The Art of Never Being Alone
Pray without ceasing.
Early 2015. My relationship of two plus years was over. Twas the end of tumultuous, exciting, terrifying, and Shakespearian times.
Living in Portland with a broken heart necessitates at least three visits to Powell's bookstore for proper recovery (hope the store survives during all this craziness. I did order I Bring the Voices of My People and plan to buy more books as well!). Something about wandering around a thousand ideas, a thousand feelings, a thousand voices, knowing at least a dozen of them can probably connect with the anguish of many years in only a few paragraphs of text is just the right kind of therapy to start mending an overweight heart.
To be honest, I picked up a copy of The Opposite of Loneliness because the author Marina Keegan is on the cover and was (RIP) incredibly beautiful. Yet after the initial fantasy of riding off to the sunset with this beaut from Yale (and then checking myself when I read she went to Yale), I thought about the title a little more. It’s one of those buzzy notions that gets you hooked before you even read the first line. In her essay, thankfully, she quickly answers the question instead of leaving you hanging.
“It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.”
I love this thought, especially now in this COVID, Defund Police, politically rambunctious 2020. Sure, it’s definitely more early 20s vibe, and she tragically passed away at 22, but she is on to something.
And so I thought I’d steal a thought from a lady I suspect I’d connect with on many more. I want to elaborate on the art of never being alone.
For all the isolation, social distancing, protests, social media arguments, unemployment, Qanon conspiracy theories, and all the other things trying so hard to pull us away from each other, we really are in this together. There is always more about us that is similar than is different. Always.
We are in this together because They are in this together.
And by They I mean Jesus, the Spirit, and the Father.
It’s probably a little sacreligious to use They when describing God. But the first way to understand how we are never alone is to understand that God is never alone.
Quick rewind; at the tail end of that same Shakespearian relationship, we went to a religious conference all about reimagining views on God. It was just heretical enough to be exciting but orthodox enough to feel legitimate.
I got the sheet passed out to me and read this line. It sort of changed everything.
“God is and has never been alone. The very nature of God as a person is that He exists in relationship.”
Enneagram 2s rejoice! Throw some 4s in there too.
Something about this idea clicked in a way that none of my Calvinist upbringing had before. See I knew all about God as three in one, one in three, and so on. But all that I really learned about that, in reality, is that God as Father had two subservient guys who He really liked, yeah, but who just did His bidding. Hierarchy was on the forefront with this Trinity thing. We believed God was three and also one, but, really, there was One who told the other two what to do.
And this One guy on top seemed kinda scary. Hence why Jesus had to bail us out from His unpredictable and oddly petty wrath.
But even a cursory reading of the gospel of John shows how silly this is. From the onset, we get Jesus saying often mystical, sometimes cryptic, and always confusing things to His disciples. Eating Him as food, drinking Him as water. Very odd things to say at the least. Not very tweetable. However, He insisted, over and over and over again, that the key to His life, His ministry, His essence, was His connection to His Father. And just doing what He saw His Father doing.
Now, I think it’s pretty easy to quickly put on our hyperbole hats and say “ok, ok, clearly He does this amazing stuff because He’s Jesus. He’s the Son of God, the Messiah,” etc. etc. And to an extent, absolutely, that is true.
Yet, while that is true, what is also true is that Jesus actually DID do what He SAW His Father doing.
But, what does THAT mean?
I’ve spent the better part of my twenties trying to figure that out. To be frank, I have to use hyperbole, metaphors, analogies, and a whole lot of “feelings” to comprehend Jesus’s thought. And I think that’s exactly what Jesus wants us to do to make sense of how we are able to do divine things with the faith of only a mustard seed. In fact, He was ridiculous enough to say we would do better things than He did.
At the heart of how we do it? Believing we are never, ever alone.
I’ll kinda always hate being single. I’m a helpless and hopeless romantic. Truth be told, the most exciting and thrilling big feels I’ve ever had were post kiss, post “I like yous,” pre “oh crap, this is getting real,” pre break up. In fact, if I’m honest, it’s the feelings themselves that exhilarate me so, not necessarily the woman I am wooing and who is wooing me. It’s selfish, and I’m in process of fixing it.
This being said, I’m majorly introverted. I have the opposite of FOMO. I prefer weekends “in” without excitement. Give me my coffee, my video games, my books, my Community rebinge, and I am a happy camper. Throw in one or two casual hangs with friends coupled with deep talks over a few cold ones, and I’d say that was a rewarding few days off.
