Loneliness Revisited

Loneliness, at a psychological level, if you go deeper, it’s solitude. Solitude is a mysterious kind of intimacy in which we are all united with one another . . .

God can sometimes providentially wean us off our dependency on finite modes of connectedness in order to open ourselves to go deeper to experience how God is unexplainably one with us in this aloneness.

Thomas Merton once said, ‘In the hour of your death, you can get all the people in the room with you that you want, they can climb up in bed with you if you want, but you are dying alone. You are that alone right now. And you will never find the intimacy you are seeking by avoiding that aloneness’.

– James Finley in Returning to Essentials: Teaching an Alternative Orthodoxy, a talk by Richard Rohr, James Finley, and Cynthia Bourgeault originally presented via webcast in December 2014.