‘Hey,’ I said, just before he beat it. ‘Did your father every psychoanalyse you?’ ‘Me? Why do you ask?’ ‘No reason. I was just wondering’. ‘Well, take it easy’ he said. ‘Have just one more drink,’ I told him. ‘Please. I’m lonesome as hell. No kidding’. He said he couldn’t do it, though. He said he was late now, and then he left.’
These words from Holden Caulfield, the anti-hero of Salinger’s novel ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ have struck a chord with generations of adolescents. Holden is a teenager who is constantly seeking to establish a relationship with the various characters he meets on a 3 day journey round New York. He is almost always disenchanted by his companions. He dismisses one after another as ‘phoney’ or shallow. It seems the connection he seeks with others will always elude him.
This novel has ‘hit a nerve’ for many people. Loneliness is a universal aspect of human experience but one which we are often loathe to acknowledge. Hearing it articulated by a character like Holden Caulfield can help us to admit to our own aloneness. We realise we are not unusual in our loneliness. Others feel like this too.
But very often, rather than acknowledge this loneliness we seek to distract ourselves from it. Our relationships, our work, our hobbies, our goals ‘take us out of ourselves’. This is generally regarded as a good thing. Many people see it as somehow unhealthy or morbidly introspective to engage with that part of ourselves which is painfully aware that we enter this world and leave this world alone.
If this seems a bleak ‘Eeyor-ish’ position to hold Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness might help us to understand this sense of aloneness more fully.
The beginning of Jesus’ ministry raises some interesting questions for us; Why was Jesus, who was without sin, baptised by John?
Why did he need to be tempted in the wilderness before he began his ministry in Galilee? And what sort of experience was this temptation?
Mark deals very briefly with these 40 days in the wilderness where Jesus is ‘with wild beasts’ and ‘waited on by Angels’. It sounds slightly unreal. As we seek to imitate Christ in our Lenten discipline do we expect to be ‘with wild beasts’ and to find Angels serving us? It sounds like a much more dramatic and exciting Lent than one I’ve ever experienced!
Well Jesus, by being baptised, demonstrated his solidarity with humanity. He could have begun his ministry standing on the river bank urging others to be baptised. After all he was without sin and had no need for forgiveness. It might have made more sense if he had begun by baptising others. But to begin in this way would have meant denying his humanity. By joining with the hundreds of other men and women being baptised, he steps into the common lot of the human race. So in baptism he establishes solidarity and communion with all of humanity.
Yet at the precise moment when he is being baptised like the rest of the crowd, when he is indistinguishable from all those others being baptised, he hears the voice of God declaring ‘You are my Son, the beloved’. The nature of Jesus as the Son of God, as a human being distinct from all other human beings is, in this moment, spoken by God.
Jesus’ vocation is revealed in this instant. Within God’s words of love for Jesus is the call to redeem humanity. The Spirit descends like a dove, an image which communicates the gentleness of God.
But this same spirit drives Jesus out into the wilderness. The literal translation is ‘thrown out’, which conjures up a violent and dramatic image. In this driving out Jesus goes from being in solidarity with his neighbour to being intensely alone.
And in being alone he is grappling with the aloneness that we all face.
Jesus could have avoided this human experience of alone-ness. After all, he is part of the divine Trinity. Satan tempts him to turn his back on this wilderness experience, to lay full claim to what is his by rights as the Son of God. These are the wild beasts which Jesus must reckon with. If Jesus had given into temptation he would not have experienced the essential aloneness of being human. So through being in solitude He once again demonstrates again his solidarity with us. If he had not fully embraced this human experience he could not have redeemed it either. And we would always be locked in a prison of isolation, never able to achieve communion with others and the world around us.
But Christ did enter this experience of loneliness and in doing so he lived out the call of the Holy Spirit.
Of course we are called to follow Jesus in this wilderness experience. Which means we are open to the movement of the Holy Spirit who may drive us out into our own desert.
The temptation in this instance is to seek distractions. To encourage friends to stay for just one more drink or to busy ourselves with unnecessary tasks. Christians particularly can busy themselves with work that is of profound benefit to others but which somehow means they never have to contemplate the dark abyss within.
And of course to avoid this is only human. We can only move beyond this natural human instinct by experiencing or asking for the grace to believe and understand that we are each uniquely called ‘beloved’ by God. It is this knowledge of ourselves as a place of indwelling for the Holy Spirit which enables us to face our wilderness experiences.
Through this we are taken beyond our alone-ness to solidarity with our neighbour. Our neighbour who is poor or marginalised. Too often the knowledge of a suffering world is too much to bear- we cannot enter the experiences of those people we hear about on the news because somehow it all seems too much. We cushion ourselves from their pain, and our own pain, but in doing so we deny ourselves the possibility of communion with the world.
It is when we can embrace a suffering world and bring it in prayer and through service to God, that we open ourselves up to the deeper joy of a life governed by the Holy Spirit.
For as Harry Williams said:
“Christ’s glory is His full and satisfying communion with all that is. It is the opposite of being isolated this complete communion springs from a love which is able to give to the uttermost to love is to give. To give is to be. To be is to find yourself in communion with all about you.”
And because Christ has made this communion possible he was able to begin his public ministry saying ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near” Amen
Sarah Eynstone