by Dr. Lani Wilson
Good morning! More than ever, our churches must be refuges from the angst that pervades the world now. Birth of The Hope who is Christ Jesus seems more and more like a sturdy resource. Even a few who feign doubt or disbelief are wishing they believed in prayer now. At the least, to consider prayer when one believes that one is not capable of it is proof that The Nazarene accomplished His mission, doesn’t it?
The word given us to this time is alone. How ironic is the origin of the word.
ORIGIN Middle English: from all + one.
Oxford English Dictionaryalone (adj., adv.)
“unaccompanied, solitary; without companions, solitary,” c. 1300 contraction of all ane, from Old English all ana “unaccompanied, all by oneself,” literally “wholly oneself,” from all, wholly” (see all) + an “one” (see one). It preserves the old pronunciation of one. Similar compounds are found in German (allein) and Dutch (alleen). Sense of “and nothing else” (“Man shall not live on bread alone”) is from c. 1200. Related: aloneness. Alonely seems to be obsolete since 17c.
Online Etymology Dictionary
When are human beings ever “wholly oneself” or all ana, as explained above? There is a relatively well-known (and somewhat) acerbic quotation that sketches a secular view.
We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone. -Orson Welles
https://www.brainyquote.com
Most people are motivated by a need to avoid being alone. Even the most introverted of us knows that companionship is life-giving and life-preserving. Some would rather suffer unhealthy relationships than be alone. We mistakenly settle for benign or even malicious physical presence to avoid being alone. Some get to a desolate place where no other biological presence is tolerable. We disappear into that stairwell that leads to an empty death by alcoholism, violence, drug addiction, physical abuse: The end of human despair.
Then here comes The Nazarene, telling us to “fear not” and promising to never leave us alone primarily because He is never alone.
Jesus replied, “Do you now believe? Look, a time is coming – and has come – when you will be scattered, each one to his own home, and I will be left alone. Yet I am not alone, because my Father is with me.
John 16:31-32 (NET)
In my mind, I go to “but He was God; I’m not God. I know what alone means.” And why is the root of the word “all + one?” How can you be “all by oneself?” That three-word phrase approaches oxymoronic. The Christ taught us that we were never going to be alone, even after He physically left those First Century Jewish Palestinians who were His followers. From the records left to us, we know that Jesus often went away to recover alone from the crowds. We know that He felt abandoned when He was on the cross. We don’t know anything about His life before His ministry. We can only guess and infer. We are taught as Christians that what counts in His earthly life is the three short years of His ministry. Yet, we are also taught that Jesus can identify with us in our humanity because He was human. Regardless of your hermeneutical understanding of Jesus the Christ as divinely human and/or humanly divine, if we are to take our training at its best, then it is not a far stretch to imagine that Jesus experienced the range of alone-ness.
Then Jesus, because he knew they were going to come and seize him by force to make him king, withdrew again up the mountainside alone.
John 6:15 (NET)
To be alone doesn’t necessarily equate with being lonely. And yet in our ever-connected, boundary-less, switched-on society, they are assumed to be synonymous. To many, especially those who are granted life as Seniors, being alone is not peaceful but tragic. Loneliness is studied globally because of its impact on the quality of life and continued positive health of older adults. It’s not just the elderly that experience being alone as loneliness.
The problem could even be deadly: new research from the University of Chicago, at the end of the year, suggested the physical effects of isolation are twice as bad for our health as obesity - weakening the body’s ability to fight viruses, pushing blood pressure into the danger zone for heart attacks or strokes and increasing the risk of early death.
Victoria Lambert, ‘Not just a problem for old people: the young are lonely, too; ”The Telegraph, www.telegraph.co.uk; January 4, 2016
Now researched at the University of Chicago and the University of California have discovered that loneliness actually triggers physical responses in the body which make people sick. It appears to trigger the ‘fight or flight’ stress signal which affects the production of white blood cells. It also increases activity in genes which produce inflammation in the body while lowering activity in genes which fight off illness, promoting high levels of inflammation in the body. Essentially, lonely people had a less effective immune response and more inflammation than non-lonely people. They feel socially threatened which has an enormous impact on health.
