Loneliness

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT the liberation of the human heart from the tentacles of chaos and loneliness, and from those fears that provoke us to exclude and reject others. It is a liberation that opens us up and leads us to the discovery of our common humanity. I want to show that this discovery is a journey from loneliness to a love that transforms, a love that grows in and through belonging, a belonging that can include as well as exclude. The discovery of our common humanity liberates us from self-centered compulsions and inner hurts; it is the discovery that ultimately finds its fulfillment in forgiveness and loving those who are our enemies. It is the process of truly becoming human.

This book is not essentially about the formation and organization of society; it is not essentially political in scope. But since society is made up of individuals, as we open up to others and allow ourselves to be concerned with their condition, then the society in which we live must also change and become more open. We will begin to work together for the common good. On the other hand, if we commit ourselves to the making of a society in which we are concerned only with our own rights, then that society must become more and more closed in on itself. Where we do not feel any responsibility towards others, there is no reason for us to work harmoniously towards the common good. 

Over the last thirty-four years, my experience has been primarily with men and women who have intellectual disabilities. In August 1964, I founded l’Arche: a network of small homes and communities where we live together, men and women with intellectual disabilities and those who feel called to share their lives with them. Today, there are over one hundred l’Arche communities in the world. Living in l’Arche, I have discovered a lot about loneliness, belonging and the inner pain that springs from a sense of rejection. Community life with men and women who have intellectual disabilities has taught me a great deal about what it means to be human. To some, it may sound strange for me to say that it is the weak, who have been my teachers. I hope that I can reveal a bit of what I have learned – and am still learning – about being human, and about helping others to discover our common humanity. 

It was only in l’Arche that I really discovered what loneliness is. There were probably many times before l’Arche when I had felt lonely but until then I had not seen loneliness as a painful reality, maybe because I had succeeded in keeping myself busy by doing things. Perhaps I had never named it or needed to give it a name. 

When I started welcoming those with intellectual disabilities into l’Arche, men and women from institutions, psychiatric hospitals, dysfunctional families, I began to realize how lonely they were. I discovered the terrible feeling of chaos that comes from extreme loneliness. 

A sense of loneliness can be covered up by the things we do as we seek recognition and success. This is surely what I did as a young adult. It is what we all do. We all have this drive to do things that will be seen by others as valuable, things that make us feel good about ourselves and give us a sense being alive. We only become aware of loneliness at times when we cannot perform or when imagination seems to fail us. 

Loneliness can appear as a faint disease, an inner dissatisfaction, a restlessness in the heart. 

Loneliness comes at any time. 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. 

When people are physically well, performing creatively, successful in their lives, loneliness seems absent. But I believe that loneliness is something essential to human nature; it can only be covered over, it can never actually go away. Loneliness is a part of being human, because there is nothing in existence that can completely fulfill the needs of the human heart. 

Loneliness in one form is, in fact, 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 justice in the world. 

Artists, poets, mystics, prophets, those who do not seem to fit into the world or the ways of society, are frequently lonely. They feel themselves to be different, dissatisfied with the status quo and with mediocrity; dissatisfied with our competitive world where so much energy goes into ephemeral things. Frequently, it is the lonely man or woman who revolts against injustice and seeks new ways. It as if a fire is burning within them, a fire fuelled by loneliness. 

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 see God. It pushes them towards the absolute. An experience of God quenches the thirst for the absolute but at the same time, paradoxically, whets it; because this is an experience that can never be total; by necessity, the knowledge of God is always partial. So loneliness opens up mystics to a desire to love each and every human being as God loves them. 

Loneliness, then, 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 those with disabilities. 

It is loneliness we find in those who fall into depression, who have lost the sense of meaning in their lives, who are asking the questions born of despair: What is left? 

I once visited a psychiatric hospital that was a kind of warehouse of human misery. Hundreds of children with severe disabilities were lying, neglected, on their cots. There was a deadly silence. Not one of them was crying. When they realize nobody cares, that nobody will answer them, children no longer cry. It takes too much energy. We cry out only when there is hope that someone may 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 confusion and coming out of this confusion there can be a desire for self-destruction, for death. So, loneliness can become agony, a scream of pain. 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 patterns. 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. 

Let me tell you some stories, from my own experience, of the damage loneliness can create. I met Eric for the time in 1977. He was in the children’s ward of the local psychiatric hospital, 40 kilometres from the l’Arch community in Trosly, France. He was blind and deaf, as well as severely intellectually disabled; he could neither walk nor eat by himself. He came to l’Arche at the age of sixteen, full of tremendous needs, anguish, and fears. He often sat on the ground and whenever he felt someone close by, would stretch out his arms and try to clutch that person and to climb up on them. Once he succeeded in getting someone to hold him, his actions would become wild: he would lose control, struggling to be held and at the same time, jumping up and down. Holding Eric under these conditions became intolerable for anyone and, inevitably, it ended in a struggle, trying to get rid of him as he fought to remain held. He was someone who seemed to be living in immense anguish. 

Anguish is inner agitation, a chaotic, unfocused energy. Anguish breaks sleep and other patterns and brings us to a place of confusion. To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefore unloveable. Loneliness is a taste death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget their inner pain. 

Eric was a terrible lonely young man. He needed to be loved but his needs were so great that no one person could fulfill them. It took a long time in l’Arche before he found inner peace. Little by little, as he learned to trust those around him, he discovered he was loved. 

By way of contrast, Pierre was the seventh child in a family of thirteen, a man who had spent seven years in prison. I met him in Montreal. He had run away from home when he was twelve years old because he felt unnoticed and unwanted by his family. So, for a long time he lived with gangs on the street. In his heart, Pierre was a lonely man who felt lost. He had no where to go, no meaning in his life. He needed a friend, a teacher, someone who could help him find himself and a sense of purpose. 

When he was sixteen Pierre committed a crime, which I believe was a cry for help. He went to jail for it. While he was there, he fell in love with a woman who regularly visited the prison. They got married and his life took on a new meaning; he finally had someone and something to live for. It was the beginning of his process of becoming human, and it happened because he felt loved. 

In our l’Arche communities we experience that deep inner healing comes about mainly when people feel loved, when they have a sense of belonging. Our communities are essentially places where people can serve and create, and, most importantly, where they can love as well as be loved. This healing flows from relationships – it is not something automatic. 

I have come to learn that embodied in this approach there is an important principle: the necessity of human commitment to the evolution of the new, the necessity of accepting constant movement as the key to our humanity and as the only road to becoming truly human. 

In Eric and Pierre, there were chaos and disorder. Yet in the midst of the chaos there was a way out. Are not all our lives a movement from order to disorder, which in turn evolves into a new order?

Jean Vanier