I began re-reading Jean Vanier's "Becoming Human" a while ago, but couldn't get far. His words on loneliness were so piercing that it was difficult to get through, like seeing my soul posed as a mannequin in the display window at a store and realizing that 60 sets of eyes are looking at this mannequin, and it was naked.
He writes this:
" Loneliness can appear as a faint
dis-ease, an inner dissatisfaction, a restlessness in the heart.
Loneliness comes at anytime. It comes in times of sickness or when
friends are absent; it comes during sleepless nights when the
heart is heavy, during times of failure at work or in relationships; it
comes when we lose trust in ourselves and in others. In old age,
loneliness can rise up and threaten to overwhelm us. At such times,
life can lose its meaning. Loneliness can feel like death. [...]
Loneliness is essential to human nature; it can only be covered over, it
can never actually go away. Loneliness is part of being human, because
there is nothing in existence that can completely fulfill the needs of
the human heart. Loneliness [...] is essential to our humanity.
Loneliness can become a source of creative energy, the energy that
drives us down new paths to create new things or to seek more truth and
more justice in the world.
[...] Loneliness is the fundamental force that urges mystics to a deeper
union with God. For such people, loneliness has become intolerable,
but instead of slipping into apathy or anger, they use the energy of
loneliness to seek God. It pushes them towards the absolute.
Loneliness can be a force for good. More frequently however, loneliness
shows other, less positive faces. It can be a source of apathy and
depression and even of a desire to die. It can push us into escapes and
addictions in the need to forget our inner pain and emptiness. This
apathy is how loneliness most often shows itself in the elderly and in
those with disabilities. It is the loneliness we find in those who fall
into depression, who have lost the sense of meaning in their lives, who
are asking the question born of despair: What is left?
[...] We only cry out when there is hope that someone will hear us.
[...]
Such loneliness is born of the most complete and utter depression, from
the bottom of the deepest pit in which the human soul can find itself.
The loneliness that engenders depression manifests itself as chaos.
There is no light, no consolation, no touch of peace, and of the joy
life brings. Such loneliness reveals the true meaning of chaos.
Life no longer flows in recognizable patters. For the person engulfed
in this form of loneliness there is only emptiness, anguish, and inner
agitation; there are no yearnings, no desires to be fulfilled, no desire
to live. Such a person feels completely cut off from everyone and
everything. it is a life turned in upon itself. All order is gone and
those in this chaos are unable to relate or listen to others. Their
lives seem to have no meaning. They live in complete confusion, closed
up in themselves.
Thus loneliness can become such uncontrolled anguish that one can easily
slip into the chaos of madness. To be lonely is to feel unwanted and
unloved, and therefore unloveable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No
wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental
illness or violence to forget the inner pain.
[...] The necessity of human commitment to the evolution of the new, the
necessity of accepting constant movement is the key to our humanity and
is the only road to becoming truly human.
[...] Are not all our lives a movement from order to disorder, which in turn evolves into a new order?
[...] Throughout our lives there is the disorder created by sickness,
accidents, loss of work, loss of friends - all crises that destroy our
agendas, security, and carefully laid plans. Such disorder demands a
gradual re-ordering of our lives and the period of transition such a
crisis represents is not an easy one to live through. It is a time of
loss, when we have yet to receive something new. it is a time of
grief.
[...] Our universe is constantly evolving: the old order gives way to a
new order and this in its turn crumbles when the next order appears.
Change of one sort or another is the essence of life, so there will
always be the loneliness and insecurity that comes with change. When we
refuse to accept that loneliness and insecurity are part of life, when
we refuse to accept that they are the price of change, we close the door
on many possibilities for ourselves. our lives become lessened, we are
less than fully human. If we try to prevent or ignore the movement of
life, we may succeed for awhile but, inevitably, there is an explosion;
the groundswell of life's constant movement, constant change is too
great to resist.
[...] This means living in a state of a certain insecurity in anguish
and loneliness, which at its best, can push us towards the new. Too
much security and the refusal to evolve, to embrace change, leads to a
kind of death. Too much insecurity however, can also mean death. To be
human is to create sufficient order so that we can move on into
insecurity and seeming disorder. In this way, we discover the new."
For a few months now, this book has been like kryptonite, alluring me with it's beauty, yet killing me with it's power. As I've come back to it, my heart still can't get passed the first chapter from which these excerpts came, so I put Jean back on my shelf, and go to bed, and maybe, just maybe I'll be able to pick it up again tomorrow...