Sarah Knapton, “Loneliness triggers biological changes and early death,” The Telegraph, www.telegraph.co.uk; November 23, 2015
In the same article by Victoria Lambert cited above, she interviews Sue Bourne who filmed a documentary called “The Age of Loneliness” that profiled people of all ages in the UK. As connected as one can be via social media, more people are feeling isolated and alone to the point of death, it seems. It is part of the human condition and yet we treat it as a social shame. Bourne says a goal of her film was to take the shame out of admitting that feeling lonely should not be a shameful state. As Christians how are we handling the fact that rates of social isolation (or loneliness) is growing in concert with the dwindling number of church members? As a relational people, are African-American Christians able to admit that people of all ages are lonely, are more alone now than ever, and suffering greater rates of physical and mental health complications as a result? It’s one thing to say we need to be in koinonia with each other. It’s another to create an environment where it is not degrading and socially self-destructive to admit that one is lonely because we are alone. Just as in childhood and teenage years, no one wants to be the outcast: Everyone wants to belong. Did we miss that message from The Christ? That everyone DOES belong?
Social isolation is a growing epidemic — one that’s increasingly recognized as having dire physical, mental and emotional consequences. Since the 1980s, the percentage of American adults who say they’re lonely has doubled from 20 percent to 40 percent.
Dhruv Khullar, “How social isolation is killing us,” The Upshot, The New York Times, December 12, 2016
When (especially in church) do you remember someone admitting that they were lonely? We speculate about others being lonely as the cause for some noticeably unacceptable, un-Christian, and (God forbid), un-saved behavior. But do we ever admit to one another that “I feel so alone” or “I’m lonely.” If you’re someone who never feels this way, then you should write a book because you are probably a rarity.
Loneliness can accelerate cognitive decline in older adults, and isolated individuals are twice as likely to die prematurely as those with more robust social interactions. These effects start early: Socially isolated children have significantly poorer health 20 years later, even after controlling for other factors. All told, loneliness is as important a risk factor for early death as obesity and smoking. The evidence on social isolation is clear. What to do about it is less so. Loneliness is an especially tricky problem because accepting and declaring our loneliness carries profound stigma. Admitting we’re lonely can feel as if we’re admitting we’ve failed in life’s most fundamental domains: belonging, love, attachment. It attacks our basic instincts to save face, and makes it hard to ask for help.
Ibid.
As a people who are known historically for our welcoming of others into our communities, how are we faring in acknowledging that those in our communities are falling “off the grid?” Rev. Dr. Jini K. Cockcroft told us in her sermon messages a couple of weeks ago that classism has driven rifts in our communities, in our churches. Her book, From Classism to Community, is creating a stir because she dares to name one source of this isolation and even offers us solutions. Khullar continues with his own suggested solutions.
Religious older people should be encouraged to continue regular attendance at services and may benefit from a sense of spirituality and community, as well as the watchful eye of fellow churchgoers. Those capable of caring for an animal might enjoy the companionship of a pet. And loved ones living far away from a parent or grandparent could ask a neighbor to check in periodically. But more structured programs are arising, too. For example, Dr. Paul Tang of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation started a program called linkAges, a cross-generational service exchange inspired by the idea that everyone has something to offer. The program works by allowing members to post online something they want help with: guitar lessons, a Scrabble partner, a ride to the doctor’s office. Others can then volunteer their time and skills to fill these needs and “bank” hours for when they need something themselves. “In America, you almost need an excuse for knocking on a neighbor’s door,” Dr. Tang told me. “We want to break down those barriers.”
Ibid.
If we believe the statistics from health professionals that this is possibly the cause of much modern, 21st century malaise, then are we surprised that people are leaving mainline churches? If you can’t find soul-comfort from other Believers in a church, then what’s the use in coming back? And blaming the pastorate is a lame excuse for any congregation, even if pastoral leadership is culpable. WE are the congregation, and Jesus told us that WE are His people; we belong to Him. Transitively, WE, therefore, belong to each other. Pastors experience their own version of loneliness and feeling alone that is incomprehensible for most congregants to imagine.
A great paradox of our hyper-connected digital age is that we seem to be drifting apart. Increasingly, however, research confirms our deepest intuition: Human connection lies at the heart of human well-being. It’s up to all of us — doctors, patients, neighborhoods and communities — to maintain bonds where they’re fading, and create ones where they haven’t existed.
Ibid.
