I am speaking of the selfishness of good people, devout people, those who have succeeded through spiritual exercises and self-denial in being able to make the proud profession before the altar of the Most High, “Lord, I am not like the rest of men.” Yes, we have had the audacity at certain times of our lives to believe we are different from other men. And here is the deepest form of self-deception, dictated by self-centeredness at its worst: spiritual egotism. This most insidious form of egotism even uses piety and prayer for its own gain.
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There is no limit to such self-deception. And the path, once entered upon, is so slippery that God has to treat us harshly to bring us back to our senses. But there is no other way of opening our eyes. It has to be painful. But often it isn’t enough. Disaster, illness, disappointment hover like birds of prey over the poor carcass that had the temerity to say, “Lord, I am not like the rest of men.” How can we possibly entertain the idea that we are different from other men, when we shout, cry, feel afraid, lack determination, and behave atrociously just like everybody else?
Letters from the Desert
by Carlo Carretto
Category: LONELINESS & SOLITUDE
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An intelligent person might feel lonely… or tend to be lonely…
Maybe because he does not benefit much from people… or because he does not like the way they act… or does not find a match to his friendship.
The philosopher Diogenes is a clear example: he was seen carrying a lamp during the daytime, and when asked the reason, he said, “I am searching for a person!”
Thus an intelligent person could fall in pride too…
Either due to his continual success, or by people’s talk about his brilliant deeds, or feeling superior when compared to others… Generally, the virtue of humility on the part of those who are intelligent needs a greater effort…
Here, someone might ask this intelligent question: why doesn’t the intelligent person discover these faults, through his intelligence, and avoid them?
The answer is that he might discover his faults, but to avoid them is another point. There is a difference between the intellectual and spiritual, between the mind and soul.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Words of Spiritual Benefit Vol. 1 -
But since social relations are always ambiguous, since my thoughts divide as much as unite, and my words unite by what they express and isolate by what they omit, since a wide gulf separates my subjective certainty of myself from the objective truth others have of me, since I constantly end up guilty, even though I feel innocent, since every event changes my daily life, since I always fail to communicate, to understand, to love and be loved, and every failure deepens my solitude, since…
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967)
Jean-Luc Godard -
Learning the difference between needing solitude and craving the safety of keeping others at arms length can point us toward what we might actually need. Learning the difference between loving alone time and feeling more comfortable not letting others in can point us toward where our practice might be. Learning the difference between honoring our introverted-ness and not wanting to do the vulnerable work of cultivating healthy relationships can point us toward both the wound and the answer. This has been a lifelong note to self.
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This was like a running theme of his life. He had no place he had to go to, no place to come back to. He never did, and he didn’t now. The only place for him was where he was now.
Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
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The curse of loneliness
Oh, my dear friends, all the people around you, in your home and outside it as well, need you. There is a terrible curse in our life, which afflicts many people, the curse of loneliness. You remember that woman who killed herself at the age of seventy because, she said, there had never been anyone in her life who loved her. Many people live shut away in their loneliness, and often there is no one to show them a little love. Everyone around us, poor and rich, small and great, needs us. Let our life be characterized by loving care, tenderness, and compassion. Let us live close to others, and for others. As one of the ascetics says, ‘our foundation is our neighbor’, which means that the criterion of our spiritual life is found in those around us. We should love others, not out of any presumed ‘goodness’, but out of a sense of responsibility which we have towards them.
—Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra -
As persons, we are so constituted that in our minds, hearts, and personalities, we are insatiable, bottomless wells, capable of receiving the infinite. God made us that way so that ultimately we could be in union with infinite love and life. Because of this, there can be no fully meaningful and final solution to our loneliness outside of union with the infinite. Therefore, in this life we are always lonely.
—Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness
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“What does that mean concretely? It means that, to the extent that we go through life running away from our own loneliness, we put a cellophane covering over our own depth and riches and live instead at the surface of our minds, hearts, and personalities. For John, this is probably the biggest problem we face in dealing with our loneliness. We are too frightened of it to enter into it. The canyons of our minds and hearts are so deep and so full of mystery that we try at all costs to avoid entering them deeply. We avoid journeying inward because we are too frightened: frightened because we must make that journey alone; frightened because we know it will involve solitude and perseverance; and frightened because we are entering the unknown. Aloneness, suffering, perseverance, the unknown: All these frighten us. Our own depths frighten us! And so we stall, distract ourselves, drug the pain, party and travel, stay busy, try this and that, cling to people and moments, junk up the surface of our lives, and find any and every excuse to avoid being alone and having to face ourselves.”
—Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness
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“Loneliness can also spur us on to new heights of creativity. It is no secret, for instance, that many of our greatest works of literature, art, poetry, music, and philosophy arose from the depths of someone’s loneliness.
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I would like to illustrate this by using as an example a very creative person of the nineteenth century, Søren Kierkegaard, the father of modern existentialism. A very gifted and prolific writer, Kierkegaard always saw his own loneliness as a creative pain, something almost to be deliberately cultivated and nurtured. For him, living in loneliness was part of a vocation from God. For this reason, among others, he refused marriage, even though he was deeply in love with someone. He sacrificed, as he saw it, married love so that he could continue his vocation of loneliness. Many of his works arose out of his own loneliness and, for that exact reason, speak deeply healing words to his readers.”
—Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness
SO GOOD QUOTES 