Loneliness

Recently I've been considering what it means to be lonely. I listened to a good sermon a few years ago by Tim Keller talking about it in the context of marriage. He sees it as the root of why two people get married, citing God's dissatisfaction with Adam's lack of a partner. Heading down a dangerous road, one might even say creation itself is partly a solution for a lonely God.

Now, that seems to punch holes in God's completeness and that's a little bit sketchy. I realize that. Its anthropomorphic, but God is heavy on the metaphors. Time and time again He recommends that we attempt to understand him within our own context. To a certain extent, there is no other way for me to understand it then to try to understand my own feelings of loneliness. On the other hand, there a times when you just need to concede the point that what you want to understand is beyond you. You can hit the cognitive brick wall.

Alternatively, our solution to loneliness is God. Its a symmetry in creation. In theory, its easily understood and accepted by everyone who believes. In practice, the struggle to deal with it can be painful.

Loneliness falls into my "pure motive" category. Meaning that, in and of itself, its not sinful. It's an emotional response to a lack of connection, a lack of communication. What you do with those emotions might become sinful, certainly, but isn't that the same with anger? Consider Jesus fashioning the whip. In the end, no matter how you deal with it (sinful or not), I'm starting to feel like I can empathize with it.

In my psychiatry class, we've been talking about what it means to work with the mind. Its a hard thing to grasp. Sure, we try to break it down into pieces so we can address what can be fixed. We might talk about anxieties, personalities, and moods. We know that, when taken in sum, these make up the majority our inner landscape. There is something holy about the mind too. It is a foregone conclusion that everyone's experience in life is more than the stimulation of neural pathways. Its special. No one is practically solipsistic about it. Science hasn't yet taken us to that place.

My professor said something this past week that really stuck with me. She offhandedly remarked that there are two things that we'll see commonly with deeply disturbed psychiatric patients. This would include something like schizophrenia and multiple personality disorders. First, there is often an accompanying inflexible belief in God. If the belief isn't there, there's a debilitating stress over its lack. Secondly, the predominant behaviors are oriented almost exclusively towards coping with felt loneliness(real or imaginary). Bearing in mind that a lot of these problems are imbalances of neurotransmitters, its important to realize that they still legitimately feel lonely. This is cause for sympathy. Its heartbreaking.

Moving more superficially into personality disorders, we again see that most of these stem from loneliness or emotional trauma. These are more learned behaviors, but they're learned at a tender, formative stage in life. They're still very hard to overcome, but we see loneliness creep in here even better. Neglected children develop schizotypal personalities. They literally create people in their own minds and attach meaning and personalities to inanimate objects. A lot of times these cases present like underlying chemical imbalances, but they are actually learned coping mechanisms. They have a solution to these feelings, but from the outside, those who don't suffer think that they're illegitimate.

I remember working in the ER one night and I had to take blood from a patient who was a "Jesus-babbler." His default state was talking to Jesus in his voice, then responding as Jesus to his own statement. It was disturbing to me. I felt like this grizzly man was John the Baptist in the flesh.

The general consensus that you'll find about this information goes something like this: "See? Religion does a real head job on you." It's a fair complaint I guess, even if its made irrelevant by the majority of the world who believe in God and aren't disturbed. Rest assured that the non-believer copes, he just does it in the secrets of his heart or in the darkness.

The claim of "completeness without God, thank-you-very-much" is a tragic vanity; an inability to admit the lack. They may certainly feel that way, but its said on the sunny day. You've asked them the question at the wrong time in their lives. Hope in anything other than God is transient. Once the losing starts, there is disintegration, sometimes a psychotic break even. As for those that already struggle with this, I've wondered if these really hurt people haven't seen the world and it broke them. I've wondered if their insanity is actually appropriate.

In James, we read that the measure of your own faith before God depends on how you feel about the plight of the emotionally helpless. God's heart breaks for those who have lost their natural companions, those who have lost their comfort: the widow who loses her husband and the orphan who loses parents. That's my consolation.