“I am lonely and I have no one” - this complaint can be heard not only from an elderly person who buried all relatives and friends, but also from young people and even quite successful ones. About where the feeling of loneliness comes from, how to survive it and whether there is something positive in it - Archpriest Arkady SHATOV, rector of the Church of St. Tsarevich Dimitry at City Clinical Hospital No. 1, chairman of the Diocesan Commission for Church Social Activities.
"Loneliness drives me"
The feeling of loneliness is different, sometimes it can be false. I met people who had many acquaintances, but they still felt lonely. Sometimes this is due to the fact that a person wants to be given a lot of attention, to be loved, but he himself does not know how to live the life of other people, does not seek to love, is self-centered, fixated only on himself and exaggerates his feelings, sorrows and experiences.
I think that before Christ came into the world, all people were unhappy, all suffered: whether they were married or not, rich or poor, hungry or full, sick or healthy - suffering was inescapable, insurmountable. Sin has corrupted the world. The Lord gave Adam a wife - and the man felt good, but when sin entered the world, the soul of a person, even one who has a wife and children, still cannot find peace, and here it is not the problem of loneliness that comes forward, but the problem of sin. If a person struggles with his sin, if he seeks Christ, unites with Christ - loneliness can be overcome, like any other tragedy of earthly human life: poverty, hunger or a deadly disease - if a person knows and seeks Christ, if he thirsts for the spiritual, and not material. We know that among the saints many were seriously ill, they often suffered greatly, endured a lot - and yet they were joyful and found bliss, found happiness not only in heaven, but also in earthly life. There were many martyrs who suffered for Christ in the 20th century, but according to the words of Elder Paisios, the Lord ranks among these new martyrs both the disabled and seriously ill children deprived of consolation, and people who suffer suffering and illness. If a person selflessly, with hope in God endures all the sorrows sent to him, does not grumble, then this is imputed to him as martyrdom.
Find someone who is worse
When a person stops living for himself and begins to live for others, for God, he changes and becomes close and interesting to so many people. There are such lonely people whom everyone loves very much. I remember, for example, how one woman died. Very often, unfortunately, it happens that when a person who has no close relatives dies, for a long time we cannot find someone to help care for him, everyone has their own affairs and worries. So when this woman was dying, people signed up to be on duty at her bedside, so everyone was happy and good with her. Therefore, it is obvious: very often a person is in a difficult state of loneliness only because he does not know how to serve others, does not know how to love and sacrifice himself, but only constantly requires something from others.
In this case, you need to try to learn to live for others. If you have some kind of grief, if you are lonely and depressed, you need to find a person whose loneliness is much greater than yours, who is even worse than you, help him - and your loneliness and despondency will definitely pass. As the holy righteous John of Kronstadt said to the holy righteous Alexy Mechev when he lost his mother: “Go to people and, helping them in their sorrows, you will forget about your sorrow.” So it is here: when a person shares the sorrows of his neighbors, when he helps others in their illnesses and sorrows, then his own sorrow becomes much less.
For example, an unmarried girl suffering from loneliness can go to school as a teacher and devote her whole life to her students: to love these children, who often have all sorts of difficulties, take them into her heart, take care of them, serve them. Such a feat may be very difficult, but it is also joyful if there is love. If you learn to love, then there will be no loneliness. I do not think that Father John (Krestyankin) felt lonely before his death - other people loved him so much. But he was loved because he loved. Usually people reason like this: "Love me and I will love you." No, you love, and then others will love you! You learn to love - and then your loneliness will stop, other people will surely respond to your love.
Why doesn't God give me a groom?
I believe that whenever some kind of sorrow befalls us, when we encounter some kind of inconvenience in life or suffer a lack of something, we should not just ask and demand relief from God, but think about the reason for what is happening with us. No, for example, a young girl has a fiance. We must not just ask God: “Give me a groom”, you need to think: “Why doesn’t God give me one? Maybe I need to learn something before God sends me a spouse? Or maybe my path is different and the Lord is calling me to some other feat? Perhaps other people need me, and not just one person? For example, the director of our orphanage is a single woman. And if she had a husband, we might not have an orphanage, because everything rests on her. Someone needs to sacrifice their personal happiness in order to serve others if we are Christians. About someone there is such a will of God! And the fact that sometimes it is hard and difficult is natural, without difficulties it is impossible to learn anything. One senior sister of the hospital department said that when problems, obstacles, temptations are encountered in her work (I don’t want to go to the ward, I’m tired of caring for the sick - sisters have different difficulties) and she gives up, begins to be in a bad mood, go to his about, it gets even worse. And if you nevertheless overcome yourself, if you pray to God, ask Him for strength and try to treat your ministry as responsibly, as seriously as before, then even greater joy comes, even greater grace is given from God, and others are revealed. strength.
