Loneliness and the priesthood

For many people, loneliness is that facet of human existence that they most dread and from which they tirelessly labour to escape. Yet, loneliness is one of the distinguishing hallmarks of our humanity. It is embedded in the very grain of life itself. We recognise in each other a capacity for loneliness. Alone or together, we plumb its abysmal depths. It cuts through the exposed face of humanity like an ancient geological seam, its primordial origin traceable to the first moments of our creation. Unique among all creatures, we have an intimate knowledge of what it is to be alone. In his poem, The Word, RS Thomas describes this intuition:

A pen appeared, and the god said:

“Write what it is to be

man.” And my hand hovered

long over the bare page,

until there, like footprints

of the lost traveller, letters

took shape on the page’s

blankness, and I spelled out

the word “lonely.” And my hand moved

to erase it; but the voices

of all those waiting at life’s

window cried out loud: “It is true.”

RS Thomas’s poetic conviction begs a series of questions. Is it true that loneliness is a distinguishing feature of humanity? Are loneliness and industrialisation, urbanisation and, in more recent times, technological “alienation”, causally linked? Is loneliness historically or culturally determined, a post-Cartesian, Western preoccupation? Is it a psychological neurosis, a form of narcissism? Are the terms “aloneness”, “solitude” and “isolation”, properly understood and are they reducible to a fear of loneliness? Does loneliness, in fact, exist or as a university student once assured me: “we have cured loneliness. We invented Facebook”?

Such questions, important though they are, lie beyond the interest of this modest reflection. My more limited concern here is to provide a loose survey of the relationship between loneliness and the priesthood based on my own experience and that of other priests who have been generous enough to be open with me when I posed the blunt, unscientific question: “have you ever been lonely in your priesthood?”

The priesthood demands an encounter with loneliness if it is to be lived with integrity before God and provide a compelling witness to humanity. The capacity to live our priestly vocation authentically depends, in large part, on our capacity to avoid self-deception. And this involves having the courage to face the truth of who we are. Loneliness is part of that truth and when we admit to this reality, we acquire the courage to be more sublime icons of Christ, the High Priest.

Loneliness, however, can prove to be one of the most challenging and testing features of the priestly life. Few priests possess the natural courage to face loneliness. The drive to avoid it runs deeply within us and motivates many of our associations and social activities. Before this disturbing reality, we retreat, taking cover in the crowd while trying to camouflage our cowardice. Busyness, noise, addiction, entertainment and superficial relationships become the primitive weapons in our arsenal. When loneliness envelops us, the default response is to grasp at any activity or relationship that might serve to contain its metastatic advance and defend us from its power.

The loneliness in my own priesthood has, generally, been experienced as something weak and amorphous. Yet, there have been times when it has been more clearly defined, with a serrated edge that feels threatening. For the great part of my life, I have preferred to nurse this reality in private and accept it as my own. When it has been particularly oppressive, I have learned to respond to it with my own crude defence mechanisms. Under cruel skies, with the drums rolling, my faith and deep friendships have proved the first line of defence, but, when the threat is more distant, a second line has come to my rescue. Culture and the arts have formed a protecting shield. Cinema, theatre, music, painting and literature have provided me with a legion of consolations.

There have been times when I have been moved to confess to others the loneliness. This has taken place, usually late at night, over a whisky with trusted friends, when a slub of self-knowledge has broken through the hard crust of my fears and found some kind of honest expression. Why have I been so reluctant to admit to the loneliness in my life?

Two reasons immediately present themselves, one general and one subjective. Firstly, our age tends to hold “inter-relatedness” as the principal measure of human maturity. The suggestion that loneliness may contribute positively to our emotional and spiritual well-being runs contrary to this crude orthodoxy. In a climate so hermetically sealed to alternative perspectives, admitting to the value of loneliness becomes an act of subversion. Secondly, my refusal to speak about loneliness has been born out of shame or some kind of moral embarrassment. No one wants to admit to being lonely. To do so is to run the risk of being viewed as someone who is psychically diseased and whose symptoms are potentially infectious.

