by Alden Bass
When C.S. Lewis wanted to describe hell, he depicted it as an American exurb.
In The Great Divorce, the dead live in a dreary place called Grey Town. There is a town center surrounded at various distances by dwellings. The longer people remain in Grey Town, the farther away from others they move from the civic center; most gradually move farther and farther from their neighbors until they find themselves at “astronomical distances” from other human beings. And the farther they retreat from human contact, the more they become stuck within themselves. This is hell.
Lewis wrote his fantasy in the immediate aftermath of World War II, just as households began to break up and cities began their centrifugal spread. The number of individuals living alone began rising after 1910 but increased rapidly after the War. High divorce rates, falling birth rates, longer average lifespans were all contributing factors. Advances in telecommunications technology were also a factor. With phones and now the internet, people can feel connected even though separated by many miles; as Bell Telephone used to say, over the phone you can “reach out and touch someone.”
But there was no touching. When David Riesman wrote The Lonely Crowd in 1950, 9% of all households consisted of a single person. Today, that number had risen to 29%.
On the one hand, loneliness is not new. It has always been a part of the human condition, and one of the most universal sources of human suffering. Loneliness has been compared to rootlessness or restlessness, the feeling that no place is home. For Jill Lepore, “loneliness is grief, distended.” Yet the material conditions of modernity – with its suburbs and telephones and internet – have exacerbated this existential feeling. The word “loneliness” seldom appears in English before 1800.
Aloneness is not the same thing as loneliness, as Henri Nouwen points out in Reaching Out. Solitude is a necessary part of a healthy spiritual life. Jesus himself spent many hours alone. Yet aloneness, the lack of regular face-to-face contact with other humans, is the single greatest factor in today’s “epidemic of loneliness.” In A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion, Fay Bound Alberti observed that loneliness is closely associated with living alone. And, sociologist Robert Putman would add, “bowling alone.”
The consequences of our aloneness have been grave. Vivek Murthy relates the physical and mental toll, a familiar litany: anxiety, depression, political apathy and political polarization, violence, crime, suicide (Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World). According to neuroscientists, our bodies interpret being alone as a state of emergency. Shakespeare’s Ophelia suffers from “loneliness” and drowns herself. For these reasons and more, the Economist declared loneliness to be “the leprosy of the 21st century.”
While there are no stories of Jesus curing loneliness, we do read about him treating lepers. What can we take away from that? He came to them and he touched them. In the ancient world, illnesses like leprosy were a double misery. Not only did they bring physical suffering, but they also separated one from the community. Sick people were also impure; sometimes they were even called sinners. The archetypal image is Job sitting alone on the dung heap, scraping his pustules with potsherds. Ignoring the purity taboos, Jesus regularly entered the company of these outcasts and found a way to welcome them back into society. “Health is membership,” says Wendell Berry.
Disciples of Jesus must continue to seek creative and even subversive ways of being together.
The healing itself is almost always accomplished with a touch of the hand and (we can imagine) a direct look in the eyes. This is essential, since loneliness is not just aloneness; in Nouwen’s words, the root of loneliness is the suspicion that “there is no one who cares and offers love without conditions, and no place where we can be vulnerable without being used.” Jesus’s loving touch is an affirmation of common humanity, an assurance of value and worth.
And Jesus was not just a divine miracle-working Savior figure. The story of Jesus is the story of one who shared our loneliness, who suffered in the same kinds of ways we do. “Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested” (Hebrews 2:18).
Just as in stories of leper stories, Jesus continues to offer healing through contact and community. He called people together to continue his mission by sharing meals together, caring for one another, and bearing each other’s burdens. How do we respond to Jesus’s call in the 21st century? Can we resist the forces driving us apart like the damned in Lewis’s Grey Town? With courage and wisdom, yes, but it isn’t going to be easy. To invert Paul’s admonition, we fight not only against spiritual forces of evil, but also against the flesh and blood, stone and mortar systems which structure our lives. Suburban sprawl, automobilization, commuter churches, social media, online shopping – none of which are wholly responsible for our loneliness but all of which have contributed to it.
Disciples of Jesus must continue to seek creative and even subversive ways of being together. The alternative, as Lewis observes, is worse than loneliness – it’s damnation.
Alden Bass currently teaches at Lipscomb University, is on NCN’s steering committee, and was a co-founder of the Lotus House community in St. Louis.