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INTENTION : |
That priests, who experience fatigue and loneliness in their pastoral work, may find help and comfort in their intimacy with the Lord and in their friendship with their brother priests.
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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.
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 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"?
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.
There have been times when I have been moved to confess to others the loneliness. At other times, I have been so reluctant to admit to the loneliness in my life?
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. 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."
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.
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?
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.
In surrendering to loneliness, the people surrounding him - the parishioners - surrender more fully to God. They become his people and he becomes one with 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 and among all creatures!
Edited article of Fr Martin Boland,
Dean of Brentwood Cathedral in England.
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