I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Year, whether that was shared with a large number of family and friends or whether you had a more quiet festive season. There are times in our lives when we want to be surrounded by a large number of those whom we love. And there are times when, like Greta Garbo, famously, we want to be alone.
But there are also times when we are alone and would rather not be. Half a million pensioners in this country spent Christmas Day on their own. Presumably some wanted to but it’s deeply saddening to speculate how many would rather not have done. Similar statistics are found in a new book by neuroscientist John Cacioppo called “Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection”, a scientific contribution to a growing number of books that address what is sometimes called the “modern epidemic of loneliness”. The book argues that there is something about the way we live now in the affluent western lifestyle that contributes to a frequently unhappy isolation. Around one in five of us live with a chronic sense of loneliness and the book shows how in the new boomtowns of China, community-oriented societies are being restructured in a more atomised way to bring about the same levels of isolation.
But it’s also the case that living with others, even with a spouse or partner will not necessarily take away feelings of loneliness. It’s been a shock in ministry for me to discover that some people experience a sense of isolation even within their marriages and families. The roots of loneliness run deep and seem, to some degree, to be locked into the DNA of the human condition – some of us more than others. It seems to be attributable to a number of different factors. Perhaps loneliness is pronounced in those who have a driven sense of what they want to do in life and have struggled to find someone to share that with. Perhaps loneliness is pronounced in people who feel in some way different to others.
It’s for those reasons I’ve often thought that Jesus could well have suffered from a profound sense of loneliness. In the part of his life that we read about in the Gospels he is usually with other people, but more often than not he is misunderstood and seems to have a strong sense of being set apart from others. And there can be no more lonely moment than the fulfilment of his mission on the Cross when he articulates his sense total isolation in the words of Psalm 22, “My God, my God why have even you abandoned me?”
So as we reflect on loneliness in our own lives and in life of Christ, the question arises: what difference does God make? What difference should our faith make to our experience of isolation? And given that today we remember Christ’s own baptism while we celebrate the baptism of Connor and Harry, what does baptism mean in relation to the common human experience of loneliness?
The first thing to say, it seems to me, is that belief in God is not a quick fix. Jesus, whose dependence on God the Father was total, did feel abandoned and afraid in Gethsemane and at Calvary. And similarly we must never feel that if our faith were deeper, if we prayed more and were more open to God, then our feelings of loneliness would go away. Never believe the grinning Christian who tells you that their relationship with Jesus is taken away all their problems and filled them with unremitting happiness. They are in denial and it won’t last!
But baptism is a sign of the real differences that faith does make to the human condition. I think that works in two ways: first, in what we might call the contemplative self and, second, in the social self.
So first, we must consider how the cultivation of a contemplative self is a response to loneliness. This is the dimension of believing that involves the continued understanding of ourselves in relation to God. And these words from the book of Isaiah are an excellent place to start:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers they shall not overwhelm you…
Because you are precious in my sight,
and honoured, and I love you…
Do not fear, for I am with you.
Those few lines describe something of unimaginable importance in the Judeo-Christian creed. Human beings do not exist by chance. We are not random and meaningless products of a chaotic system that need not have existed at all. We exist because of God’s love and that God is with us all the time. There is no truth about the universe is more important than that one. Someone once criticised my music choice of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” on the grounds that as hymnody goes, it doesn’t say very much. On the contrary, I would argue, it says everything. God holds us. God is lovingly present to us, even in our darkest moments of despair, bringing meaning and hope.
We could spend our whole lives reflecting on the meaning of God’s love for us and God’s presence with us. And I hope you will! But where that reflection begins, it seems to me, is out of the sense that as a beloved creature of God our solitude (which is in some sense inescapable) is a solitude before God. It’s a “being alone before God” that we all have to experience at some point or other. And on that journey of solitude we learn to discover the joy of being in God’s love and of knowing, at a fundamental level, that we are loved and that we give joy to God. That is the insight of the contemplative self, that the journey that baptism sends each one of us on. Whether or not he embraced it immediately, it was the message of Jesus baptism too: “You are my son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.” This is what Jesus needed to know at the beginning of his ministry.
But second, of course, we remember that baptism is entry into the Church and a calling to live as a community – indeed, as a family. In this passage from Isaiah God is not addressing an individual but a nation, a nation who have passed through the waters of the Red Sea because God was with them. Being a member of a church cannot immediately take away deep-seated feelings of loneliness. But what I am convinced that it ought to do is challenge a lot about the atomised lifestyle of Western contemporary culture. Ours is a society where people frequently feel that their sense of connection to others and responsibility for others stops at their front door. Most people feel no sense of connection with or responsibility for those who find themselves in circumstances of isolation. But baptism tells us that we do have just that connection and responsibility.
As a child I remember more than once my parents inviting almost total strangers to come and have Christmas lunch with my family because they had come church on Christmas morning and my parents discovered that they were going to spend the day alone. I am so grateful that as a child this seemed perfectly normal to me. But now I realise how counter-cultural it was and I’m in deep admiration of their commitment to the meaning of baptism.
But as baptised people we are also presented with the challenge when we feel lonely and isolated to reach out to others and ask how we can help ourselves by helping them. The author of the book I mentioned earlier has one overriding piece of advice for the seriously lonely and that is to help others through voluntary work or cook for acquaintances: “When you’re lonely you feel you could just eat other people,” he writes, “But the trick is to feed them.” Baptism calls us to be a social self.
So, as I mentioned earlier, there is a certain inescapable solitude in the Christian life. But it should be a solitude of the individual creature before his or her loving Creator. And as we contemplate in and out of that solitude we will find a certain joy and healing in our knowledge of God’s love and purposes for us. But that more destructive loneliness which we can all experience is one that baptism calls us to challenge in community because we are one in Christ Jesus. We have the responsibility of compassion toward those around us who are in some way excluded and that is the case whether it is they who are suffering from loneliness or whether it is us.
Baptism is a sign of God’s love: a love out of which we were created, the love which God showed in Jesus who went through the loneliness of rejection and death for our sakes, and the love we are all called to share as we are caught up in the hospitable life of the Holy Spirit.