Here, on earth, we all suffer to one degree or another, including from loneliness, the feeling of which for a person can be very painful, but if he carries his cross complacently, without grumbling, this becomes a feat for him. The most important thing is that after the Savior's coming into the world, we have the One Who calls Himself our Friend - Christ - the One Whom we call, singing the troparion to the Great Martyr Catherine, the Heavenly Bridegroom. And fellowship with Christ helps a person overcome loneliness, and the joy of being with Christ is much greater than the joy of being with the closest person. And what a person does not receive according to the ordinary laws of this world, he makes up for by supernatural communion with Christ. Natural loneliness is overcome, and a person gains much more than a friend, groom, wife and children - he finds God Himself in his soul.
I think a feeling of loneliness arises when a person does not feel the love of God and seeks to receive it from other people, but people will never give a person what God can give. And the Gospel directly tells us: do not do good to those who will answer you, but do good to those who cannot answer this (see Matt. 5: 44-47). The Gospel does not say that we will be loved by other people, it calls us to learn selfless love, to rise above the natural order of things.
Learning to walk is very difficult. You crawl, you try to get up, you fall. But if you only crawl on all fours, you will never learn to walk, you have to try to get up. And learning to speak is also sometimes difficult, and learning to write. And when it comes not about some natural skills, but about supernatural ones: about love, about true faith, it is always very difficult. But when a person acquires them, these difficulties begin to seem unreal to him and no longer bother him.
"Love everyone and fear everyone"
Some actually have many friends and acquaintances, but they still feel lonely. This, I think, is loneliness without God, without spiritual life, loneliness, perhaps from fatigue; and here we encounter an imaginary, unreal feeling of loneliness. I knew one woman who, during confession, complained all the time about her loneliness, although she had wonderful sons, one of whom was a priest, a good daughter-in-law, wonderful grandchildren who loved her. This woman continued to be, in a sense, the center of the whole family, but she still complained of loneliness and said: “All my friends have died, my husband is not with me.” She seemed to be missing something. It seems to me that she lacked the right arrangement of the soul.
In our time, there is another sinful tilt - a person deliberately remains lonely in order to better, as it seems to him, arrange his life. Many modern people now do not want to get married or get married, striving to live the way they like. “I,” they say, “have not yet walked up, I have not yet achieved anything in my life. That's when I get all the pleasure - then I will look for a wife. All this, of course, is selfishness.
There is also the phenomenon of striving for "friendship" with the confessor as one of the ways to overcome loneliness and compensate for the lack of communication. It happens that sometimes some of the spiritual children, especially the "old ones", become friends of the priest, it is better to say that the friendly element enters into these relations: the priest goes somewhere with them, goes to visit, while the relationship remains very reverent , these friends from spiritual children keep the right distance with the priest. But if in a relationship with a confessor a person develops attachment, resentment, jealousy towards him, envy of those who take more time from him, then something is wrong in these relations. A particularly dangerous thing is when some unmarried girls try to find a friend in their confessor: they begin to take offense at him, become jealous, annoy him with calls and questions that are not related to confession. I understand the gravity of the situation of a single girl who wants to get married, but nevertheless, she must understand that a confessor is not a friend. He is in order to be an intermediary between the girl and God, to help establish herself in faith, and not to have long conversations with her at confession or go to visit her. If this is how the relationship develops, they are wrong, and the girl does not receive spiritual benefits. I can reveal one small secret: it often happens that when a girl gets married, all her spiritual questions and difficulties for some reason disappear. It seems to me that this suggests that before her marriage, she did not have a real spiritual thirst, but an unsatisfied loneliness.
Elder Father Pavel Gruzdev said: “Love everyone and fear everyone.” These words imply both some caution and a certain distance in communicating with other people. Being alone is sometimes useful and necessary. The saints sought solitude, went into the desert, hid from people in the forests. The Gospel says: in order to pray, you need to close the doors, stay alone and turn to God in solitude (cf. Matt. 6:6). Sometimes I would really like to be alone, but God does not give me this, because I have to communicate with different people, do many things.
Sometimes it’s good for a mother of many children to be alone for a while, because she also needs to be with God, to pray. It is very important for mom to be sometimes in silence. But at the same time, you need to carry your cross and follow the will of God.
If you live with God, pray to God, everything can be overcome, and the very loneliness that people experience so hard can be for the good of a person if he seeks the salvation of his soul, if he is with God.