Yet for years, even when I was isolated constantly, scrolling through social endlessly, and able to stay inside my Hobbit hole of my own free will, I never liked being alone. Or, said better, feeling “lonely.”
Contending with yourself while feeling lonely is entirely different than inquiring within when you are well connected. Said differently, feeling lonely brings a lot of negative feelings particularly when you have shut yourself off from others whereas being alone when you are well known by others is fertile ground for knowing God more. Yet in truth, I understand the former better than the latter.
“Am I lovable?”
“Am I attractive enough?”
“Was it something I did or said?”
“I wish I had their life.”
“I guess I deserve this.”
“I just wish somebody was here with me.”
Fill in the blank, I know you’ve felt and experienced it too. These are thoughts that come when I am feeling lonely. Add to this our culture’s obsession with finding romantic love, and if you’re single while feeling these things? Insult to injury with a little extra salt to the wound.
Now, even though I have stated the answer, somewhat, what does it mean to “never be alone?” Do we cross our legs and chant like a proper ivy league white progressive ashamed of their whiteness? Do we read the Bible all the time to somehow “see” what the Father is doing through hyper spiritual vigilance? Do we quit doing as much bad behavior as possible so we can better feel God’s love more clearly?
All of these things, save for the first, are beneficial to “not being alone.” But as I’ve been learning from Christ for many years now, this idea is not quite something our minds can hold completely.
See it really isn’t through “effort” that we believe. To be fair, effort is required, but it alone is not enough to be with the Father. If anything, it’s through a whole lot of grace, a whole lot of letting go, and a whole lot of time that we grasp how deceptive lonely feelings are. And how God has always been present with us, even when we didn’t “feel” it.
Stated plainly, the art of never being alone is understanding that even though feelings of loneliness are felt and experienced, they aren’t real or true. Think of it this way; even in a crowd of strangers, across the table from a partner, or on vacation with family, you can feel isolated. Misunderstood, frustrated, unclear, dissatisfied. You can sense a particular and rich lack of belonging. Strange how when we don’t experience heaven, when we don’t feel known, when we don’t know where God is in these moments, we crave them all the more.
It’s like how when you first walk into a dark room your first instinct is to turn on the light. Yet when you are in a place filled with light, you never have an impulse to try to make it darker. So too are we when the greatest and most human quality, being with, is threatened. When we are known, loved, seen, “full” of other people, we never want that to end.
But the key is, what Jesus keeps telling us over and over and over again, in the Gospel of John, deep inside of our hearts, in times of prayer, in screams and cries of anguish over our suffering, is that the Father is with us.
No longer does anything broken go unnoticed or uncared for, no more does anybody say “is anybody out there?” without a deep and resounding yes from the Father above. The way He says yes may often be indirect, may not always be clear, may not give answers we want, but the emphatic truth is that past our faults, past our False Self, past our pain and suffering and sin and darkness, we are hidden in Christ.
Forget even with; Paul says we are inside of Him. In the same way Jesus is in the Father, and the Father in Him, now through the Spirit, we are in all of them. Sit and stew on that for a minute. And then a minute more.
None of this is intended to dismiss loneliness. Even with a million followers, an idyllic marriage, wonderful set of kids, and a workplace community so close it’s like a family, loneliness will come up. And if you don’t have all the right circumstances, you’ll probably feel it a lot more. Such is the human lot.
But my point is this; loneliness is felt but it’s not real. Truly experienced but in actuality, not true.
Scan back, remember the times when you were the most and fully known. Now, recall when you were the most misunderstood or rejected.
Which is stronger? Which does your soul, your deepest of the deep, your truest Self, remember better?
So many characters in so many stories say their deepest fear is dying alone. But I can tell you, as the most cynical of cynics, the most pessimistic of pessimists, the most broken, fragile, and frustrated hopeless romantic, this will never happen. We will never die alone because we have never lived alone.
We are never alone. We never have been and we never will be. Even the lonely feeling itself points to a God who is desperate for us to call on Him to remember the truth that we aren’t alone.
Lonely? Yes.
Alone? Never.
For He is Emmanuel, God with us. The beginning and the end, the first and the last. The one who knitted you together through love in your mother’s womb and the one to whisper love over you when you close your eyes and surrender your life.
This is the gospel. This is our God. This is the art of never being alone.