|
|
Dalton
Roberts |
|
|
|
Once when I was down and out and living in a one-room apartment, a friend said, “Loneliness is nothing but a call to service.” It hit me as too glib at the moment. It irritated me that he didn’t seem to empathize with my plight but over the next few weeks I saw the truth in his words. I was feeling like Nietzsche when he moaned, “I lie here buried alive in my loneliness.” It was not just the loneliness of being alone for the first time in my life. I had been fired from my job. I felt like a failure and Eric Hoffer’s words rang so true, “There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure.” Maybe some people don’t read the bible for humor but I do and one of the funniest stories in it is the time Elijah prayed to die. Just a few days earlier he had been on top of the world, calling down fire on the prophets of Baal. That’s pretty hot stuff, no pun intended. Jezebel got mad that he had embarrassed her priests and threatened to kill him. This man with so much power ran and hid under a cedar tree and prayed to die. What was his problem? Clearly it was loneliness for he claimed to be the only man with the courage to stand up against Baal. He said, “I, even I only, am left.” Those two contrasting pictures, one of calling down fire and the other of crawling off under a tree crying to die, are just hilarious to me. Why? I guess because it is so typical of humans to alternate between feelings of invincibility and extreme vulnerability. Loneliness is one of those things that can buckle your knees no matter how much fire you have called down lately. Elijah may have been burned out from too much service and not enough rest and recharging of his inner batteries. But the fact remains that he was not cured until he returned to service. His later works were so great, we are told, that he was swept up to heaven in a chariot – the only man to ever avoid death. It is my theory that during his loneliness he was able to contact a deeper part of himself and tap into a higher stream of power. Jung spoke of this when he said, “It is … only in the state of complete abandonment and loneliness that we experience the helpful powers of our own natures.” Hermann Hesse also touched on this theme; “Loneliness is the way destiny tries to lead a man to himself.” As I sat there day after day in my one-room apartment licking my wounds and whining about the recent misfortunes in my life, my mother decided to take a chance on cracking through the thick shell of defensiveness and negativity I had wrapped around me. She reminded me that I had twenty-five years of successful service before this apparent failure. She said, “You need to quit whining and blaming people and go back to doing what you know how to do.” I stomped out of her house but her words followed me around like a little lost puppy and kept snapping at my heels until I sat down and acknowledged the truth she had pointedly pushed into my mind. Once I decided to return to service, I was still alone but not lonely. Dag Hammerskjold spoke of a kind of loneliness that “can be a communion.” I experienced that communion and it buoyed me up through six months of campaigning. Yes, this difficult time was the period when I made a decision to run for county executive. It was actually the loneliness of failure that impelled me to dig deeper into myself. Your loneliness may be of some other variety. All varieties respond to a return to service. There is no way to be lonely when we are serving people.
|
