Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life by Osb Joan Chittister, Joan Sister Chittister Page A
Authors: Osb Joan Chittister, Joan Sister Chittister
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also a call to make other people’s needs our own. What we learn in loneliness is that everybody needs someone. The question at a time like this, then, is, Who needs something I can do for them? It’s time to get involved with someone else’s emotional support in addition to my own. Which is why, perhaps, so many people who lose a loved one begin groups to support people in similar situations.
Loneliness is not the end of anything. It is the starting point at which we are able, this time, to choose fresh ways of being alive. It’s like being dropped down on the Planet Nowhere and told that you can do anything you’d like to do. And for the first time in your life, you must and you do.
Most of all, loneliness is not a call for other people totake care of us. Loneliness is the call to ourselves, now that we have acquired a better understanding of it so well, to do something to alleviate the loneliness and needs of others. Dag Hammarskjöld had a keen understanding of an affliction of the soul that easily keeps us awake at night and feeling hollow during the day. “Pray that your loneliness,” he said, “may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.”
21
T HE S EEDS OF L OVE IN F RIENDLESSNESS
Love is good for greeting card companies. People everywhere—even people in other parts of the world now—send cards. The cards say: “Miss you,” “Wanting you,” “Grateful for you,” and, of course, “Love you”—especially on Valentine’s Day. The question worth thinking about, of course, is, Who sends them, who gets them, what do they mean by them—and, perhaps even more important, who doesn’t get them or send them and what does that mean, too?
There is, after all, a kind of cachet about being above it all, about not bothering about such things. About not being entangled. Then, it would seem, you can go to bed at night emotionally independent. Free. Unaccountable to anyone else’s agenda. Unaccountable to anyone else’s needs. Carefree and careless. “I’m my own person,” theyput it, as if that were some kind of personal achievement, one of the great triumphs of existence, to have no sense of accountability or responsibility or enduring affection for anyone but the self.
The irritating question, the question that rankles the soul, however, the question that can really make a person uneasy in the still of a friendless night, is the obvious one: Now that you are free, what has your freedom gotten you?
In the answer to that question lies a wisdom that little else in life can garner. It takes a long look into a mirror to even approach the depths of it.
On the surface, loners are a rare breed. Almost everyone looks as if they are attached to someone somehow. As best friend or confidant. As lover, partner, or spouse. But as Eric Hoffer puts it, “We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.” These so-called connections are often only a superficial patina on the social dimensions of life. They mask as the real thing. But real relationships require commitment and concern, affection and truth, independence as well as support. Loners are the friends who come to all the parties but who are never around when they’re needed.
To be a loner with a mask is a precarious situation. There are learnings to be had here, all of them the hard way.
Loners soon discover, when they find themselves confronted with the big things of life—debilitating sickness, great loss, death, a plundered heart, a deep disappointment—how much there is that cannot be done alone in life. There are some things only friends can do for us: understand our grief, sustain our despair, pick up our load, be a light in our darkness. Without that kind of intimacy and confidentiality,we are left alone to smolder in the pain of it all. We become more prone to try to anesthetize what we cannot resolve. In that event, we are left with two problems where only one had been before.
The illusion of self-sufficiency is a very
Loneliness is not the end of anything. It is the starting point at which we are able, this time, to choose fresh ways of being alive. It’s like being dropped down on the Planet Nowhere and told that you can do anything you’d like to do. And for the first time in your life, you must and you do.
Most of all, loneliness is not a call for other people totake care of us. Loneliness is the call to ourselves, now that we have acquired a better understanding of it so well, to do something to alleviate the loneliness and needs of others. Dag Hammarskjöld had a keen understanding of an affliction of the soul that easily keeps us awake at night and feeling hollow during the day. “Pray that your loneliness,” he said, “may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.”
21
T HE S EEDS OF L OVE IN F RIENDLESSNESS
Love is good for greeting card companies. People everywhere—even people in other parts of the world now—send cards. The cards say: “Miss you,” “Wanting you,” “Grateful for you,” and, of course, “Love you”—especially on Valentine’s Day. The question worth thinking about, of course, is, Who sends them, who gets them, what do they mean by them—and, perhaps even more important, who doesn’t get them or send them and what does that mean, too?
There is, after all, a kind of cachet about being above it all, about not bothering about such things. About not being entangled. Then, it would seem, you can go to bed at night emotionally independent. Free. Unaccountable to anyone else’s agenda. Unaccountable to anyone else’s needs. Carefree and careless. “I’m my own person,” theyput it, as if that were some kind of personal achievement, one of the great triumphs of existence, to have no sense of accountability or responsibility or enduring affection for anyone but the self.
The irritating question, the question that rankles the soul, however, the question that can really make a person uneasy in the still of a friendless night, is the obvious one: Now that you are free, what has your freedom gotten you?
In the answer to that question lies a wisdom that little else in life can garner. It takes a long look into a mirror to even approach the depths of it.
On the surface, loners are a rare breed. Almost everyone looks as if they are attached to someone somehow. As best friend or confidant. As lover, partner, or spouse. But as Eric Hoffer puts it, “We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.” These so-called connections are often only a superficial patina on the social dimensions of life. They mask as the real thing. But real relationships require commitment and concern, affection and truth, independence as well as support. Loners are the friends who come to all the parties but who are never around when they’re needed.
To be a loner with a mask is a precarious situation. There are learnings to be had here, all of them the hard way.
Loners soon discover, when they find themselves confronted with the big things of life—debilitating sickness, great loss, death, a plundered heart, a deep disappointment—how much there is that cannot be done alone in life. There are some things only friends can do for us: understand our grief, sustain our despair, pick up our load, be a light in our darkness. Without that kind of intimacy and confidentiality,we are left alone to smolder in the pain of it all. We become more prone to try to anesthetize what we cannot resolve. In that event, we are left with two problems where only one had been before.
The illusion of self-sufficiency is a very
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