Yes, we know that the isolation of Black communities – or the segregation of poor African-Americans from the bourgeois, African-American middle class – has created broken bonds. But, isn’t it our responsibility to acknowledge it and then fix those broken bonds? Isn’t that what The Christ was and is all about? How can we expect new life in a ripe garden for God to work when we won’t admit that the ground from the choir stand and pulpit to the last row in the balcony needs to be weeded, tilled, and fertilized first? Frankly, some ground in churches needs to be “nuked” first, exorcised, and then prepped for The Spirit of the Living Christ. Sound exaggerated? Take a look at annual statistics. Being “in the black” is a necessity if any organization is going to continue, but it might not be the measure that God looks at or cares about most. How many people were baptized? How many babies were dedicated? How many new members joined? How many of them are still here after a year? How many members left and do we even keep count? This absolutely does not tell the whole story for any church, but it says something. Most importantly, do we have a clue as to how many of them found a place, a niche, a heartbeat of the Christ, in our shrinking church community?
Yes, it’s a complex problem. Yes, it’s happening nationally. Yes, people have different issues. Yes, we cannot be all things to all people. But can we at least be the one important wheel in the vehicle of people’s lives that no other wheel can be? Can we be the place where people find soul-support?
Lament is an essential practice for peacemakers and justice advocates: simultaneously directing their pain to God and expanding their imagination for the tasks ahead. Indeed, without lament, they are stripped of a potent resource for rightly orienting themselves to the world and inviting transformative divine action.
Josuha Becket, (2016). Lament in Three Movements: The Implications of Psalm 13 for Justice and Reconciliation. Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care, 9(2), pg. 207-208.
When people are on the ropes in the dueling ring called “life,” when they seek relief and respite, they must first lament the struggle, the despair, the loss. The Hebrew Bible is replete with the Hebrews lamenting the strife in their lives, the oppression of soured leadership, the rape of injustice, the feeling of abandonment by God, feeling alone. If there is any people who know what these are, it is African-Americans. In post-election 2017 have we publicly, corporately, openly lamented what is and might transpire over the next four years?
Lament is not despair. It is not whining. It is not a cry into a void.
Lament is a cry directed to God. It is the cry of those who see the
truth of the world’s deep wounds and the cost of seeking peace.
It is the prayer of those who are deeply disturbed by the way things
are ... If we are to participate in God’s plan to reconcile all things in
Jesus Christ, we must begin to listen to this cry.44Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice, Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace, and Healing (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 78.
Ibid., 209.
But first, we must cry.
A structural analysis of Psalm 13 served as Becket’s content to analyze the three-step process leading to reconciliation:
1. Crisis to complaint.
2. Complaint to plea.
3. Plea to praise.16
16 Bellinger, Psalms, 50-51. Cf. Westermann, Praise and Lament, 68-69, for a more elaborate rubric.
Ibid., 211.
It’s not necessarily earthly reconciliation that we need as much as a reconciliation with God Whom we sometimes feel has abandoned us.
How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul, and
and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
Psalm 13:1-2 (NRSV)
As Becket reminds, it was Martin Luther King, Jr. who answered the ancient Psalmist.
I come to say to you this afternoon however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth pressed to earth will rise again. How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever. How long? Not long, because you still reap what you sow. How long? Not long. Because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. How long? Not long, ’cause mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!28
28 Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World, ed. James Melvin Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 124.
It is in the spaces of the church where we must come to succor our souls. It is in the spaces of the church where we must lament, cry out, petition, and surrender in praise to our God, to our Christ. Where are these spaces in the church? They are in the people of God; not in a room, not in a meeting, not in the narthex, not in the breezeway, not in the fellowship hall. They are in the people, just where Jesus placed Himself and where He lives, breathes, and gives us life. They are in us.
Alone? If The Christ has taken up residence in His people, in you, every time we come to the sacred ground where we worship God and allow ourselves to lament and plead and surrender to praise, we know in our every heartbeat that He is there. And has never left. He is there for us to be there for each other. Do we dare lament and plead and praise? Do we dare?
But I trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the LORD, because he has
dealt bountifully with me.
Psalm 13:5-6 (NRSV)
Reach in, O God, and make those spaces where You reign pulse with Your blood. Reach in, O LORD, and blaze brightly to burn out fear and demoralization. Reach in, O Jesus, and baffle us with Your joy. Reach in, O Master Lover, and rekindle our relation with Your Spirit. We are dying of loneliness and are feeling left and alone. Carry our souls aflame with Your perfect love back to each other and heal.
Lord, help us all from bondage flee,
Let my people go,
and let us all in Christ be free,
Let my people go.Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land,
tell old Pharoah: Let my people go.
Let My People Go, Spiritual
hymnary.org
Amen.
