Researchers have found that people often feel more comfortable being honest and open about their inner selves with strangers than they do with their friends and their families — that they often feel more understood by strangers. This gets reported in the media with great lament. “Strangers communicate better than spouses!” It’s a good headline, right? I think it entirely misses the point. The important thing about these studies is just how significant these interactions can be; how this special form of closeness gives us something we need as much as we need our friends and our families.
Kio Stark: Why you should talk to strangers
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Such loneliness is not felt only by those who are alone, but is experienced painfully by those who are surrounded by crowds but have no real interior connection with other people.
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Loneliness is not something we need to be bound by throughout our life as Christians. It seems to me that when we feel lonely it is not because we are alone, but because we have no loving and life-giving connection with others. We are not able to give and receive of ourselves freely and without fear or hesitation. This means that our relations with others are either absent, and merely a matter of external transactions. Or that they are always expressed with a sense of need, of seeking something from others to satisfy the longing within us, and so are not experienced as freedom and self-giving love.
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“Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.”
—Charles Bukowski -
“I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone.”
—Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running -
“I thought also about how content and comfortable I was being single, how much control I had in my life, how I could go out and get applause anytime I wanted and then retreat to the green room of my life, eating Oreos and waiting for my next performance.”
—Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy -
In his isolation, man is plagued relentlessly by egotism and pride, which are the natural parents of his loneliness.
The Community of the Desert and the Loneliness of the City -
We have become accustomed to referring to the loneliness of late evening, of mourning, of living abroad. And each of us deals with our own individual circumstances as best we can. But, how long will we continue to go around in circles, examining the subject externally yet never entering its reality? Standing before the eternal enigma of existence, when will we the sons and daughters of God by grace and participation, created in his image and likeness, the children of light when will we dare to cast aside worldly ideas and discussions and, standing face to face before God, make the decision to fundamentally change our lives?
Our movements remain uncertain. We talk about God, yet God remains someone we do not really know. We desire to be with God, we advance toward him, yet at the last minute we find an escape route and evade him.
We love ourselves excessively, beyond measure. We are unwilling to bear God. We are afraid of him, and we try to deceive him - although in fact we only deceive ourselves - with excuses which appear to be convincing. We have come to love our deceptions to the point of no longer being ashamed of them. And yet God himself never tires of seeking us out discreetly, reminding us of his presence in our sufferings and in our joys, in our mistakes and in our victories.
It is necessary for believers to begin again the way of the Lord. Let us abandon the crowds and their excited shouting; let not their words entice and influence us. The way of the Lord is narrow, uphill, demanding, lonely, but it is also salutary, as he himself has promised us. The believer must at last attach himself with love to what is essential to his personal existence, setting aside decisively and irrevocably the secondary and superfluous.
SO GOOD QUOTES 