A wave of loneliness seems to be washing across America. Cigna surveyed 10,000 people 18 and older. Three out of five of these adults—that’s 61 percent—reported feeling lonely. Narrow the age range to 18 to 22 and the percentage of respondents feeling lonely jumps to 79 percent.
Cigna made its survey public in January of 2020. That’s right. January. Before coronavirus led to physical distancing and stay-at-home orders.
We were already a strikingly lonely people. Our pandemic-wrought isolation may have exacerbated our experience of personal disconnect. But many of us entered the shutdown feeling empty, isolated, or unwanted.
It’s widely recognized that being alone is not the same thing as being lonely. And you can feel desperately lonely in a crowd of people. Loneliness is a profound feeling of disconnect from other people.
In her book The Village Effect, Susan Pinker defines loneliness as more than mere physical separation. Being lonely is the feeling that we are being intentionally excluded—that others are keeping us at a social distance—along with the existential drain that comes with that feeling.
Professor Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s research shows that we are organically wired to long for social connection. It’s one of our biological needs. When we’re deprived of it, our physical as well as our mental health declines. (See Julie Halpert’s “How to Manage Your Loneliness”)
We long for connection. To know and to be known. To love and to be loved. To belong. And yet, experiencing emotional, social, and spiritual disconnect is a recurring theme in human life. And I hate to say this to Cigna, but we could have told them this before they bothered with the survey.
Existentialist philosophers used the world “alienation” to refer to the tension felt by individuals between our longing to belong and our inability to form genuine, abiding connections. Even earlier, in his 18th Century essay “Perpetual Peace,” the philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that humans are characterized by an “unsociable sociability.”
More recently, spiritual writers have underscored how our institutions include us and exclude us. In her book Healing Spiritual Wounds, Carol Howard Merritt names clearly how the Church at once offers safe spiritual harbor for some and a dangerous, wounding place for others.
Kaitlin Curtice’s Native confronts us—in an effective mix of stark boldness and nurturing grace—with the ongoing social, political, and economic erasure of indigenous cultures as a function of our national business as usual.
We all long for connection. To be on the inside. But even in our most sincere efforts to create a place of belonging we push somebody to the fringes. Perhaps that’s because deep within each of us is the nagging fear that somebody, someday, is going to elbow us into the outer darkness. To leave us crushingly disconnected.
Believe it our not, the most oddball story of the Jesus narrative—and the least glamorous major feast in the Church calendar—addresses our deep fear with a powerful hope. I mean the Ascension.
In the Acts of the Apostles, we read that the disciples watch Jesus float skyward and disappear among the clouds. (1:9) This happens forty days after the resurrection and nine days before Pentecost. So churches celebrate the feast on a Thursday. And you’re right, few people remember the feast day and even fewer show up for worship.
And yet, the story of the Ascension tells us that loneliness or alienation is not our eternal fate. The meaning of the Ascension is that, in Jesus, all of humanity—each of us and all that makes us truly human—will be woven into the very life of God.
Our identity will not be erased. But our loneliness will be a thing of the past. Our destiny is seamless intimacy with God and with one another. Paradoxically, our earthly loneliness hints to us that we were made for an intimacy that we yearn for and dream of while we’re still walking this planet.
However, the Ascension does not teach us to wait passively for the ultimate divine fix for our individual loneliness and our social alienation.
It challenges us to dismantle the barriers that divide us and the systems that exclude some in order to privilege others. It encourages us to take up spiritual practices that make us increasingly open to Christ’s presence in ourselves and in those different from us.
We long to be connected. And as it turns out, our longing is a response to God’s longing to be connected with us and to connect us with each other.
Do you think that connection to God or feelings of oneness with Universal Energy can heal the very real neurological responses that result from being disconnected, isolated, and excluded socially?