Loneliness is a fierce, unforgiving power. It challenges much of what we hold to be true about ourselves, the precarious station we stake in the world of human affections and, above all, our meaning before God. Such a power can bring a priest to his knees and blow open a locked heart. Of course, the failure of metaphor, when employed in relation to loneliness, is that it can turn this power into a romantic sentiment that must be either, stoically faced or heroically resolved. For the believer, loneliness exhibits none of the sepia-tinted attractiveness of romanticism. Rather, loneliness is that terrifying possibility of disintegration and recreation in Christ, that process we are so constituted to resist and fear most. Reflecting on this, Thomas Merton, in Thoughts in Solitude, writes:

“The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God.”

What follows is based on the assumption that loneliness does exist and that it can be considered from the perspective of the priesthood. I propose to train my attention on this religious landscape, with its own distinctive contours and gradients. It is this terrain with which I am most familiar and, though which, I can act as a guide and commentator.

Of course, what is said about this relationship is not intended to devalue the bigger questions nor is it meant to imply that loneliness does not exist in other contexts, for example, the loneliness experienced within marriage. As Anton Chekov, that unflinching observer of the matrimonial state, once commented, “If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.” The same might be said of becoming a priest.

2.

The popular description of loneliness emphasises its social dimension. Loneliness is the absence of companionship, a failure to create and sustain a web of meaningful, supportive attachments. Circumstance or choice means that some people live without the same relational content and emotional attachments in their lives as other people. They lack a single loving person, such as a husband or wife, or a social network that can sustain them.

Developing this psycho-sociological view in his essay, Research on Social Support, Loneliness and Social Isolation: Towards an Integrated View of Personality, the psychologist, KS Rook, defines loneliness as: "an enduring condition of an emotional state that arises when a person feels estranged from, is misunderstood or rejected by, and/or lacks appropriate social partners for a desired activity, particularly activities that provide a sense of social integration and opportunities for emotional intimacy."

An article (August 12th, 2014) in the Independent, entitled "Lonely Britain: 10% of population does not have a close friend", highlighted the sociological roots of this condition. The article reported that following a recent survey by the charity Relate, it was estimated that some 4.7 million people had no intimate friends or close confidants. Prof Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist from the University of Oxford, provided a plausible explanation for this phenomenon:

“Since the end of the Second World War people have become increasingly mobile, that means you end up with a social network that would previously consisted of people round about you but now its been dispersed. It’s crucial with friendship to invest time and effort. And because we move so much now – especially young people because of jobs – your cohort of friends wherever you last were gets hammered when you move away.”

The relationship between loneliness and mobility in society may well find parallels in the priesthood. Secular priests are designed to live a nomadic lifestyle as they move from one parish to another. They are largely itinerants and, increasingly so, as new pastoral demands have to be met by fewer priests. If the expectation is that a priest is likely to be appointed elsewhere after a short period of time, then it may be that pastoral and personal attachments with others remain more superficial as it becomes difficult for relationships to germinate and mature at their own pace.

Priests may exist who find themselves geographically isolated or pathologically afraid of letting themselves get close to others. They experience loneliness in a chronic manner. Unable to communicate in any intimate or honest way with others, unsure of their own personal or priestly identity, burdened by compensating for their own frailty and the weight of expectations, such priests go underground. For these priests, creative ways to coax them out into the daylight of a healthier understanding of the loneliness in their priesthood is surely required.

There is another group of priests who experience loneliness in a more oblique, less debilitating fashion. Sagart 1 by the priest-poet, Padraig Daly, imagines such a priest:

You may have many acquaintances, few friends;

Besides your unreplying God you have no confidant.

Neverthless you lift your hat to all. Old ladies

Especially will seek you out, sometimes a sinner.

You are a guest at many celebrations, a must at birth or death.

Sometimes you wonder whether this is how God intended it.

Daly’s portrait of this imaginary priest is vivid and raw. It is achieved with a few, confident strokes that are charged with truth. A first, casual reading might give the impression that Daly is sketching a caricature based on the tortured, “lonely” priest types that populate so many contemporary films, plays and books. Daly’s poem is not that. This is a skilled piece of poetic surgery where every word has been specially selected to cut away the dead matter of stereotype in order to expose something alive and beating.

Daly’s priest tips his “hat to all”, a greeting that signals that the care of souls is his business. His ministry has acquired a universal scope. He has been careful not to allow his attentions to be hijacked by a few demanding parishioners or to allow himself to become closely attached to those people he finds agreeable. He has ensured that all his people have equal access to him and not just a select few. In order to protect this universal mission he has erected, a series of physical and emotional boundaries that corral and define his relationships. While some of these partitions have aided his ministry, others have become barriers that have excluded any form of emotional intimacy and personal growth. Given this, he has become expert at accumulating acquaintances, but struggles to make or keep close friendships.

