For a number of good reasons I was not able to get back to Michigan for her funeral. So on the day of her internment, I took the day off work, and walked the luminous, pastel hills of San Francisco on a cool but sunny day. I walked by myself, seeing my grandmother vividly in my mind's eye, giving thanks lavishly for the gift of her life.

But strangely, as I paced the city, I felt a keen and upsetting loneliness far more acutely than I felt the great emotions of grief and sorrow. Why?

Because in California there was not one single person I knew who also knew my grandmother. No one could hear her accented words in their heads, or the sound of her dancing laughter. No one could see her standing by her beloved fig tree in the sun, or bending over the grass to pick dandelion greens for her salad. I had, and still have, many good friends in California, but not one of them had met my grandmother. And thus, they could not share my grief, but only relate to my particular feelings of grief and loss by analogy. And I wanted something more than analogy even though I knew that was not possible.

This story came to mind immediately when I thought of the times in my life when I have felt lonely. And the loneliness clearly was not generated by the grief…after all, when my best friend Stephen died, it was quite different… there were many people surrounding me who knew him and loved him in their own ways, and so we could grieve together. I cried and keened when he died, but I did not feel lonely.

Now my loneliness at the time of my grandmother's death didn't frighten me. I was not ashamed of being lonely. It seemed perfectly appropriate to feel that way considering the situation. And I knew it would fade eventually, which it did.

But it was that experience which prompted my provisional understanding of the word "loneliness":

Loneliness is what I feel when I can find no way to share my precise feelings with anyone.

The second thing that came to mind, when I started to think about this sermon, was a letter I received from a minister friend who had been a classmate and room-mate of mine at Seminary. R. graduated a year before I did. He went off to serve his first church, in a small city not much more than 4 hours from here, while I remained in California to finish my coursework. He wrote me a letter after only two months at work with these very despairing words: "If it were not for the tremendous amount of alcohol consumed by members of this congregation, and the terrible loneliness of being a minister so far from colleagues, family and friends, this work might actually be possible and enjoyable."

It was a disturbing letter. Naturally I called R. right away to offer him an arm around his shoulder long distance. We talked. Turns out half the staff had a drinking problem, and R. spent all of his time putting out strange and hurtful fires.

R. had hardly anyone to talk to. He did not know his district colleagues, who were all more than an hour away. His friends were far away. He felt isolated, with no one to easily share his particular frustrations with, or to whom he could confess his deeply felt powerlessness in the face of the addictive behavior tearing apart his church office.

Now, if my friend R. could describe his ministry as lonely, it should be clear to you that loneliness is obviously not the same thing as being alone. After all, a parish minister, like R. or me or Wendy or Ned, is positively surrounded by people all the time. I myself have two phone lines, two e-mail accounts, and meetings most nights of the week. The office is busy with visitors most every day. There are two gatherings for Sunday morning worship. And if that were not enough, I am surrounded by "a great cloud of witnesses," that is, by all the voices of the men and women who converse with me out of the books on my shelves, the memories of my mind, and the love in my heart.

Yet I too feel very lonely in this profession sometimes. Not as much, I hope, as R. expressed in his letter, but enough, certainly to note.

R's letter was the first hint I had that loneliness has no inherent relationship to merely being alone.

Indeed, I know many people, like my good friend Leonard, who not only live alone deliberately and gladly, but who can say to me when I ask about loneliness in their lives, "I NEVER feel lonely."

Leonard, in fact, will tell you that he is something of "a loner."

Now the word "loner," despite the romantic glow lent the word by our own Henry David Thoreau in the last century, may strike some folks as kind of creepy…after all, isn't a loner kind of an eccentric? Aren't they all serial killers like Jeffery Dahmer or something?

Well, not all of them, certainly. My friend Leonard is the gentlest soul on earth, and is eccentric only if you think a practicing Buddhist is eccentric, which I certainly hope you don't.

And, even if it's true that some so-called "loners" like Dahmer end up committing atrocities, the equation of loner and loser is very suspicious, as far as I am concerned. King Henry VIII of England, for example, was not a loner by any means. He was surrounded by courtiers from morning to night, who watched him dress, undress, eat and eliminate. They followed him everywhere except to the final bedchamber where he spent so much time trying to create a male heir. And yet this famous lunatic was responsible for the deaths of over 78,000 of his own citizens, mostly political and economic enemies. He caused these men and women to be savagely killed by many methods not hitherto used, like being boiled alive. And Henry, you must know, was by no means unusual for European royalty.

So from the evidence of history, you could just as easily say that the greatest atrocities rise not where there are loners, but where there are people who cannot ever be alone.

Furthermore, despite my lonely walk over the San Francisco hills grieving for my grandma, most of my own experiences of loneliness have occurred in the midst of crowds, not when I have been by myself.

For example. When I was 33 years old, I received the most amazing gift in my life from some wonderful, generous friends…a trip to Europe. I traveled through France and Northern Italy, meeting other touring friends from the USA in almost every city. Finally, I found myself in Venice all by myself at the height of the tourist season.

