And what about relationships? Even if a relationship makes me happy, or content today, I'm always wondering when it will end, either through boredom, death, or desertion. I'm never in a place of perfect inner peace and contentment. I'm never totally satisfied, with what I own, who I am, or even who I love.
And, I'll bet you're just like me, not in the particulars of what I say, but in the way I think and feel. All human beings are. No one and nothing can ease this primal hunger and thirst inside of all of us for long. Or this primal loneliness. No one ever seems capable of understanding and accepting and loving us completely. Everyone, at some level, is a mystery to others, a mystery too deep to be plumbed, a mystery we can only see through a glass darkly. Especially God! Our greatest thirst is for this Mystery called God Whom we can never completely know and love this side of Heaven. At the end of the day, regardless of our toys and our relationships, we're alone.
Did you ever stop to think that Loneliness is who we are? That this is how God built us to be? God created us to share in God's love, to participate in the richness of God's very life through complete union with God. But we're not created just to share complete union with God; we're also created to desire and have complete union with all other human beings and with all of creation. How do we come to know this purpose for our lives? Through God's revelation in Scripture, and through loneliness, restlessness, and dissatisfaction! Fr. Ronald Rolheiser explains this through some of the insights of St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest philosophers and theologians who ever lived:
"Through loneliness, God has written the divine plan for us right into the very structures of our heart, mind, and body....Just as the wound-up mainspring of a watch creates a tension that makes the watch's hands move, so loneliness
creates a tension inside of us which makes us move....It is the raison d'être of every action we do. We experience this tension at every level within our being: spiritually, in our thirst for God; aesthetically, in our thirst for beauty; psychologically, in our desire for love and unity with others; emotionally, in our desire to feel a oneness with others and with all things; intellectually, in our thirst for experienced truth; and physically, in our sexual tensions." (in "The Restless Heart.")
In other words, for us to feel lonely, restless, and dissatisfied, is perfectly normal. In fact, it's more than normal - it's a good and necessary thing. Our loneliness is what ultimately motivates us. Rolheiser tells us
"We all go through our lives being too surprised at ourselves. Far too often we are surprised at the powerful tensions inside us, surprised at the cataclysmic forces that so often stir deep inside our minds and bodies, surprised at our inability to be quiet and satisfied, surprised at the strength and unyieldingness of our sexual urges, and surprised simply at how much complexity and tension there is in being a human person. Thomas Aquinas was not surprised....To be human, then, is not to sit quietly in a room, but to be a searching, lonely being, restlessly looking always for an all-consuming and infinite love and unity." (in "The Restless Heart.")
For the mystic poet, St. John of the Cross, our minds, hearts, and personalities are like bottomless caverns, created for the Divine. But - tragically - we can run away from exploring those caverns. We can be terrified of facing our loneliness and what that loneliness means, - that we are created by and for God. It's so much easier to stay on the surface of life instead of traveling down into the dark depths of who we are and who God is. (In fact, St. Francis of Assisi's favorite prayer was, "Who are You, God, and Who am I?")
"The canyons of our minds and hearts are so deep and so full of mystery that we try at all costs to avoid entering them deeply. We avoid journeying inward because we are too frightened: frightened because we must make that journey alone; frightened, because we know it will involve solitude and perseverance; and frightened because we are entering the unknown. Aloneness, suffering, perseverance, the unknown: All these frighten us. Our own depths frighten us! And so we stall, distract ourselves, drug the pain, party and travel, stay busy, try this and that, cling to people and moments, junk up the surface of our lives, and find any and every excuse to avoid being alone and having to face ourselves. We are too frightened to travel inward. But we pay a price for that, a high one: superficiality and shallowness." (Rolheiser)
There is no painless way to enter loneliness. It's always, St. John of the Cross says, a Purgatory. It's intolerably painful when we stop running, when we stop trying to fill up the thirsty caverns of ourselves with counterfeit and pseudo solutions. It's Purgatory when we cut ourselves off from the narcotic of surface living and begin the plunge into the infinite mystery of ourselves, reality, and God. People fear nothing so much as aloneness and quiet prayer. Today, that's even more true: we drug and distract ourselves with endless noise and activity as we use our technological toys. But how can we find ourselves when we lose ourselves in everything else? The only safe and sane place to lose ourselves is in God - and in God is where we truly find ourselves.
The journey inward is a journey to find balance, to choose to back away from the unhealthy use of the things of this world, the unhealthy dependence on the people of this world, and to choose instead to embrace the lifestyle of prayer and love for God's Way of Living. Once we begin the prayerful journey within, we're in the pain of withdrawal. We've stopped using anesthetics. We're beginning to see how we've used substitutes for God's love. We're beginning to realize that we have to let go of the life support system of finite things, a life support system we know and understand, and switch carefully and deliberately to the infinite life support of God and God's life waiting to be released within us, to satisfy our thirst with living water.
This is the pain of new birth, a travel through a dark canal into the blinding light of the Unknown. A travel from being lonely to being able to stand alone yet not alone - with God, in the Light of His Face. A new birth in a new capacity for unselfish love.
Seeing the vision of God's Life in us begins the easing of our loneliness, and the blooming of hope that one day it will end. In the raw reality of our new vision, we can finally see and acknowledge our littleness, our nothingness, our limited understanding. We set aside the illusion that we are only answerable to ourselves. We finally accept that our hearts are restless and lonely until we set our hearts on our infinite God. Nothing or no one else can ever suffice for us! And, finally, we see that there will finally be an end to our long loneliness - in eternity, in the arms of the God Who Alone loves us with unconditional love, and, through, with, and in Him, in our total, ecstatic union with all created life.
"Oh God, You are my God, for You I long,
For You my heart is thirsting
Like a dry, weary land without water...."