Yes, but I think of it as a process. One completed in eternity. That’s part of what it means for us to be finite. Nevertheless, I also believe in real, remarkable transformation
Thank you, Bishop Jake – for this particular article, which outlines the need of most of us for a ‘significant other’ with whom to share our lives. For those of us who in adulthood are able to find a loving partner – in conformity with the heterosexual norm – this is comparatively easy. However, for those who are not part of the majority, who for no fault of their own find themselves able only attracted to someone of their own gender; this can be an insurmountable problem. This is why the Church needs to better understand the deep needs of LGBT+ people to find their life-partner – without the condemnation of fellow members of the Christian community. All human loving, after all, is but a pale shadow of the Love God has for each one of us.
Amen
I would like to share something I wrote many years ago when I felt that way most of the time. I do not feel lonely anymore. I hope this encourages deeper connections to oneself. The story just begins there. In Loving Kindness Patricia Marie Babin UNCOVERING TRUTH–LONELINESS WAS NOT THE FOE
Feeling alone most of my days
From birth to middle years
Depths and widths
I walked in it’s veil.
What crisis is this?
A second look.
I have uncovered truths
Unending and constant
Suddenly lonely was not the foe
I opened my heart and
Became it’s friend
Loneliness and I
Days on days
Endless and vast
Loneliness beside me
Loneliness abides me
Tonight I see through
A tiny ray of light
More substantial inside
Crowding my “friend” out
The new friend is me
With definition
With shadows of goals
With soothings of Peace
My friend is not gone
But resting aside
Tired from energy
Constantly spent
My loneliness wants peace
And so….
I have risen like the phoenix
From some kind of hell
From life
A life
Of tidal rhythms
I have wandered through
And peered at
The inner walls
Of my soul
I have laid bare
My shortcomings
My block
My lacks
Unto myself I revealed
And others
My discoveries
Of truth
I journeyed into that darkness
And the journey brought the light
I released my own imprisonment
Of fears and delight
To find my own soul
In blessed times it unfolds
In earnest I proceedTo set it free
Then I see the openings
My reason for life
My creativity
In my own rights
My life of bliss
Is free and calm
Is full in the middle
Exansive and boundless
My journey never over
Has brought me back to life
Has opened my mind
My heart
My eyes
I still hunger for clarity
Freedom and joy
I seek peace
And more peace
And peace some more
I journey to beauty
An eloquence there
A Knowing
A center
Of Grace
Calmly held secured
It is of Grace I want to walk
In Grace I seek to be.
Of my burgeoning soul’s worth
To be free
Grounded, anchored, solid
In its source
Is it nothing, is it all?
It is hunger no more
For it resides in me
The love of life
A power unleashed
In its peace
It Rambles through
It settles and Homes
It rests and aches
It Relinquishes forces
Power of the Divine
Of light
Of love and Peace
It Spirals out
And collects magnetically
It Wheels around
It pushes toward
Its vortex
Is infusing
Permeating
Blanketing
It hones in essence
It balms and soothes
Its force is bewildering
Inside of empty muse
It beckons at the pain
By tugging at its core
Revealing the hurts
By wake of their absence
It is endless
It is more than endless
It is bursting in its
Gentle rhythms a wash
Permeated
A tangible force
it is unrelenting
It is Home
It is ALL
AND
I want to learn
to live there
Patricia Marie Babin 1990”s
This is beautiful and powerful. Thank you for sharing this with me and all my readers.
I read this after choking on tears reading tonight’s evening prayer scripture from Matthew 8, Jesus has come down from the mountain with great crowds following him after being astounded that he taught with such authority. Obviously, He was on a roll, with so many looking up to Him and listening to Him. One of the ”important people’ – the ones we expect to brush by those of us on the margins,those of us not so attractive or charismatic or well-off or well-read – fill in your own not so thoughts here. So one of us ‘not-so’ people slides in and asks him for something. We all know how this goes, right? He will be brushed off with disdain, or platitudes, flat out ignored or pushed aside by the important followers. But not Jesus. He SEES him – he stretches out his hand and touches the untouchable. He says “I do choose.” He connects. And that brought me to tears. Which is a bit awkward when you are the one reading the scripture aloud! Jesus does chose us – you,me, the CEO Christians, the meth-head walking down the street with her backpack, every one of us. And the even more awesome thing is that connectedness is with us even unto the end of time. Thanks for helping me see why those simple words “I do chose” brought me to tears.