Loneliness is an unsatisfied desire for love and connection with others, and this person finds it difficult to satisfy it. Perhaps the real reason for the inability of this person to connect with others is the lack of love within him, for if he sowed love, he would reap love too. This is a kind of selfishness, for he wants people to love him while he does not have the readiness to offer this love. He wants others to connect with him though he does not have the readiness himself to connect with them.
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For if the infant remains attached to his father and mother his whole life, [he will have negative issues]; therefore, detachment must take place, that he may become disciplined, and his life may become healthy.
And it happens sometimes that the fathers and mothers delay the onset of detachment in the life of their children, and by this they impede their growth and maturity.
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But gloominess may be generated in the heart, making them depressed and sad, and the feeling of abandonment arises in him, so he feels that all [people] have abandoned him, and this makes him feel insecure too. And then he may reach despair and loss of the meaning of life, all these making him turn into a rebellious person against society, and [making him] violent.
If the feeling of loneliness increased within a person, and he became fully convinced that he is unloved and undesirable, then he would distance himself fully from others and would avoid them.
This however will make him lonelier, and then he will go into a vicious cycle.
Of the curious matters, concerning loneliness, which were observed, is that they found that the lonely person turns creative and inventive. For there are people who feel lonely, yet they have composed wonderful musical pieces, and there are others who have painted the most beautiful paintings.
Nevertheless, this does not make us conclude that loneliness creates innovativeness nor inventiveness in man’s life. But what happens is that if a man were already talented in a particular field, like painting, music, poetry, or writing, then loneliness makes them excel all the more in their talent. This loneliness may polish these talents, thereby making the talented person produce a creative and inventive product.
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Overcome Loneliness [The Definition of Loneliness]
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Research has shown that loneliness may begin from childhood. If a young child was brought up without being taught how to form friendships in his life, then when he reaches adolescence, having no friendships in life, it would be difficult for him to form friendships afterwards. Therefore, the feeling of loneliness would continue with him. The child may have formed friendships, but not with people who had a positive impact on his life, and therefore he will feel lonely when he grows up. This makes clear the importance of the role of fathers and mothers in encouraging their children to form valuable and meaningful friendships in their childhood.
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1. One of the very important causes of loneliness is that the child was left alone in infancy, as it happens in the cases of divorce. The father and mother may dispute with one another over who would get custody of the child. And it may happen that neither of them wants to take the child with them, and then the child feels abandoned, especially [coming] from people who do impact his lite.
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Divorce causes loneliness for the following three reasons:
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Take to yourself the Lord as a friend, a father, and a shepherd, as David the prophet said, “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take care of me.”
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Overcome Loneliness [The Treatment for Loneliness]
Category: PARENTS
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Lord, consider me among the despised and nonexistent, but do not deprive me of working with You. Allow me to have an existence before You, although, in my eyes, and perhaps in the eyes of people, I am despised and nonexistent (1 Cor 1:28).
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Lord, it is a blessed hour when I sit with myself. When I sit with myself I sit with You, because, although I might not see You, You are within me. It is the same as when You were in the world and the world did not know You.
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Behold, O Lord, I confess to You that now whenever I sit with myself, I feel every time that my self is more precious than the whole world, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” (Mk 8:36). Whenever I feel that my self is more valuable than the world, the world grows smaller and smaller in my eyes, and I take from You the grace of indifference to everything. When I am thus indifferent, I find You before me, encouraging me: “Do not fear, for I am with you” (Gen 26:24).
When I sit, O Lord, with myself, I discover what is inside me, and I also see how the strangers transgressed Your sanctuaries within me (Jer 51:51). When I see that, and expose it before You, for You to keep my soul from strangers, then our session goes on and on, and I find many things to say to You. Here, human consolations pale in comparison. I do not seek human companionship, but rather I seek solitude, retreat, and stillness, so as not to be deprived of this dire need, my session with You, which provides me with contrition and purity.
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I love You, and love sitting with You more than sitting with other people.
