Many things contribute to loneliness. Decades ago, people seldom moved far away from where they had grown up. You grew up and aged with familiar people around you, some were intimately close and supportive. Today we live all over kingdom come, and while smart phones bring us data and keep us connected, the connections are less than fully human. You see people gathered but ignoring each other to stare into their phones. Individualism is assumed to be the American way, but it’s isolating us from genuine openness with others. Big business and big government are impersonal; saying they care about you is just a commercial come-on. The causes are countless. Loneliness abounds and it’s not healthy.
I write that reflecting on a prayer I read the other day. Loneliness is made worse by our fixation on the here-and-now of my own individual life. Turned in on ourselves, we don’t see ourselves in the bigger context of humanity, or in the longer view of history. This prayer says the obvious, but it was an “aha” moment that made me lean back and think how connected I truly am, not on a device but in the deepest human ways possible, not in the here-and-now but throughout generations.
“O God, who hast spoken unto us through the Scriptures of old, help us to speak to Thee, while we use these same Scriptures now. We could not know Thee, or address Thee, hadst Thou not revealed Thyself unto us: and the words which we now utter proceed from those which our fathers heard of old, and knew to be Thine own. For these we give perpetual thanks; and we beseech Thee in Thy wisdom to make us wise regarding them, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” (Anonymous, in “For All the Saints,” IV, 1001).
Think of all the generations that have pondered the same Scriptures we meditate upon today. Young, old, parents, children, sick, healthy, troubled, calm, lonely… "all the company of heaven," as the communion liturgy says. We are not so unique. Jesus Himself used the same Old Testament Scriptures we read and prayed the very psalms we pray. “We are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1).
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