LONELINESS: A SOURCE OF BEAUTY

We live in a society in which loneliness has become one of the most painful human wounds. The growing competition and rivalry which pervade our lives from birth have created in us an acute awareness of our isolation. This awareness has in turn left many with a heightened anxiety and an intense search for the experience of unity and community. It has also led people to ask anew how love, friendship, brotherhood and sisterhood can free them from isolation and offer them a sense of intimacy and belonging…
But the more I think about loneliness, the more I think that the wound of loneliness is like the Grand Canyon – a deep incision in the surface of our existence which has become an inexhaustible source of beauty and self understanding. The Christian way of life does not take away our loneliness; it protects and cherishes it as a precious gift. Sometimes it seems we do everything possible to avoid painful confrontation with our basic human loneliness, and allow ourselves to be trapped down by false gods promising immediate satisfaction and quick relief. But perhaps the painful awareness f loneliness is an invitation to transcend our limitations and look beyond the boundaries of our existence. The awareness of loneliness may be a gift we must protect and guard, because our loneliness reveals us to inner emptiness that can be misunderstood, but filled with promise for him who can tolerate its sweet pain.
It is the most basic human loneliness that threatens us and it is so hard to face. So often we do everything to avoid the confrontation of the experience of being alone, and sometimes we are able to create the most ingenious devices to prevent ourselves from being reminded of this condition. The fact remains that we need to be alone for sometimes to really discover ourselves. The good things we are able to gather out of our loneliness will be exploded or refined in solitude when the need arises.
When we are impatient, when we want to give up our loneliness and try to overcome the separation and incompleteness we feel too soon, we easily relate to our human world with devastating expectations. We ignore what we already know with a deep-seated, intuitive knowledge – that no love or friendship, no intimate embrace, no community, commune or collective, no man or woman, will ever be able to satisfy our desire to be released from our lonely condition. This truth is so disconcerting and painful that we are more prone to play games which our fantasies than to face the truth of our existence. Thus we keep hoping that one day we will find the man who really understand our experiences, the woman who will bring peace to our restless life, and the job where we can fulfill our potential, the book which can explain everything and the place where we can feel at home. Such false hope will lead us to make exhausting demands and prepare us for bitterness and dangerous hostility when we start discovering that nobody, and nothing, can live up our absolutistic expectations.
The development of our inner sensitivity is the beginning of spiritual life… by slowly converting our loneliness into deep solitude; we create that precious space where we can discover te voice telling us about the inner necessity – that is, our vocation.