The first thing I noticed was the real reason why the island is sinking: there are plainly just too many tourists visiting the fabled island city…and they look like they all ate heavy Venetian polenta for supper. I've never seen such a mass of human flesh in my life. I never went anywhere on the main island where I was not jostled, bumped or crowded some time or another.

Yet I was lonelier there than I had been anywhere else in Europe. Chris had met me in Sienna, Judith in Paris, Ron in Chartres, but no one met me in Venice.

Although the city was sumptuous, the canals enchanting, the dome of St. Mark's a revelation under the moonlight, I felt as lonely as I have ever felt. In Anne Tyler's words, I felt "isolated from the universe." Everyone around me seemed to be celebrating something… birthdays, anniversaries, new love. Like Macon, the main character in Tyler's novel, I was always the lone diner looking out over the glittering city. I was so frightened by this sense of isolation that I even managed to "accidentally" elbow people in restaurants just to get a little reassuring human touch.

But Macon, in the "Accidental Tourist," had other reasons to feel isolated than I did. His wife Sarah had left him after their son Nathan had died. With such an immense and particular double loss, Macon is crushed by a profound grief he cannot share with anyone, especially strangers. Somewhat the way I felt, walking around San Francisco after my grandmother died, this man could find nothing in his environment that did not contrast drastically with his own inner life. Everyone else was celebrating and toasting; he was lost in his own desolation.

Thus, to my provisional definition I must add a line:

"Loneliness is what I feel when I can find no way to share my precise feelings about particular circumstances with anyone…especially when I am surrounded by people." Such a definition begins to make me wonder if Henry VIII became so murderously insane precisely because he was surrounded by people all the time. Perhaps it was his immense loneliness in the midst of all those people that focused his cruelty.

Hannah Arendt, one of the greatest philosophers of our very cruel century, suggests something just like that. She has come to the conclusion that the "dull heart-ache" "lose your way" long-lasting loneliness outlined by Tolbert McCarroll in the Second Reading is one of the root causes for totalitarianism itself, which has dominated so much of our century. In her majestic opus, The Life of the Mind, she writes that profound "loneliness" (which she defines as "the experience of being abandoned by everyone, including one's own self") robs a person of the ability to feel any other experiences or to think things through carefully, so that finally, a tightly ordered sense of true belief (ideology) and terror come to replace the shared values of community and reason.

Now most of us in this room are not that profoundly lonely in Hannah Arendt's sense. I don't see anyone here wanting to sign up with the Storm Troops and run rampant over the world. The loneliness in this room is probably of a more ordinary variety:

the loneliness of people who have moved here recently and miss the proximity of friends;
the loneliness of people who spend all day home with the kids and have no time to nurture outside friendships;
the loneliness of people who have retired and miss both the people there and being needed;
the loneliness of people who have suffered a recent break up.

There is even a loneliness for people whose education has given them a knowledge or jargon few others can share.

And of course, there are people who feel lonely because they feel as if they are not whole unless they find a partner in life to balance them out,
and others who are in relationship but feel lonely even in that embrace because of communication difficulties.

Are there any antidotes to loneliness? Sure.

One thing that comes to mind is to take time to actually be alone for a few minutes each day at least… "alone with the Alone," so to speak, or with one's self. Think of the great minds and hearts that the human race honors…deliberate solitude was an essential part of their lives. Buddha under the bodhi -tree, Jesus in the wilderness, Marie Curie sitting silent at her desk, Georgia O Keefe in her desert house, Thoreau in his hut by Walden Pond…these are images that convey a sense of self-possession to this very day. They suggest that a few moments of solitude do not promote loneliness, but rather help build gateways back to the land of authentic community which is, after all, where we live our most fruitful lives.

I know, deliberate solitude is hard for some people to come by in our day and age. Our children need us, our parents need us, our work demands more hours than we can humanely give, our friends protest that we do not spend enough time with them. By the time we are ready to sleep, sleep overtakes us so fast that we don't even have much of a chance to simply go over the day we just lived in the solitude of our minds, and savor its riches and grieve its losses.

And sleep, I must note, is not a form of solitude.

Thus, little by little, I think it's good to try and capture at least a few moments alone amidst all the bustle. Nothing fancy. Even some conscious breathing upon waking or just before sleeping will do in a pinch.

But I think it would be even better to spend some time reflecting on the day behind us or the day ahead of us, remembering both our blessings and losses, our passions and boredom, our hopes and fears. During this time we can try for a while to be less hard on ourselves, and, at the same time, more honest with ourselves. Call it prayer, call it devotion, call it meditation…it makes no difference to me. Arguing about words like that is an immense waste of time. But I fear that without such self-conscious time, a real and lasting loneliness can creep up almost unnoticed. Not a situational loneliness, like me grieving for my grandmother. Not a profound, angry loneliness, like the kind that leads to totalitarian thinking. But the "dull heartache" loneliness McCarroll talks about, the kind of feeling that we have lost our way. When that begins to occupy our inner heart, we find honest conversation more difficult, trust harder to offer to others, confidence in our own self less available, and all patience gone.