Friendly communication is natural and to some extent necessary, Christ himself had friends, He called Lazarus His friend (cf. John 11:11). A person needs the warmth and sympathy of other people, it is very difficult for someone who does not have such warmth to live, his soul is distorted. For example, children who spent their childhood in orphanages, did not receive love and warmth in childhood, are defective in some way, and it is very difficult to make up for this lack of love later. During adolescence, children need friends, a person needs them even more during growing up, in their younger years. If we talk about true friends, they can be found both at work and during study. Friends, first of all, should be close spiritually. The psychological factor is in the background: it often happens that completely different people become wonderful friends. For Orthodox young people, there is a way to find comrades: to find a place where like-minded people study, where there are people who are looking for service to their neighbors, striving for a feat.
The feeling of loneliness is different, sometimes it can be false. I met people who had many acquaintances, but they still felt lonely. So there is an imaginary loneliness associated with the fact that a person wants to be given a lot of attention, to be loved, and he himself does not know how to live the life of other people, does not seek to love, is self-centered, fixated only on himself and exaggerates his feelings, sorrows , feelings...I think that before the advent of Christ into the world, all people were unhappy, all people suffered: whether they were married or not married, married or not married, whether they were rich or poor, hungry or full, sick or healthy - all the same, suffering was inescapable, suffering remained irresistible... Sin distorted the world. The Lord gave Adam a wife - and the man felt good, but when sin entered the world, the soul of a person, even one who has a wife and children, still cannot find peace, and therefore it is not the problem of loneliness that comes forward, but the problem sin. And if a person struggles with his sin, if he seeks Christ, unites with Christ, then loneliness can be overcome, like any other tragedy of earthly human life, just as a person can overcome the tragedy of poverty, hunger or a deadly disease, if he knows Christ, seeks Christ, if he thirsts spiritually and not materially. We know that among the saints many were very seriously ill. Such many-painful saints suffered greatly, endured a lot, and yet they were nevertheless joyful and found bliss, found happiness not only in heaven, but also in earthly life. So is a person, if he believes in Christ, then for the sake of Christ he is even ready to REJECT earthly happiness.
Just as there are free and involuntary martyrs, so there are monks who are called to the feat of a solitary life, and who freely choose this path, and those who do not choose this path, involuntarily living in chastity. For example, the holy righteous Alexis, a man of God. He voluntarily gave up what many young men and women are now seeking, and was happy to find his blessedness in Christ. There were many martyrs who suffered for Christ in the 20th century, but according to the words of Elder Paisios, the Lord ranks among these new martyrs both the disabled and seriously ill children deprived of consolation, and people who suffer suffering and illness. If a person selflessly, with hope in God endures all the sorrows sent to him, does not grumble, then this is imputed to him as martyrdom.
In fact, here on earth, we all suffer to one degree or another, including from loneliness, the feeling of which for a person can be very difficult and difficult, but if he carries his cross complacently, without grumbling, it becomes for him feat. The most important thing is that after the Savior's coming into the world, we have the One Who calls Himself our Friend - Christ - the One Whom we call, singing the troparion to the Great Martyr Catherine, the Bridegroom, the Heavenly Bridegroom. And fellowship with Christ helps a person overcome loneliness, and the joy of being with Christ is much greater than the joy of being with the closest person. And here, natural loneliness is overcome by supernatural communion with Christ, and what a person does not receive by nature, what he does not receive according to the ordinary laws of this world, he makes up for by communion with Christ. Natural loneliness is overcome, and a person gains much more than a friend, much more than a groom, much more than a wife and children - he finds God Himself in his soul.
I believe that all problems of human communication are overcome when a person goes to God. It seems to me that it is impossible to solve them without raising these problems to another, completely different level. All the controversial problems of our earthly life, located in its plane, are resolved only when a person goes beyond this plane, when he turns to God with a prayer, when his life begins to be built on faith in Christ - then all these issues can be resolved.
