On Loneliness and Intimacy

This is TV On The Radio. I'm addicted to this song and their other new one, Caffeinated Consciousness. Pretty darn keen to get the CD just out.

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Life has been ridiculously busy of late, and I'm only just getting comfortable with the pace again. For the last two weeks since Easter Camp I was pretty destroyed though! Easter Camp is an epic 5 day long camp run by Baptist Youth Ministries for high school kids, and I've been going along since age 13, save last year when I was in Spain and a couple of years prior, when I went to the intermediate age one as a leader. I was a leader at this year's one, and amazing and awesome (in the true sense of the word) as it was, it was exhausting! I got back and was straight back to work with an 8am start... Combine work with being out of the house literally every evening and it led to a fairly moody, pensive Elliot. It's led to some pretty heavy thinking though! Sorry, I don't mean to rate my thinking at all, I've just found it quite heavy and intense, and a bit of personal breakthrough.

Leading into this patch I was really questioning my relationships, after some prompting by discussions with some friends. I came to a place where I felt I'm not truly known by anybody, where they know my every struggle and triumph, or know perceptively when to ask how I really am. Don't get me wrong, I am surrounded by many amazing people, and I don't doubt the sincerity of their love and care for me, but the reality is they aren't perfect (nor am I of course), and so they fail to fully satisfy me. I'd always known this, but this time I really felt it, and it felt lonely. I had a pretty glum day at work as all this was weighing on my mind, along with the tiredness. Work at the cafe is actually really great for giving me space to think about things, as the work is often menial.

I got home and read this very interesting article by Shalene Gupta titled On Loneliness. She wrote stuff like this:

There is friendship, and there is family, and then there is silence swollen with the murky fog of almost but not-quite forgotten sins, the jagged shards of broken promises that have not quite dulled with time, and the slimy residue of wounded feelings. There are so very many things that are never talked about. Instead you shut your eyes, you tell yourselves this is friendship and this is love, and you never say, where were you when I needed you, and you never wonder why you are attacked by sudden, terrible bouts of loneliness....

Sometimes, the loneliness is so terrifying all you can do is rush from one party to another, anxious to meet more and more people, so that when the sky falls down, at least someone will know it fell down on you. Paradoxically, when you rush from party to party, you become lonelier than ever. You can not meet people at parties. Too much noise for conversation.

It spoke to me pretty strongly. I could definitely relate to the pain she was expressing, of no one knowing you intimately enough. She then went on to talk about wanting to be the person everyone can talk to; the person who really asks you how you are. I liked that, but I understood as she said that was just too hard. Everybody is struggling with things, and to take on everyones' problems and to try and provide their satisfaction yourself is just too hard. You burn out trying to be that person.

For a while I stood by the side of the road and wore a sign on my chest that read: “Will Always Be There.”

When she realised this was just too hard, she turned to herself, and learned to find contentment on her lonesome. I think this is valuable to an extent, in line with this quote by Blaise Pascal:

I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

Having space for yourself just to stop and think and ponder things is so important. However, if it means you just become insular, perhaps narcissistic, I think you've gone too far the other way, from depending on relationships too much, to becoming cold and isolated; unloving. Ignorance is bliss, but it's still ignorance.

Not wanting to get too far down that path, I turned to the one relationship I'm told and led to believe offers true satisfaction and joy - that which I claim to have with God through Christ Jesus. More intensely than ever before I felt desperate for this relationship; in need of it. It was my only hope in the despair of loneliness, my only hope for the deep-felt intimacy I desired. I know God knows me completely, every struggle and triumph... but I needed to know it, to feel it in my being, to be comforted by it. Is that comforting intimacy offered? What does it mean to have this relationship with God? Is it a long-distance one, where perhaps every now and then I am overwhelmed by Him through a Holy Spirit 'experience', but otherwise it's a matter of praying and then waiting for a answer? Or it is here, now, satisfaction available? Can we experience intimacy with God in this life, in the midst of corruption and destruction, brokenness and corrosion, or do we only get glimpses, tastes of what's to come when God will dwell among us? Will I be among those to spend eternity with Him, who he says he knew and accepted? And does he really know me, or does he just know about me? I don't know; these are questions still big on my mind right now. All I do know is my hope has been greatly increased, because that's all I have. I want to know my God and be known by Him so badly, because I feel nothing else can hope to offer me the satisfaction I so badly desire! I want to chat with Him, and snuggle into his big arms and find rest in Him, and just feel exposed and known, but loved and secure. So I'm actually pretty excited about this all. It feels like reality, like I'm growing up and seeing life for what it is: hard and wearisome, but hopeful and ultimately satisfying. I'd just like to know when that satisfaction's coming, and see how deep this relationship with God can go.

Are you lonely? Do you have a hope?