Loneliness, you see, can disguise itself. It can look like the search for distinction and power, as McCarroll reminds us, and that only leads to more loneliness. And when that happens, the people in our lives are no longer companions on the way, fellow wonders in this universe of wonders, but rather objects to be controlled, functions to be manipulated in some way, means to an end, not ends in and of themselves.

Eleanor Rigby, died in the church and was buried
along with her name, nobody came….
Fr. McKenzie, wiping the dirt off his hands as he filled in the grave, no one was saved.
All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?

When the Beatles created that song, they were famous. "More famous than Jesus," one of them said cavalierly, but I think accurately. Indeed.

But that fact alone suggests to me that this song wasn't a sophomoric song written about a poor old widow who died alone, and the Anglican priest that buried her, but rather, a confession of loneliness on the part of the writers. I wonder, how lonely do you think you might feel if you were no longer yourself, but rather a veritable god, a symbol always desired, interpreted, wanted and adored by others, as Sir Paul McCartney was until he got rich enough to hide out on a remote and protected estate?

But there is a simpler way to live, says McCarroll, a way of life that can ease loneliness. "Stop trying to find a ladder that will reach the sky. Stay still, the sky will come to you." Separateness, I think he is saying, is just an illusion. Feeling separate and lonely, and being separate are two different things. Our loneliness, he says, is a illusion we may have inadvertently nurtured. We may have inadvertently nurtured our loneliness because somehow we thought the "melodrama" of desire and control was more wonderful than just opening ourselves to the reality of the earth that surrounds us right now: snowy fields, stone hard earth, geese flying overhead, gray skies, crystalline air, warm wood beams, roses, and real human beings…our peers…in purple chairs all around us. And each of their lives is as important to them as my life is to me, or yours to you.

If you want to stop being lonely, says McCarroll, "detach from the melodrama." Don't imagine that the ideal spouse will complete you, the final friend will understand you perfectly, the great teacher or guru will solve your problems, the best possible church community or ministers will make all things well, the truest companion you could ever imagine is waiting in the wings.

There are many concrete ways "to detach from the melodrama," he suggests. And all of them, I think, are neatly summed up by another Beatles' song: Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be. Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

By my lights, "Letting it be" looks something like this:

First and foremost: I need to stay still more, run around less. Listen more, speak less.

Two, You and I need to cease imagining that our uniqueness needs to be either less unique or more unique. You and I are unique enough already.

Three. I need to name and face any real limitations in my own life. Equally, I need to name and face my strengths and joys. And each and every day I need to accept and love them both more and more and more.

Four. I need to give up thinking that anyone owes you anything, or that I deserve or do not deserve things. The whole concept of "deserve" arises from confusing the particulars of life with the sheer gift of life itself.

Five. An important corollary: I need to let go of as many expectations about life as I can, since so many of them can be foolish or crazy-making; and I certainly never should confuse my expectations with something I can serenely control.

Six. Several times each day, I need to give thanks for my life, being glad that I can experience the world still… and that I am experiencing its most delicious mystery right now by breathing ...and saying "I am."

These may seem like simple, even mundane suggestions, but, for God's sake, who was it who ever convinced you that the spiritual life would have to be painfully baroque, fussy or complicated?

And if facing and lifting our own loneliness is not the purpose of choosing to live a spiritual life, then what is?

In sum:

Loneliness because of circumstance, as illustrated by the story of my lonely grief at my grandmother's death, will certainly come to us all.

And, soon enough, it will, in all likelihood, pass.

Profounder, more potent forms of loneliness also exist in this world, and the history of the twentieth century reminds us that people can lose their way completely, may try to ease their aching hearts by controlling everyone else's life.

But even this sort of loneliness, in its greater and lesser, more ordinary forms, can be faced and conquered by a willingness to daily be alone with the Alone. It can also be faced well by keeping ourselves faithful to experience above any set ideology or "ism." Loneliness can be addressed, not by going out and making a thousand new friends to fill up the empty places, but rather, by learning to love all the more who you yourself are right now, and by guarding your solitude and times apart.

Or, as the poet Marge Piercy puts it even tighter: to face loneliness, "Live as if you like yourself, and, you know, it may actually happen."

A Winter Prayer [back to top]

Bells in the tower, snow on the ground,
ache in the heart, spring on the way.

Ache in the heart. Love in the heart.
Snow in the trees. Trees in my eyes.

Grey in the skies. Grey in my heart.
Sun in the skies. Sun in my heart a lot.

Love for itself. Never to acquire.
Never to control. Never to lie.

Bells in the tower. Seasons round and round.
Love, breath upon breath. Ice melting.

Love in my heart. Snow on the ground.
Spring and roses are on the way.

[back to top]

First UU Church Home | Church Newsletters | First UU Staff | Sermons | Elected Officers
Email Mark | Email the Church Office | Email the Webmaster

Last update: 02/02/2003