Advent Loneliness

Our Advent fast forces us into intimacy with the struggles, fears, sorrows, and sins for which we bear entire, solitary responsibility. We find ourselves alone with the parts of ourselves we most dislike — parts of ourselves we may even fear — and, in this solitude, are uncertain of the way back to redeemed communion with our beloved God and fellow members of his Body.

When we realize this loneliness, which we cannot escape or shift onto the shoulders of others, our first response is often violent resistance. Loneliness can be an agonizing wound. When it comes, we want to fight it, to ward it off in any way we can. If it is “not good for man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18) — if human loneliness is a result of the Fall — why would God leave us to loneliness’s devastating emptiness? Not only this — why does it sometimes seem as if he invites us into it?

And why must we feel so alone when we face our loneliness?

It is easy to forget that Christ, too, was lonely in his life on earth. From birth to death, who could have been more lonely than the God-man, the One who embodied a love for the world of which his companions could have only partial knowledge — a love that very world is incapable of fully requiting? 

Can there be any experience more lonely than Christ’s Passion, in which he was crucified by the creatures whose loneliness he had come to answer and redeem? 

Christ is more intimate with the wound of loneliness than we will ever be. In his Incarnation, Christ makes himself at home here, in the land of our loneliness, and invites us to find him already with us — always present, always ready to answer our isolation with communion. 

By the grace of Christ’s presence with me, then, my loneliness is redeemed from a senseless wound into an opportunity for intimacy. Henri Nouwen touches on this idea in The Wounded Healer:

The Christian way of life does not take away our loneliness; it protects and cherishes it as a precious gift. . . . When we are impatient, when we want to give up our loneliness and try to overcome the separation and incompleteness we feel, we easily relate to our human world with devastating expectations. . . . But when we are not afraid to journey into our own center, and to concentrate on the stirrings of our own souls, we come to know that being alive means being loved. 

Thus, a wise Christian thus does not enter battle with her loneliness, but accepts and attends to it. She recognizes it as an opportunity to meet Christ in the deepest parts of her being. 

Grace, embodied and offered by Christ in his Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection, transforms our loneliness from a frightening enemy into a mode of generosity and presence. We are ushered into the humility of our desire for communion with others, a humility in which we discover depths of grace that we may then shower upon them. When loneliness stops battling with itself, when it ceases to take issue with its own existence out of fear of pain, it can become what it was from the beginning: a love content to inhabit the wound of its longing for others. 

It is Advent now. In Advent, we find ourselves lonely, and content ourselves with waiting for the Coming of Christ, in which he will enter our lonely humanity with himself. By our Advent disciplines we anticipate Christ’s dual coming: His First Coming, in a cradle, in which he enters and binds himself to the loneliness of this world, upholding our pilgrimage by the strength of his presence. And his Second Coming, in which he returns in Glory, as End and Beginning, as the One in whom our loneliness finds its final consummation in union with God in Christ.

In the meantime, we answer the Advent call to wait. As we are humbled before the patient grace of this call we find Christ — incarnate, crucified, and resurrected — always going before us and dwelling with us in our loneliness. We learn to inhabit his life as he upholds us in this deepest of wounds. 

We may feel lonely, but we cease to feel the pain of our fear. More than we know ourselves to be lonely, we come to know ourselves as entirely loved.