You are not alone…
Being alone requires adjustment beyond my experiences. Time, my friends who have dealt with such a loss as this, will eventually ease the pain. The emptiness is becoming more tolerable. Lexi, my canine companion, has been a Blessing. Not the same though! More of the past was us. The past that I owned alone keeps me busy now. Those things that were mine occupy as much of my time as I can give them. Whether living alone is in my future only the Good Lord knows.
This song by Patty Griffin reminds me of what my college roommate told me of the loss of his wife. There will be moments of ‘a love connection’ that transcends ‘time and space.”
A couple weeks later…
St. John of the Cross, an old mystic, said that this place where I feel Godforsaken is an important part of my faith journey. As a follower of Christ it’s the dark night of my soul.
It is a place of loneliness, darkness, chaos, doubt and even fear, where I am invited to stand steadfast in faith, even if I am feeling and thinking differently.
I wish there were a different way, an easier way. But I am going to suffer losses, experience disappointment and rejection. Life is still going to happen to me with feelings of despair that overwhelm me. And like Jesus, I too will feel lonely at times and ask: “Why?”
But this is the path I have to take – a purifying journey on which I follow Jesus in his last hours and being led through the dark night of the soul.
At the end of Jesus’ earthly existence, He experiences an intense loneliness – nobody understands Him, they reject Him, his friends leave Him, He is humiliated, He suffers physically and goes through spiritual torment, and a helplessness that He himself can do nothing about. But He holds on to one thing: Through this lonely experience, He can fulfill the will of the Father.
Surely God can and will also use loneliness in my own life? I have definitely been lonely before, but do I now have to welcome it into my life?
There is also a different kind of loneliness that I can experience. And like Jesus, it is not because I acted wrongly, but as a result of acting correctly…
In this loneliness I discover more and my inner world expands. I discover how I am more sensitive to others’ pain and how I increasingly realise the magnitude of God’s goodness. Deep in my soul things are happening and I become more and more aware of it. The old saying in the Jewish apocalyptic writings expresses the awakening in my inner world:
Every tear brings the Messiah closer….
But loneliness means more than just a physical death. There is a loneliness in the silence of retreat where my self-centeredness, illusions, fantasies, arrogance and myths that I live with, are exposed and I am invited to lay these down, to die in myself.
God found me and in Christ I found God, but like Peter I sometimes am in that undesirable place. Like Jesus now, here on the cross, I too sometimes experience that intense loneliness – the times that I withdraw, retreat into silence.
From The Bible app
For more thoughts on those Dark Nights see the earlier post: Revisited…’Dark Night of the Soul.”
Even if…In the Darkness’s we still have HOPE!