loneliness

So if you’re walking down the street sometime
And spot some hollow ancient eyes
Please don’t just pass ’em by and stare
As if you didn’t care, say, “Hello in there, hello”
– John Prine from his song, “Hello in There.”

We live in a culture where we seem to connect more with people through social media than we do through incarnated interaction. Connecting with the others electronically is not a detrimental thing in itself, but if it replaces incarnated relationships, then it will further alienate us from one another. The irony of modern life is that many are so connected and yet so alone. Human relationships, of course, are messy, so I get why people are retreating to electronic ones. They can control when to interact and the relationship’s parameters. That’s harder to do when another person is present with us. Incarnated relationships lay a claim on us that’s personally demanding and sometimes painful. In electronic ones, all we need do is turn off the device.

Newsweek last week ran a story on the alarming rise in the suicide rate over the last decade. According to Newsweek, Julie Phillips, a sociologist at Rutgers University, analyzed this new data. It used to be that teenagers and the elderly had the highest rates, but that’s no longer the case. Baby Boomers, those born between 1945 and 1962, now have the highest rate. What’s alarming, however, is that while “the boomers have the highest suicide rate right now, everyone born after 1945 shows a higher suicide risk than expected—and everyone is on pace for a higher rate than the boomers.” What’s causing this profound change across all regions of our country? According to Newsweek: “[Phillips] has a good list of suspects: the astounding rise in people living alone, or else feeling alone; the rise in the number of people living in sickness and pain; the fact that church involvement no longer increases with age, while bankruptcy rates, health-care costs, and long-term unemployment certainly do.” Oh my!

Kathy Mattea sings about going “through life parched and empty” all the while “standing knee deep in a river and dying of thirst.” My hunch is that those who are so “parched and empty” don’t even know there is the water of life running around them knee-high. Those who choose suicide have made a clear calculation: death is preferable to their life as it is. To them it makes sense. If they have no incarnated relationships where they are loved unconditionally, where grace and forgiveness are the operative virtues, and where they share with others a clear meaning and purpose in life, then there is some sense, however bent and twisted, in such a choice.

Do we as a Church need any more of a mission imperative than what is provided by that list of suspected causes for the rise in suicides? We must reach out to them with the Good News of Jesus, who is the Water of Life. Yet, as the John Prine song states: We so often just pass folks by and never stop to say “hello in there.” We as a Church have the antidote. It is time for us to share the cure.

+Scott

“Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” is the provocative title of the cover story in May’s Atlantic Monthly. Author Stephen Marche’s answer is: sort of, but only because it perpetuates a trend that has been present in our culture for some time. He contends that Facebook offers an illusion of connection, faux intimacy if you will, without actual human connection. He reports on the growing data about loneliness. According to one prominent study, about 20 percent of us report that we’re lonely most of the time.

Concurrently, doctors are beginning to talk with some alarm about an “epidemic of loneliness.” One such doctor, John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago, is a leading expert on loneliness. In his book aptly titled, Loneliness, he showed how loneliness impacts our physical health. He reported: “When we drew blood from older adults and analyzed their white cells, we found that loneliness somehow penetrated the deepest recesses of the cell to alter the way genes were being expressed.” Loneliness then isn’t only an emotion. Our whole bodies are lonely. And the data shows loneliness makes us sicker. It is becoming a public health crisis.

Ten years ago I remember reading Robert Putnam’s compelling book, Bowling Alone, where he documented the rise of suburbia’s isolation, media’s omnipresence, and the instant gratification of technology all of which makes our separation from one another more possible. Combined with the decline of traditional associative institutions like unions, community groups, and churches, we see the result: greater loneliness. Marche argues we’ve done this to ourselves willfully, but without a conscious awareness of the consequences. As he writes: “We are lonely because we want to be lonely. We have made ourselves lonely.” I can hear Screwtape and Wormwood laughing out loud right now.

Marche quotes Sherry Turkle, from her book Alone Together: “These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and protect ourselves from them at the same time…The ties we form through the Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy.” We Christians know about the “ties that bind,” as in the hymn: “Bless be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love.” I recall the Episcopal Church Ad Project poster from a few years ago that showed a television set with a corporal, paten, and chalice atop it with the caption: “Can your TV set give you Holy Communion?”

This growing data on loneliness offers an insightful description of our current mission field. We need to find Gospel ways to address people’s loneliness at its core and not superficially, and by that I mean, only socially. That probably means that more Church Bowling nights or other group activities are not the answer, although they certainly might help. We need to go deeper and somehow convey the Biblical truth from the Genesis creation story that it is “not good” for us to be alone; that God has created us for one another; that St Augustine was right (“Our hearts are ever restless until they rest in thee, O Lord”); that “there is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole; there is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.” God has a mission for us.

+Scott

The eCrozier

Reflections from Bishop Scott Benhase

“Knee deep in a river and dying of thirst.” (eCrozier #180)

Loneliness is an Epidemic and We know the cure (eCrozier # 133)

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