The Gospel does not say that we will be loved by other people, although it says that if a person leaves his father, mother, relatives, he will gain much more than he had. this feat of self-denial, self-sacrifice. When a person stops living for himself and starts living for others, starts living for God, he changes and becomes close and interesting to a lot of people. There are such lonely people (lonely in the sense of having no relatives) whom everyone loves very much. I remember, for example, how one woman died. Very often, unfortunately, it happens that for a long time we cannot find a person to help care for dying people. Everyone has their own affairs and worries, and if the patient does not have close relatives, it is very difficult to organize care for him, and sometimes such care is needed around the clock. So, when this woman was dying, people signed up to be on duty at her bedside, so everyone was happy and good with her. Therefore, it is obvious: very often a person is in a difficult state of loneliness only because he does not know how to serve others, does not know how to love and sacrifice himself, but only constantly requires something from others. In this case, you need to learn to live for others. If you have some kind of grief, if you are lonely and depressed, you need to find a person whose loneliness is much greater than yours, who is even worse than you, help him, and your loneliness and despondency will definitely pass. As the holy righteous John of Kronstadt said to the holy righteous Alexy Mechev when he lost his mother: “Go to people and, helping them in their sorrows, you will forget about your sorrow.” So it is here: when a person shares the sorrows of his neighbors, when he helps others in their illnesses and sorrows, then his own sorrow becomes much less: he sees that there are people who suffer much more than he does, and he comes to a sober, correct internal state.
For example, an unmarried girl suffering from loneliness ... She can go to work as a school teacher and devote her whole life to her students: to love these children, who very often have problems, take them into her heart, take care of them, love them, serve them, to help learn... Such a feat, perhaps very difficult, but also joyful, if there is love. You need to learn to love - then there will be no loneliness.
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Some actually have many friends and acquaintances, but they still feel lonely. This, I think, is loneliness without God, without spiritual life, loneliness, perhaps from fatigue, and here we are faced with an imaginary, unreal feeling of loneliness. A person considers this loneliness, but in fact it is something else. I knew one woman who, in confession, constantly complained to me about her loneliness, although she had wonderful sons, one of whom was a priest, a good daughter-in-law, wonderful grandchildren who all loved her. This woman continued to be, in a sense, the center of the whole family, but she still complained of loneliness and said: “All my friends have died, my husband is not with me.” She seemed to be missing something. It seems to me that she lacked the right arrangement of the soul.
I believe that whenever some kind of sorrow, tragedy or drama befalls us, when we encounter some inconvenience in life or suffer a lack of something, we should not just ask and demand something from God, and think about the reason for what is happening to us. No, for example, a young girl has a fiance. You should not just ask God: “Give me a groom”, but you need to think: “Why doesn’t God give me a groom?” What is the reason for this? Maybe I need to learn something before God sends me a spouse? Or maybe my path is different and the Lord is calling me to some other feat, a higher one? Perhaps other people need me, and not just one person: not the groom, but the same children? For example, the director of our orphanage is a single woman. And if she had a husband, we might not have an orphanage, because everything rests on her. Someone needs to sacrifice their personal happiness in order to serve others if we are Christians! About someone there is such a will of God! And the fact that sometimes it is hard and difficult is natural, nothing can be learned without difficulties. One older sister of the hospital department said that when problems, obstacles, temptations come up in her work (I don’t want to go to the ward, I’m tired of caring for the sick - sisters have different difficulties) and she gives up, begins to be in a bad mood, go to his about, it gets even worse. And if you nevertheless overcome yourself, if you pray to God, ask Him for strength and try to treat your ministry as responsibly, as seriously as before, then even greater joy comes, even greater grace is given from God and others are revealed. strength, another skill appears in the soul.
Learning to walk is very difficult. You fall, crawl all the time on the floor on all fours. But if you crawl on all fours, you will never learn to walk. And learning to speak is also sometimes difficult, as well as learning to write. In general, to acquire certain skills, and we are not talking about some kind of natural skills, but about supernatural ones: about love, about real faith, it is always very difficult. But when a person acquires them, these difficulties begin to seem unreal to him and no longer bother him.
In our time, you often meet with the fact that a person deliberately remains lonely in order to better, as it seems to him, arrange his life - and this, of course, is selfishness. Many modern people now don't even WANT to get married, DO NOT WANT to get married, striving to live the way they like. “I,” they say, “have not walked up yet, I have not done this, I have not yet achieved anything in my life. That's when I achieve something, when I get all the pleasure, then I will look for a wife. This is another, in a completely different direction, a sinful roll.
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You can understand that these are wrong relationships as follows: if they become spiritual, not spiritual, that is, if attachment, resentment, jealousy, envy for those who take more time from the confessor appear, then something is wrong in these relations. so, it means that there is something wrong with them and this needs to be fought.
Regarding the desire to compensate for the lack of communication with people by communicating with animals, it should be said that a person is an amazingly rich creature, there are various elements in his life, including communication with animals. I know one girl who communicates wonderfully with horses, with dogs, once she saved a crow by bandaging his wing - but all this is not at all instead of communicating with friends, since one does not interfere with the other. The human heart is wide enough and can accommodate a lot, all the variety of relationships with earthly beings, with animals that inhabit this world.
