[Well here it is, folks. Hope it comes out well. I think I really want to do stand-up. love, Hops]
Sermon July 23, 2006
I don’t know if any of you know this feeling, but it’s very unsettling what you can find in filing cabinets. I think that’s one reason I prefer to file things in piles, or sometimes spread like a fan of cards, or in a wing-like spray of paper across the desktop. (And I suppose there are some on the floor.) I have files on several churches I’ve been involved in. But my first sermon was in 1987, right here, before I moved away for a while. This is my second. At this rate, if I live to be 94, I could do two more. (You do the math.)
The first reason I mention that Sunday is that when I found my old sermon again the other day, and re-read it, I recognized it was also about loneliness. I thought back then that I was only writing about being single again…what the label does… how even if you feel mostly fine about your life the word “single” can still bite into your self-image after a certain age, or how single or coupled, we might unconsciously view the widow or widower beside us as “a little ghostly but certainly not quite single”, or what it would be like to call yourself “single” because that’s the only way to get by in a culture that won’t tolerate your relationship. Then there was a really poignant passage about the death of my dog. The rest was a lot of bucking-up stuff about how it’s safe to be whoever you are in this community. But I think what was really on my mind was that I was lonely, and wanted an analytical way to talk about it. That about covers it. If I’d known I could have done it in a paragraph it could have been a lot shorter.
The other reason for my nostalgia is that Marie, whose recorded voice you just heard, was here that Sunday, and she is gone now. I had asked Marie if she’d like to create a service together, and she was magical. She sang a solo, and she led the congregation in a harmony so sweet and moving that we were spellbound. Connie Bingham and some others were blowing their noses. Then for the postlude Marie played her fiddle some more to accompany our exit from the sanctuary, but the congregation would not move. They wouldn’t get up. They wouldn’t budge. She tried encouraging them to move by waggling her eyebrows and titling her body and gesturing with her bow until finally she gave up and led them out to the parlor like the Pied Piper, still playing, walking backward. (This may strike a chord. Given the expressions around this piano on Sundays, it’s not hard to imagine a team of us grabbing Steve’s bench and shoving him and the piano up to the social hall so he won’t stop. Let’s form a committee to talk about that!)
I am avoiding my topic. And that really is my topic. Loneliness is an inconvenient truth. Generally, loneliness gets a bad rap. It’s not a word you just sling around. You can say you’re so lonesome you could cry if you’re Elvis Presley or Roy Orbison or Bonnie Raitt, but nobody else gets away with it. It’s embarrassing. Sometimes it carries a whiff of something toxic. It’s almost like saying you’re unpatriotic. Loneliness is a very un-American emotion. Usually what comes right on the heels of naming it, if you even allow yourself to call loneliness what it is, is shame.
What if you just went around saying “I feel lonely” any time you actually felt that way? Right out loud. It doesn’t happen very often, does it? What holds us back from that simple piece of honesty? You can say, “I’ve got a heck of a cold,” can’t you? I know what holds me back. People might think: That person is…CLINGY. A WET RAG. DEPENDENT. CO-DEPENDENT. WEAK. Or the worst epithet of all, the most humiliating: NEEDY.
I think most of these terms are relatively new accusations, and that they come from lives that are too pressured and fast and ambitions that are too strenuous to allow us to encounter and abide with each other, most days of our lives, in the graceful rhythms of community.
Haven’t we all had some friend or acquaintance, sometime or other, say to us, “I’m depressed. I’m bummed out. I’m in therapy. I’m in one of the stages of grief. I had a panic attack. I’m an alcoholic.” It might be a sobering moment to share with someone, but it’s probably not a very rare one. Any of these admissions are more likely to come from someone we know, even someone we know very well, than the words: “I am lonely.” One of the most remarkable phrases I read in a self-help book that described a man who sounded pretty lonely to me was that he was “walking around with his umbilical cord in his hand, looking for an outlet to plug it into.”
