Friends Journal

e - n .e s s
grandchildren, instead of traipsing all
over the place. Why don't you go
straighten him out?" What could she
have told them?
Jesus was alone, too. None of his
disciples understood him while he was
alive. They tried to, but they didn't. The
Bible records many cases of his anger
with his disciples and with the crowds
that carne to hear him, because they did
not understand what he was trying to
say. The crowds wanted the miracles,
but they did not understand his
teachings. No matter how close he was
to God, surely sometimes he must have
wanted to speak to someone human who
could understand what he was saying.
There are many people now who are
alone, and most of the time it is not
obvious. There are people who are alone
in some contexts, like work, and not
alone in others. There are some who are
always alone. Usually people cannot tell
others about their alone-ness. They may
be unable to communicate in a physical
sense, like a stroke victim, or they may
be afraid of ridicule or hostility, like a
gay person. They may be afraid of being
misunderstood or they may be ashamed.
It is easy to say "There is always
God." There is, but people who are
alone often cannot experience the
presence of God either. It can be very
hard to have a deep conversation with
someone who is not there in a physical
sense, although I have heard of a
woman who used to pull a chair up
opposite to her and imagine Jesus in it,
and converse that way.
(If you know someone who seems to
be alone, it is most emphatically not
helpful to suggest they get out and meet
people or socialize, or whatever. Most
people who are alone are in the middle
of people a lot of the time already. It is
the nature of the connection with others
that is the problem, not the lack of
people.)
I have not found many helpful
answers. One answer, of course, is to
join a support group if that is possible.
There are now support groups for a /
wide range of problems, and for those .c:/..
periods when you are with a group
FruENDS JOURNAL June 1994
that meets your needs, you are not
nearly so alone as you were.
Another possibility is to find a
spiritual director, or someone with
whom you can talk on a deep level
without being judged. Such people are
not common, but they do exist. Often if
you ask around your meeting or your
yearly meeting's Worship and Ministry
Committee you can fmd such a person.
Even if you believe you do not have a
spiritual problem, such a nonjudging,
listening person can be a great help.
The solution I have found that works
best for me is to reach out to other alone
people and smile at them. Since you do
not know who is alone, you may wind
up smiling at a lot of people who may
not need it, but that doesn't hurt
anything. The good thing is that quite
often people remember that you smiled
· at them last time you met and they smile
at you ftrst this time. That often has
been a big help to me.
At a very deep level, we
frequently are alone because God
has placed us there for a short or
long time. Our solution, then,
has to involve finding out
what God has in mind
for us to do in our
alone-ness. This is not easy,
and may require that we do
something we may not want
to do. We may need to get
rid of anger about some
situation, or we may
need to forgive certain
people, or we may
need to ask
forgiveness of
others. If that is
what we need to
do, then the
sooner we do
it the better.
Our aloneness
!"'
may be because God is trying to ·
teach us something we can learn no
other way.
If alone-ness is to be our lot for
life, then we must come to terms
with that. That is not easy either. We
may compare such a life, if we wish,
to those hermits who went into the
desert. Our deserts are within.
Because our deserts are not visible,
others have a tendency not to
believe in their existence. But we
know they are there. We know
others have, their own deserts. Part
of tlte problem of alone-ness is that,
unlike the hermits of the early
church, we cannot recognize others
in their deserts.
We can, however, recognize that
those deserts do exist, and, if we
choose, reach out of
ours toward
theirs. 0
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