How to Feel Lonely

Or, a study in blindness, desire, and perspectives

Grace waits for us, even at the Bottom.

No expectations, no judgment, just the kind of compassion that rushes out to meet us, to throw arms around us, to bring us home. That was my story, I think, looking back.

The one where the Prodigal relents, gives up, and returns to the Father. I had all these conjured images of prodigals: of tattered robes, disheveled hair, emaciated faces—the

classic image of the broken ones returning home.

What I couldn’t see was all the ways I was a prodigal: the shined shoes, the tailored pants, the branded button-downs, the smile—all just a mask for the brokenness underneath.

Whitewashed tombs.

Thinking there was no need of any healing because I didn’t look sick on the outside.

The boring catastrophe.

Then there was my old way of trying to fix it: follow the rules, do the stuff, and drink myself ragged whenever things didn’t seem to line up.

The Prodigal was at the Feast of Pigs and I judged him from the bottom of a bottle.

He and I were much the same, however.

And that’s a bitter pill to swallow; we judge those to whom we are all too similar; they are mirrors that reflect back to us all our weaknesses. And even there, from the bottom of the bottle, Grace was waiting for me; Jesus was singing the Hidden Music, inviting me into His Life.

I thought my way up was to find Him, but He had been there, at the Bottom, all along; I was just blind.

So blind.

And that’s generally our problem: the blindness—we have it backward.

We think we’re responsible for the first step, but that has already been made.

All our effort boils down to this:

Receive, be filled, and overflow.

The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?” The question is not “How am I to know God?” but “How am I to let myself be known by God?” And, finally, the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?” God is looking into the distance for me, trying to find me, and longing to bring me home.

It’s late morning, Aislinn is teaching English online, and I’m grabbing a backpack and heading out to get some groceries for us.

There’s some drying and dying leaves at our entryway, the last few from the trees finally giving in to winter’s cold, and they crunch under my boots. My time alone now feels different.

I don’t feel lonely.

Before these epiphanies, if I can call them that, before embracing the way of the Saint, alone felt like being on the outside, separated from Reality.

Now, alone feels different.

It feels like solitude, a place for undivided attention, a time for prayer. These walks, down the same old lanes, feel like recited prayers, just for my body.

You’ve heard me say it a few times, but hindsight is twenty-twenty, and there was this situation, a conversation, that popped into my mind as I shopped for ground beef and onions, for peppers and celery and carrots.

One that didn’t fully make sense when it happened, but one I could reinterpret in light of everything I had come to see.

It was during that time when I was questioning if God really loved me, and if I could know it, not just in my head but in my whole self.

I had been talking with someone, and we were circling the whole topic—probably my fear of being rejected or misunderstood.

But eventually the Band-Aid had to be ripped off.

“I just don’t know if God loves me,” I’d said.

“Of course He does,” came the reply. “You know that.”

“I don’t. I know all about it, but I don’t know it. It’s like I’m just a tourist, visiting the sites, doing the things I’m supposed to—taking a few pictures to commemorate the occasion—but then I just move on—”

There was no pause before the reply—no moment to consider, to genuinely respond—just the typical six-shooter of platitudes locked and loaded, finger on the trigger:

“God Loves you; that’s all there is to it.” And then came the inevitable. “ ‘God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.’ ”

A verse to save me.

Done and dusted, at least in his mind.

The conversation had droned on, saying much yet getting nowhere.

And now I know it’s because we were speaking different languages, we were missing each other on what it means to know. The difference of knowing by explanation versus by experience.

I’d thought I had to find Love, rather than be found by it. And now I know that my longing wasn’t a one-way street, it wasn’t just a Lost Son seeking out his Father.

No, God had been inviting me back to Himself all along.

He wanted me to know Him.

I’m putting the last few groceries in my basket, grabbing a chocolate bar for Ais, and getting in line. Now I know, I’m thinking, that everything, even back then, and even back in Toronto, was an invitation—I’d just been blind to it.

Jesus had always been singing the Hidden Music; He’s the Source, the fountainhead from which cascades all Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.

Every moment is an invitation, a summoning. It was a survival mode that gave me tunnel vision, only able to see half the picture.

The lady behind the register is ringing up the cabbage, the beans, the tomato sauce, and we smile at each other. I had been left unsatisfied in my life because I was looking for this life to satisfy—putting too much on everything around me, attempting to fashion it into something that could sustain and hold up all my needs and desires and wants and worship.

I hand her the money, get the change, and put all the ingredients for tonight’s chili in my backpack. And when nothing could sustain me, I’m thinking as I walk home, when everything was crushed under the weight of my need, rage followed.

The vicious cycle repeated until I learned that all those longings and all their corresponding pleasures were not the telos—the end, the goal.

They were signposts fashioned and formed to point my whole self toward the Source. Another guide whispers in my mind:

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthy pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.

That was Lewis again, reminding me that half measures won’t do.

A few years later I discovered that Peter Kreeft had taken this passage from Lewis and formalized it, calling it the “Argument From Desire,” and his syllogism goes like this:

Premise 1: Every natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy that desire.

Premise 2: But there exists in us a desire which nothing in time, nothing on earth, no creature can satisfy.

Conclusion: Therefore there must exist something more than time, earth and creatures, which can satisfy this desire. This something is what people call “God” and “life with God forever.”

I was looking for the Something More; we all are, and we’re trying to turn sex and drink and success and relationships and pleasure and everything else into that Something More, but every time, they collapse under the weight of our infinite longing.

Structurally unsound for the load of our need.

We need to allow those longings space, give them some room to breathe, not try to silence and numb them with every kind of distraction and idol.

All along, from beginning until now, I was searching for God—not in some cliche, catchphrase sense, not like a fortune cookie or bumper sticker, not a secret phrase, not in the whole the obstacle is the way, but in the sense that He was behind it all.

I wanted Him, and settled for so much less. He is the Source of all the Beauty I longed for, the Author of Goodness, the Genesis of all that which is True.

He sings the Hidden Music; He beckons to us all, calling us up rather than out.

That’s the Real Christian view:

that God made everything Good, and everything, as it reflects Him, reflects aspects of that Goodness; everything that is Beautiful finds its fulfillment in Him, and so, too, for Love and Truth.

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This was Chapter 28 of Room for Good Things to Run Wild: How Ordinary People Become Ordinary Saints

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