Ow! What’s up with that? It sounds like perfectly reasonable behavior to me. Isn’t this the sort of world that occasionally makes you want to climb a ladder back up into the womb? Even when we’re running from one thing to the next, busy all day long with work and family or this cause or that one, aren’t there times when we’re just struck cold by another dire piece of horrible news? There are times when the state of the world is so overwhelming to talk about that we just don’t. We stand limply in place saying “How are you?” and answering, “I’m fine.”
Friday night on the PBS show “NOW with Bill Moyers”, about faith and reason, Moyers was interviewing Richard Rodriguez, the author of “Brown”, an amazing book on culture and identity. Rodriguez is deeply religious, exalted by the rituals and mysteries of Catholicism, even though the church rejects his sexuality. He knows loneliness when he sees it. Mexico, he says, despite its pain and poverty, is a culture with a cheerful heart. Consider how so many Mexicans relate to each other and to their families. Consider how their laughter is an ordinary thing and their music is not an occasion. Consider even how they relate to their dead. They invite them in, have festivals for them, offer them their favorite foods, and once a year party with them all night long in the cemetery. By contrast, in Rodriguez’ view, America, despite its youth and optimism, is a desperately sad place. “A country that raises its children to leave is such a sad country,” he says.
Most of us don’t have abuelas, grandmothers, sitting by the door in the sun shelling peas. There are nursing homes or assisted living communities for that. Most of us can’t walk to visit our friends. There are cars for that. Most of us don’t play the guitar and sing together at the drop of a hat. There are CDs and radios for that. Most of us don’t sit outside every evening, just talking to each other, or telling stories. There are televisions and movies for that. Most of us don’t grow food. There are stores for that. And once our children if we have them, finish high school, we most likely drive them off to college, come home, and put more stuff into our houses that are often too big for us.
Another thing Richard Rodriguez remarked on was the insanity of cell phones. About all the people who are with other people and say when their cell phone rings, “Excuse me, I’ve got to take this call!” as though they’re thinking, “THAT might be the person who will change my life!”
We don’t even call them cell phones any more, we have given them a nickname: Cell. “Call my cell,” someone says, and you can imagine them marching along a sidewalk in an invisible cell, eyes out of focus gazing through the bars, unaware of anyone passing and looking at their face. “Call my cell.”
What’s up with that? I think many of us are more lonely than we like to own, even when among other people and their cell phones, and more often than we like to recognize. You might be wondering when I’m going to talk about the healing joys of solitude. Soon, but not yet. I believe what most of us do most often when despite our avoidance and our busyness, the subject of loneliness, our own or someone else’s, rises right in front of us, is to deflect it as quickly as possible and change the subject with a brisk elevator speech about solitude.
I love being alone. I like solitude. You’re born alone and you die alone so you might as well get used to it. I’ve got to have my Me-time. I’m not married and-I’m-just-fine-by-myself. True enough. I don’t know a writer, a musician, a mother, a father, a wife, a partner, a lover, an employee or a boss, or almost anyone, in fact, who doesn’t literally crave solitude—time alone, time to think—with an intensity that can backfire into exhaustion, irritability or despair if the need is not met.
One strange thing that can happen, though, when you feel lonely, because it is not well-accepted to say so, is that you might decide you had better stay alone until you “get over it.” You’re feeling really blue, alone in the universe, and somebody calls to invite you to do something. “I’m sorry,” you say, “I wouldn’t be good company right now.” Or you unplug your phone so nobody can call in the first place and you won’t have to pretend you’re not lonely.
Well for Pete’s sake, people! That’s exactly when we need to say “I am so glad you called. I was just feeling lonely!” Forbidden feelings tend to expand, and grow, and spread into the crevices of our nature.
There’s another dangerous thing about loneliness when it goes too long unattended. It can morph into self-pity after a while because what you really want is somebody to go, Poooor YOU. POOOOR You. Would you say that with me, please?
“POOOOOOOOOOR You.”
Oh, that is so nice. One more time, please, with feeling:
“POOOOOOOOR You.”
