Jesus Christ, King of Loneliness

The human experience of loneliness is, without a doubt, one of the most universal and distressing aspects of our life in this ‘vale of tears’. For the creature to whom God said it was not good to be alone, we feel most acutely the pain of isolation and separation. Aristotle famously remarked that the man who had no friends must be either a god or a beast, but we know that that is one of his most untrue philosophical remarks. We know that God, as He has revealed Himself to us, is an eternal and blissful communion and love. In the Christian Dogma of the Trinity, there is no such thing as a lonely God, or a God reigning in splendid isolation. God truly is complete in himself by nature, but the Revelation of Jesus Christ showed us definitively that God the Father has always been in eternal relationship with the Word, his Son, in the Holy Spirit, the Love which they share. The Revelation of the Godhead as Father, Son and Spirit showed us that an aspect of God’s essence is his relationality, not just his rationality. Trinitarian Theology, as always, is far from the dry speculation of theologians. It cuts to the heart of who we are as human beings and who we are meant to be. Even the ‘beasts’ of Aristotle, the natural world that God created, is intensely relational.

At the same time, especially as we have now reached Passiontide this year, the Church puts in full view the “Suffering Servant”, the Son of God. Who is this man that stands before us? When Pilate presents him famously before the crowd in the Latin Gospel of John, he says, “Ecce Homo”, thus immortalizing the phrase in countless works of art. This is because “Ecce Homo” does not just mean “Behold the man”, as in, the man who is condemned, but simply, “Behold man”, in general. When we cast our eyes on this bloody and forsaken man, we do not just see Jesus – we see ourselves.

Modern Western Civilization, as currently practiced, has been sociologically well-demonstrated to be a particularly potent solvent of relationships, and therefore a seedbed of loneliness and isolation. This starts with childbirth, where for the first time in human history, by mid-century, most developed nations will struggle to meet replacement-level birthrate, and so many children will not experience having siblings in the home. With the proliferation of divorce and the instability of adult relationships, many children have already been raised with the expectation that relationships are inherently unstable, and therefore, in a self-fulfilling act of sabotage, many children struggle with their capacity for trust and appropriate intimacy. After four years since the pandemic, I have been able now to speak to children and young adults who are able to reflect more maturely upon what that time meant to them and their development. Although I am not a psychologist or sociologist, my findings in schools and in families is an experience of “lost time”, and not a lost time as counted so much in years, but in age-appropriate experiences. Bar none, the most lamented loss among school-aged children and young adults is the loss of those crucial years to build lifelong friendships. Many were stuck at home with masks on, and although some beat the odds socializing online, many find themselves curiously ‘stuck in time’. I mention these young people in particular because it is well known that the younger generations are more lonely, not less, and this will have a compounding spiritual and social effect upon our civilization. In thanatology, many nurses say that loneliness kills. I believe that. If loneliness kills the body and breaks down its structures, so much more does loneliness break down society and ‘kill’ relationships.

Saint Paul makes clear in his Epistle to the Philippians that the redemptive mission of Christ was fundamentally ‘kenotic’, that he emptied himself, in so far as it could be done, of all the prerogatives and glory of his godhead, in order to join himself to our humble humanity. He did this both to unite himself experientially with the human condition in the most authentic way possible, but also then to redeem all these human experiences, elevating them to a supernatural order. Therefore, every human experience, even the most depraved and painful, can potentially be a conduit of grace. It’s easy to see God’s Order of Grace in “All Things Bright and Beautiful”, in the harmony and splendor of nature. It is far more difficult to see grace in blood and viscera. In light of this, I have to ask: could anything be more kenotic for Christ than his experience of loneliness? There was never a time during which his communion with the Father was interrupted, although in some way, the sheer psychic torment of the Passion and his experience of a grievously sinful world must have meant that, to borrow from the Nicean Fathers, both bliss and desolation flowed into his personhood in a mixture we can hardly conceive, “whole, and undivided”. Persons are experiencers, and they experience according to their natures. We will never understand the joy or the agony which existed simultaneously in the heart and mind of the Savior. Perhaps the only analogy which can be made is that of great creative genius, or of childbirth, or the exertion of heroic courage in battle. It is no mistake that the Greeks first called our Lord’s Passion an agonia, agony, which is a word which came from martial or competitive contexts. All the aforementioned examples involve great pain and exertion, yet with the expectation of great joy, achievement or triumph at the end.