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Give me, O Lord, to leave people, and become occupied with myself, to connect with You.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Dialogue with the Divine
from the poem ‘A Whisper of Love’
Wherever You are, there shall my thoughts be
Family and friends have I forgotten—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Dialogue with the Divine
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10. Such has the Evangelist shown her, such did the angel find her, such did the Holy Spirit choose her. Why delay about details? How her parents loved her, strangers praised her, how worthy she was that the Son of God should be born of her. She, when the angel entered, was found at home in privacy, without a companion, that no one might interrupt her attention or disturb her; and she did not desire any women as companions, who had the companionship of good thoughts. Moreover, she seemed to herself to be less alone when she was alone. For how should she be alone, who had with her so many books, so many archangels, so many prophets?
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Our Longing for Home
IT is important to read Jesus’s parable of the lost son in the context of the whole of Luke, chapter 15, but the story has an eVen larger context. If we read the narratiVe in light of the Bible’s sweeping theme of exile and homecoming we will understand that Jesus has given us more than a moving account of individual redemption. He has retold the story of the whole human race, and promised nothing less than hope for the world.
In Jesus’s parable the younger brother goes off into a distant country expecting a better life but is disappointed. He begins to long for home, remembering the food in his father’s house. So do we all.
“Home” exercises a powerful influence oVer human life. Foreign-born Americans spend billions annually to visit the communities in which they were born. Children who neVer find a place where they feel they belOng carry an incapacity for attachment into their adult lives. Many of us have fond memories of times, people, and places where we felt we were truly home. However, if we ever have an opportunity to get back to the places we remember so fondly, we are usually disappointed. For thirty-nine years my wife, Kathy, spent summers with her family in a ramshackle cottage on the shores of Lake Erie. The very memory of that place is nourishing to Kathy’s spirit. But returning to the actual, now-dilapidated property is a gut-wrenching experience. It won’t be much different if someone buys it and puts up new condos on it. An actual visit to the place will always present her with a sense of loss.
Home, then, is a powerful but elusive concept. The strong feelings that surround it reveal some deep longing within us for a place that absolutely fits and suits us, where we can be, or perhaps find, our true selves. Yet it seems that no real place or actual family ever satisfies these yearnings, though many situations arouse them. In his novel A Separate Peace, John Knowles’s central character discovers that Summer mornings in New Hampshire give him “some feeling so hopelessly promising that I would fall back in my bed to guard against it . . . I wanted to break out crying from stabs of hopeless joy, or intolerable promise, or because those mornings were too full of beauty for me.” In East of Eden, John Steinbeck similarly says of the mountains of central California that he wanted “to climb into their warm foothills almost as you want to climb into the lap of a beloved mother.”
The memory of home seems to be powerfully evoked by certain sights, sounds, and even smells. But they can only arouse a desire they can’t fulfill. Many of the people in my church have shared with me how disappointing Christmas and Thanksgiving are to them. They prepare for holidays hoping that, finally, this year, the gathering of the family at that important place will deliver the experience of warmth, joy, comfort, and love that they want from it. But these events almost always fail, crushed under the weight of our impossible expectations.
There is a German word that gets at this concept— the word Sehnsucht. Dictionaries will tell you that there is no simple English synonym. It denotes profound homesickness or longing, but with transcendent overtones. The writer who spoke most of this “spiritual homesickness” was C. S. Lewis, in his famous sermon “The Weight of Glory.” He refers to many similar experiences like those described by Steinbeck and Knowles, and then he says:
Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself. . . . Now we wake to find . . . we have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken in. . . . Our life-long nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.
There seems to be a sense, then, in which we are all like the younger brother. We are all exiles, always longing for home. We are always traveling, never arriving. The houses and families we actually inhabit are only inns along the way, but they aren’t home. Home continues to evade us.
Timothy Keller, The Prodigal Son
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Watch yourselves—your passions especially—in your home life, where they appear freely, like moles in a safe place. Outside our own home, some of our passions are usually screened by other more decorous passions, whilst at home there is no possibility of driving away these black moles that undermine the integrity of our soul.
—St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ -
When I understood that neither parents, nor family, nor friends, nor anyone in the world could offer me anything but pain, insults, and wounds, I resolved to stop living for the world and to dedicate my few remaining days in this life to the Lord. I understood that I had no one in the world except God.
—Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives -
We are children, and as children of the Heavenly Father we should ask for the support of our Parent. Because we were born of earthly parents, we seek support from them. But they have their cares and their worries; they are beset by all kinds of trouble and difficulties. We look to them for guidance and support, but they do not look after us. “You should have a head on your shoulders—use it. You’re a grown man,” they tell us. The Heavenly Father, however, never avoids helping us. He is always looking after us, always guiding us, if our heart is united with Him. But if we look for support in the world, it will be very difficult to find. It is very hard to find a person who is of one mind and thought with us.
—Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives -
This, also, I am ever urging, and shall not cease to urge, that you give attention, not only to the words spoken, but that also, when at home in your house, you exercise yourselves constantly in reading the Divine Scriptures. This, also, I have never ceased to press upon those who come to me privately. Let not any one say to me that these exhortations are vain and irrelevant, for “I am constantly busy in the courts,” (suppose him to say;) “I am discharging public duties; I am engaged in some art or handiwork; I have a wife; I am bringing up my children; I have to manage a household; I am full of worldly business; it is not for me to read the Scriptures, but for those who have bid adieu to the world, for those who dwell on the summit of the hills; those who constantly lead a secluded life.” What dost thou say, O man? Is it not for thee to attend to the Scriptures, because thou art involved in numerous cares? It is thy duty even more than theirs, for they do not so much need the aid to be derived from the Holy Scriptures as they do who are engaged in much business. For those who lead a solitary life, who are free from business and from the anxiety arising from business, who have pitched their tent in the wilderness, and have no communion with any one, but who meditate at leisure on wisdom, in that peace that springs from repose—they, like those who lie in the harbour, enjoy abundant security. But ourselves, who, as it were, are tossed in the midst of the sea, cannot avoid many failings, we ever stand in need of the immediate and constant comfort of the Scriptures. They rest far from the strife, and, therefore, escape many wounds; but you stand perpetually in the array of battle, and constantly are liable to be wounded: on this account, you have more need of the healing remedies. For, suppose, a wife provokes, a son causes grief, a slave excites to anger, an enemy plots against us, a friend is envious, a neighbour is insolent, a fellow-soldier causes us to stumble—or often, perhaps, a judge threatens us, poverty pains us, or loss of property causes us trouble, or prosperity puffs us up, or misfortune overthrows us;—there are surround us on all sides many causes and occasions of anger, many of anxiety, many of dejection or grief, many of vanity or pride; from all quarters, weapons are pointed at us. Therefore it is that there is need continually of the whole armour of the Scriptures.
—St John Chrysostom, On Wealth and Poverty -
False obligations are all the kind of things that, if you could do them, would make you abnormally wonderful, outstanding, quite a lot better and more sensitive-looking than other people with abilities and opportunities similar to yours. Our ordinary obligations—like cleaning house, gardening, repairing things, being faithful to friends, and doing our fair share of the work in family life—don’t make us look us especially wonderful or exceptional. People who are burdened with a lot of false obligations invariably fall down on what most of us consider to be normal obligations. They tend not to help others with anything. They make promises and then break them without giving it a second thought. They tell you they’ll be at your party or meet you on a certain afternoon, and nine times out of ten they’ll back out the last minute with a very unconvincing excuse. Even though they are constantly getting after themselves for not loving and being kind to everybody, they have almost no sense of obligation to other people and are completely inconsiderate most of the time. They rarely notice or feel guilty about the everyday obligations they could be living up to. But they feel terribly guilty and miserable about the false obligations they can’t live up to.
Who is God? Who Am I? Who Are You?
Dee Pennock -
I interpreted the entire movie as documenting his pathetic cope; a cope he was able to keep up as long as he had no significant social interaction and could keep repeating the cope to himself in his own head, day after day.
As soon as he’s reminded about how he has no children, his sister mogs him, his father hates him, and mortality is coming for him, he starts crying and spiraling out of control.
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To me, it’s actually a very sad (albeit beautiful) film. I saw a man hanging on by a thread, his routine and isolation being the only things keeping nightmares at bay.
Perfect Days (2023) – I don’t understand the top critic reviews of this film
SO GOOD QUOTES 