The priest has not burrowed away in some Victorian presbytery but, rather, he is visible and accessible, pounding the streets and ringing doorbells. There is a missionary spring in his step. His sacramental and pastoral ministry is performed dutifully and generously.

The issue for this priest is not that he lacks a social network. His parish provides that. People surround him and he is often to be found as the focus of their attention and personally involved in the most significant moments of their lives. He is “a must at birth or death”, but this popularity does not detract from his personal need for relationships where he is permitted to be more transparent and openly vulnerable. One can imagine that his “few friends” would be members of his family (those who are still alive), and if he is fortunate, one or two priest friends.

Those who are familiar with loneliness make their way to him, the elderly, the widow or widower, the sinner, the single person, the desperate housewife, the burdened husband, the misunderstood teenager, the divorced, the grieving, the poor, the sick and the dying. Anyone who carries the wound of loneliness will seek his counsel and prayers. The scent of his solitude identifies him as one like them and attracts them to him.

The priest’s pastoral antennae are hypersensitive to the needs of his people. In God’s presence, the priest and his parishioners establish a solidarity that offers them hope beyond isolation. Through his own suffering, something of the gentleness and compassion of Christ is communicated to those who come to him. In his weakness, he will spill Christ’s healing balm on lives that are chafed or have become suppurating sores.

God is un-replying, not absent. His silence is His presence. “Sometimes”, the priest finds the tension of living with such paradoxes hard to bear. He desires a human confidant, but he has vowed to keep faith with God. The crushing sense of being alone before this mystery threatens to defeat him. Yet, his loneliness is not a fixed or permanent attitude. It is a “sometimes” experience. For him, loneliness is like a shifting weather front, a climatic depression, that shadows his priesthood, but which also, in time, passes.

In the recesses of his mind, the question lingers as to whether this is how it is meant to be. Maybe his loneliness has no meaning outside of itself, but is simply an emotional landfill, leaving him hungry for external stimuli and relationships of dubious quality? At times, enduring this loneliness becomes almost unbearable and the idea of escaping from it seems to offer an answer.

But, perhaps, this is how it is meant to be. In the loneliness of his priesthood, he is confronted with the ultimate realities of life and death. Loneliness is not something to be viewed as a defect, rather it is the making of him. The chiaroscuro of solitude gives his priesthood a distinctive depth, substance and form, without which he melts into a phantom of nothingness. At the same time, his ability to open up supernatural realities to those around him, is honed by the abrasive action of loneliness. He stares into the wound of their loneliness, until it eyeballs him and a flintspark of recognition passes between them. Illumination allows them to see each other in a pure light, stripped clean of all distorting accretions: vanity, jealousy and fear. Through this process of purification, a new clarity is achieved, the immanent and transcendent is bridged. Priest and people, thus, become more susceptible to the salvific power of God. In surrendering to loneliness, they surrender more fully to God. They become his people and he becomes their God.

The temptation is to resist the gift of loneliness, to distance ourselves from it or smother it beneath feverish social activity. When we opt for this course of action, we lack the resolve to admit to a dark truth about ourselves: loneliness is not just a matter of circumstance or choice, it is an existential lesion in our beings.

Man's self-knowledge depends, in large part, on a profound awareness of his being alone, that he is one of a kind before nature. Alone among all creatures, man possesses this kind of knowledge. In his essay, God's Lonely Man, Thomas Wolfe finds a literary key with which to express this existential insight: "The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people…not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul…we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness."

Priests are not immune to this existential reality. In fact, by sacrificing the spousal union that most men and women enjoy in marriage, priests are confronted by the full force of this “original solitude”.

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Next week: Book Club member Vincent Hanley, who recently retired after 37 years teaching English in Scoil Mhuire agus Ide in Newcastle West, Co Limerick, offers his take on A History of Loneliness. The podcast discussion with John Boyne, two Book Club members and Martin Doyle, Irish Times assistant literary editor, will go out on Tuesday, December 2nd, followed on Thursday, December 4th, with a webchat where readers will have the opportunity to put their questions to the author.