However, these examples fall short because Our Lord’s psychology of self-emptying/kenosis was a trait, not just a state. In all the meditations I have done and read about Our Lord’s solitudes, I have always heard it described that he went in order to commune with his Father. This meditation is usually meant to teach the importance of prayer, silence and recollection. The older I get, I find that Our Lord’s active desire for solitude is not simply for prayer and communion with the Father, but for two other reasons: first, because the Man-God wanted to experience what social isolation feels like, humanly speaking. To redeem this experience, Jesus went through it, just like he went through poverty, exile, political persecution, hunger and thirst. Secondly, Our Lord sought solitude not to get away from the crowds, but often to find the ostracized. Every era and society in human history has its undesirables, its outcasts. In Jesus’ time and culture, those who occupied the margins of the predominant Jewish culture were the lepers, the pagans/gentiles, and even the demoniacs, some of whom were said to live in remote and hidden places, such as among tombs, or in caves. It should greatly interest us that it were these particular encounters that Jesus had with these men and women that so fascinated the Evangelists, that they were immortalized in the Inspired Texts, and have been read and proclaimed for two thousand years. These also are some of the most beloved stories by Christians across the centuries: the Samaritan Woman, the Syro-Phoenician Woman, the Woman Caught in Adultery, the Healing of the Ten Lepers, and so on. Jesus met countless men and women, but these are just a few examples of men and women ‘on the margins’ that Jesus touched with healing love and redemptive mercy.

One of the bitter ironies of life and of history is that for so many gifted individuals, the very thing they give to the world, is often denied to them. St. Alphonsus Ligouri helped cure the scruples of millions of souls, while he was tormented with them up to his death. St. Bernadette Soubirous, who famously saw the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, leading to the miraculous cure of perhaps millions of people, herself would not bathe in the healing waters which flowed from the apparition site. The same is true of course of the un-canonized; our parents and grandparents who sacrificed so much with the hope that we could enjoy a better life than they had. This same irony is operative in the life of Christ, but when touching the topic of his loneliness, we see a man who, in so many ways, is surrounded by inadequacy and inferiority. In the past I have written what I have called the “Psychological Proof” of the Immaculate Conception: Our Lord’s Human Nature demanded a sinless mother, since his exquisite sensitivity and divine provenance would strongly require a parental influence which could both revere and educate him as his mission and natures required. Virtually all mystics know that at the end of the day, anything short of God is a mirage. To use the famous words of Christ in his appearance to St. Catherine of Siena, “I am He who is, daughter. You are she who is not.” There is a real sense where, for God, to deal with any of us, his creation, is a condescension. God does not tire of his outpouring of creative love, but the fulness of his desire is to create rational creatures which are capable of sharing and reciprocating the love and bliss which he bestows. This is one reason why Mary is so supremely praised in Christian Tradition with that category we call hyperdulia: she was and is the only created human to perfectly “magnify the Lord”, to take God’s grace, and aim it back at him in an act of perfect adoration. She too had her ‘kenosis’, and it was in the recognition of the truth at the heart of all created reality: we all exist by virtue of the loving, wise will of God, who brought us into being from nothingness. If he did not love us, did not regard us, for even a moment, we would cease to be. The saints embrace this existential fact, and often come to ‘kill two birds with one stone’: by recognizing that they are nothing, they arrive at the truth which is humility. By recognizing that they are loved into something, they see their unmerited destiny is love, joy and eternal communion.