The appetite for sympathy varies from individual to individual although personally, I like plenty. But after enough of that, some instinct pops up and says, Wait A Minute. It’s not that bad. You start thinking about other people, who live in starving or violent places that are not a small green city in America, or who are right here beside you facing fears that make your own troubles look like hobbies, and pretty quickly your loneliness seems shallow, even selfish. (And you know doggone well you can go out and volunteer for something that will make a difference to someone, if not to everything, and feel better right away.) Still, everyone does need someone, preferably someone you don’t have to pay (although sometimes you may need that too), to whom you can occasionally vent your misery and worst disaster fantasies. You can spread it around among several people, so nobody gets worn out. And take turns, so it feels fair. If you don’t get your Poor-You, or you isolate yourself and keep not telling the truth or wanting to hear it (“I’m fine, how are YOU? Oh that’s good.” (Whew!) then self-pity can expand into depression, and by that time it’s hard to nurture yourself by connecting with others even if you wanted to.
But if you tell the truth and get a little Poor-You? Then you’re done and it’s time to fill the birdfeeder. Or read to a child. Or get back to work. Or pay your bills. Or take a slow walk with an elder. Or come to church for something or other. Or call someone, or go visit somebody else whom you think is probably lonely, even if they haven’t said so. You turn your caving in to the truth of your feeling into a reaching out.
In my old sermon, it was when my dog died that I felt the loneliest, because I had no shoulder to cry on. Since then, especially since the year 2000, watching the news alone is what most makes me feel that way. And then there’s wintertime. I almost always forget not to take the dark and the cold personally. But I have more relationships now, more rooted than before, most of them the gifts of this community. So these days my bouts of loneliness don’t last as long. They still happen though. And I’m as newly stunned by how painful loneliness can be as I am by the start of every winter. It’s really going to be this cold? This dark? This is taking forever! I can’t stand it.
But what about you? Or if not you on this beautiful summer morning, what about someone in a nearby pew? What do you think the chances are that a person within 10 feet of you has felt or is feeling a piercing loneliness that they haven’t really described to anyone?
The single image from 9/11 that broke my heart and gave me hope at the same time was hands. People who stood at the edge of life, accepted that there was no place to move except forward, and at that instant of ultimate existence and ultimate humanity, reached to hold each other’s hands.
What would happen to us if we held hands more before we stand at the edge of our lives? What might happen if we acknowledged the truth of loneliness, the reality of it that lingers just outside the firelight? What if we looked at it together now and then, not just at the moments of ultimate danger or loss, when love and friendship are most precious and most appreciated. What if we reminded ourselves often, this is a state of being? What if we befriended our loneliness the way the Mexicans befriend their dead? Invited it in, beguiled it with ritual and flowers and its favorite foods, stayed up with it all night when the occasion demands? What if we took it to meetings, to work, to friends? Does that sound frightening? The thing is, like most feelings, loneliness passes once it’s released. Maybe what we need to do when we’re lonely is not hold onto it so tightly. Let someone else know about it when we’re feeling it, or invite someone to tell us how it feels whenever they are.
What if everyone at coffee hour, just once, took a vow not to say the word, “Fine.” What if you asked yourself to come up with at least one unusually authentic adjective to offer when someone says, “How are you?” You don’t have to run. Coffee hour is not an encounter group. You might be feeling really happy this morning (or, you were before you came here). But there would be no penalty for using happy adjectives. Think of the possibilities! Even if this is all too feely for you at the moment, please don’t boycott coffee hour. I would never hear the end of it. You can just practice your adjectives if you want to.
If we really belly up to our loneliness, within it we might find our own loveliness. And that is when loneliness turns to solitude, and comfort can come from anything, anywhere. If we name loneliness when it strikes, and stop being ashamed of it, within our communities we might find deeper comforts, greater joys and happier company. And courage. With loneliness named and thereby tamed, we might be able more often to think of other people, silent in the next room, a few miles away in a housing project, hundreds of miles away in the debris of a disaster, or thousands of miles away in a war or a famine. We might be able to think about them, “Poor You” and, remembering the comfort it brought us, and how essentially simple it was, answer their loneliness more effectively, with something more than words.
We might feel the need to change our lives by answering their loneliness with our own. Bring it on! we could say to loneliness. I can speak your name, I can learn what you have to teach me, I can let you come, and let you go.
So may it be.
