Today's helping of existential angst

I had a conversation with a friend today about how, on some level, we are all alone, even though there are people all around. (There's nothing like starting off the week with some existential angst, is there?) It's not that I'm particularly isolated, even working from home. I have a whole list of phone calls to make tomorrow morning, several in-person meetings this week, and endless e-mails. I went to yoga today and chanted "Sut, Nam" with a room full of people. I'm close enough to smell my neighbor's weed, and right now, I'm can hear how the soccer game playing on the television in the apartment building next door is going. "Goooooooool!!!!" is good. "Pinche Cabron!" is bad.

I have no shortage of friends and other relationships. I had a good friend visiting me this weekend. We sat on my front porch and read the paper this morning, and I had two other friends drop by to say hi before 9:30 in the morning. I have two voice mail messages from friends to return, and a long phone conversation with another friend today. I have a therapist and a spiritual director.

All of these people care about me. Some of them I see almost daily. I don't have a lot of secrets these days, I mostly tell the truth about myself, and I have friends who have proved themselves over time, but still - there are ways in which I am still utterly alone. We're all flawed and limited, and sometimes we don't have it in us to be present for someone else. Even when we're trying our damndest to be supportive, can any of us ever really know what it's like to be someone else? I'm reasonably intuitive and empathetic - on my good days, at any rate - and I sometimes find some of my closest friends baffling and unintelligible. And even when I feel like I get it or they get it, we all have our own journey and our own battles and no one can really fight our demons for us. I would be delighted to outsource the monsters under my bed if that were an option.

In my religious tradition, this was where faith and God was supposed to come in, with that "Footprints" poster they sell in every Christian bookstore and a rousing chorus of "What a Friend We Have in Jesus." My experience is that in the real dark spots, there ain't no Jesus there. Sorry to be the one to tell you. That's part of the alone - there are these spots in my life and in my soul where God is echoingly absent, leaving me solo in the universe. It's not that I don't believe in God - I entirely do. I just find that there are spots where if God is present, She hides real good.

I don't know if that's everyone or just me. Relatively high levels of self-revelation on this blog notwithstanding, I'm a very guarded person who is rather accomplished at being honest without being vulnerable. You'd be surprised at how long you can get away with being walled off if you listen well and have good social skills. I will tell friends how I felt, but I almost never actually emote in front of anyone. Even my closest friends very rarely see me cry, and almost no one has ever seen me yell.

Maybe it's different for other people with fewer attachment issues and fewer walls to break through. Maybe not. I jsut think that, regardless of how many people are residing in our house, on some level, we all live alone.

Comments

[mfh]

Ha, was just reading Rilke's Christmas letter early this morning. It's all about embracing existential aloneness. Rilke can handle that kind of stuff, it seems ;-) For me it's still too hard most of the time, but I hope I can get to that point.

[HSY]

Geesh, glad I was able to bring a black cloud of despair to your sunny, but chilly corner of the U.S.! But thanks for your hospitality, and for articulating the pain of feeling truly alone. It's hopeless despair, and I suspect, too, that it's more deeply felt by those of us with attachment issues. In times when we really needed help/ rescue/ love, we didn't get it tangibly from people who should have provided such nurture. No wonder we feel deep pain,despair and ALONE when life hurts.

[Ryan]

C.S. Lewis wrote about both of your points (human inconsistency and God's sometimes deadbeat fatherhood) in the Screwtape Letters:

LINK

Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy's determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dulness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.

To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite. Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily good; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot "tempt" to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

[Jenn]

Not going to say "I know what you mean," because you're right--I'm not you, and you're not me. But I FEEL like I know what you mean. I've been thinking similar thoughts a lot recently . . .

[Christy]

mfh -

Maybe I should be reading Rilke...

HSY -
Any black clouds of despair were already pre-existing..... Fabulous to see you, attachment issues notwithstanding.

Ryan -
Much as I (sometimes) like C.S. Lewis, I think he and I are talking about something different here. I think that there is a significant difference between the normal ebb and flow of experience, and very dark spots that are a great deal more than dryness and dullness. I have low expectations for the warm and fuzziness of my relationship with God. I'm still rather thrilled that I no longer wake up every day feeling like God actively hates me - anything more than that is just gravy, as far as I'm concerned.

It's more that I have these spots in my psyche where there is no God - and those spots coexist with my faith at exactly the same time. And I have these spots in my life where, on a very profound level, there was no God. It's a hard experience to explain. I feel it very deeply, but it's hard to put words around it.

Jenn -
do any of us ever truly know what anyone else means? Maybe, maybe not - but I'm glad something connected with you.

[leslie]

...and I believe it is in those deepest darkest places where we must find Him

[Amelia]

I read this and was reminded of Jesus:
" My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"
I haven't an editorial point to this, it just made me reflect for a moment.