Loneliness, and Our Lord’s experience of it, is thus so much more complicated than at face value, because he is not only the one who is metaphysically, existentially the foundation of reality and the ability of things to relate, but he also spent his earthly life among us relating with creatures that were infinitely less wise and loving than he. Our Lord was a solid object, moving in a world of holograms. It is lonely for any person to live apart from one’s family, native culture and language, and the comforts of home. It is impossible to fathom what motivated Our Lord, save the outrageous outpouring of his love, to come down into our four-dimensional, unreal world.

As Holy Week draws near, one thing that I find very relatable is how Our Lord has made the Memorial of His Passion something so simple, something so stable in our limited grasp of space and time: the simple Host, in the Tabernacle. We believe he is in every Tabernacle in every Church in the whole world, and that when we go into that presence, we are truly, mysteriously, in his presence. Yet this True Presence is also, once again, so frequently the manifestation of his loneliness and vulnerability, how he exposes himself to be ignored by countless men and women who are indifferent to him and to his goodness. Some of the most ‘really present’ things in the world are the things, sadly, we tend to take for granted: our family, our friends, our health, etc. They form the foundations of our lives, and when they slip out of place, what collapses above them can truly astound us.

Jesus Christ is truly the King of Loneliness, not because he means to lead us to that state, but because he is and was supremely aware of what that means for us, as social creatures ‘hardwired’ for relationality. As men and women made in the image of the Trinity, I think this should give us pause this Lent to reflect on whether we truly are doing our part to reach out to those we know are isolated, but also, doing our part to seek and to find those we do not know are isolated. This requires effort, because often, loneliness and isolation can begin with an exterior action or misfortune, but then it becomes sealed from within. It may make sense in the context of grief or deep inner pain to want to give someone space, and that certainly is a judgment call to be made. But at the same time, what matters the most is the attempt.

Our Lord speaks to this situation today. What he does ask of us is to find ways to be authentic and to create opportunities for our children and those under our care to create authentic relationships based on trust and charity. We do this, because Jesus did this, both for his sake, and the people he served. I find it so interesting that even in the opening hours of his Agony, Jesus invited his best friends to be near to him. He woke them up several times to continue to be present with him in prayer, but they kept falling asleep. Our Lord was not without his human supporters and companions, even in his final hours. When Christ cried out to his Father in the words of the Psalm, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” We are told that the earth shook, and the sun was eclipsed. Some astronomers try to date the original Good Friday based upon a Total Eclipse of the Sun over Jerusalem that day, but I personally believe that the event was preternatural in origin: that nature shook at the infamy at what mankind had the audacity to do, to crucify the Lord of Glory. Nature knew what humanity in its stupidity often forgets, that it could no more live without God’s love than the whole created universe could.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen famously called that incident on the Cross the moment when God appeared for an instant “to be an atheist”. The ultimate loneliness is the perceived absence of God. God is never at any time absent from any place or time, but his presence can be occluded whether by his own desire to purify us, or because of our own blindness. The Dark Nights of the Soul are well known in Occidental Mystical Literature as being normative, even necessary, for the journey toward full Transformative Union in and with God. Yet even for these people, even for those who reach the apex of intimacy of God possible on earth, there is still a sense that something is left undone, that space and time as we currently experience it, this fallen universe, is not yet ‘apt’ to receive perfect bliss. But one day, when God restores all things, it will be.

Julian of Norwich, arguably my favorite Medieval Mystic, famously quoted Christ as saying, “All will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.” Contextually, that is not a dismissive or Pollyanna quote. Julian endured a great deal of physical suffering and also asked Jesus very insightful questions on what sin and suffering are all for. He gives many different kinds of answers in his Revelations of Divine Love, which she wrote, but the one line he says so famously is the one I quoted above. For lovers of Dostoyevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor, it is akin to when Christ kisses the eponymous Grand Inquisitor. Loneliness and the pain of loneliness is part of the fabric of evil in a fallen world. Yet the glory to be revealed will far supersede it. Meanwhile, we have a duty to alleviate, as best we can, all forms of suffering in our world. But most especially, as we look at our suffering Savior this Passiontide, we consider his dejection and his loneliness among sinners, and we recognize how we can continue to accompany him, by our obedience, by our attentiveness to prayer, and by our love of others.