I think a feeling of loneliness arises when a person does not feel the love of God and seeks to receive it from other people, but people will never give a person what God can give, so in this case it is best to pray to God. And the Gospel directly tells us: “Do not do good to those who will answer you, but do good to those who cannot answer this.” / Compare: Matt. 5,44-47 / That is, the Gospel calls us to learn selfless love, to rise above the natural order of things that exists in this world. But, on the other hand, due to human weakness, we still need friends. And Christ himself had friends, He called Lazarus His friend / Compare: Jn. 11,11/, so that friendly communication is natural and to some extent necessary.Moreover, in the Church, we still try to talk about the spiritual factor, and not the psychological one, and friends, first of all, should be close spiritually. The psychological factor is in the background: it often happens that completely different people become wonderful friends.
Elder Father Pavel Gruzdev said: “Love everyone and fear everyone.” These words imply both some caution and a certain distance in communicating with other people, because communication can be not only love, not only friendship, but also affection and have some kind of distortions.
Sometimes being alone is good. Sometimes I would really like to be alone, but God does not give me this, because I have to communicate with different people, do many things, and being alone is sometimes useful and necessary. The Gospel says that in order to pray, you need to close the doors, stay alone and turn to God in solitude /Compare: Matt. 6.6/. The saints sought solitude, went into the desert, hid from people in the forests.
Sometimes it’s good for a mother of many children to be alone for a while, because she also needs to be with God, to pray. It is very important for mom to be sometimes in silence. But at the same time, you need to carry your cross and follow the will of God.
If we talk about true friends - they can be found both at work and during study. One of the graduates of the school of sisters of mercy told how she found friends while studying at the school. So for young people there is a way to find comrades: to find a place where like-minded people study, where there are people who think the same way with you, think the same way with you, strive for a feat, seek service to others ...
If you live with God, pray to God, everything can be overcome, and the loneliness itself, which is so hard experienced by people, can be for the good of a person if he seeks the salvation of his soul, if he is with God.
Marina VASILIEVA, coordinator of the volunteer service "Mercy": I usually encounter a feeling of loneliness not in myself, but in other people: our wards or friends. Moreover, if you can still let your friends read these words (they, as Orthodox people, will try to at least to some extent apply your advice to themselves), then with the wards the situation is much more complicated.
Yes, on the one hand, we (volunteers) are needed in order to make up for the lack of love in our wards as much as we can with our presence, communication, and help. On the other hand, their sense of loneliness is often so aggravated that relations with volunteers turn into a kind of “terror”, when the volunteer is almost ordered: “come to me every day”, “why don’t you call me every two hours”, etc. P.
We try - again, to the best of our ability - to promote the churching of these people. But even when it is possible to more or less improve the spiritual side of the life of the wards: they read the Gospel, prayers, take communion regularly, have the opportunity to talk with the priest - all the same, loneliness haunts them VERY strongly. Maybe this is some kind of “hunger for love”, which is not satisfied even by several years of a non-lonely life?
If a person lived a spiritual life before he got old, fell ill, was left alone, he usually does not have such experiences.
Although probably, in fact, everything is simpler - we are not able to give them true love - it is unlikely that people next to the saints felt their loneliness?
Prot. Arkady SHATOV: Once, a very good priest, Father Alexander Kiselev, said to his interlocutor, who gave him advice on how not to grieve after the death of his wife: “Yes-ah-ah-ah! It’s easy to give advice, it’s like throwing pebbles down from the bell tower, but following them is like carrying heavy stones from the bottom up to the bell tower!
The overwhelming majority of our volunteers are young and healthy, and we cannot feel the grief of lonely, abandoned, sick, elderly people. We can help to the best of our ability, console these people, pray fervently for them, endure their whims and nit-picking.
Their suffering should not plunge us into despondency and despair. There is One Who loves them more than us and can help them more than we do. They perform their feat of patience of illness and loneliness, we must support them in this.
Father John (Krestyankin) told me that the task of the sister of mercy is to teach the patient to love his illness, to understand its meaning.
I don't know if there are people among us who could do it. To do this, you need to love your cross yourself, experience illness and sorrow, overcome despondency, learn to love.
Let's do what we can, let's try to fulfill the advice of the holy fathers and the gospel commandments, and place all our and not-our sorrows and sorrows on the Lord, Who has no lack of love!
April 19, 2012Many of us humans are familiar with the suffering of loneliness. It hurts us that beings like us around us ignore or avoid us. And if you imagine a situation where there are no creatures like us around at all? Even Robinson Crusoe had knowledge of the society in which he lived and the hope that he would be found sooner or later. And then Friday came along... What if there isn't a single being like you in the entire universe? Perhaps God is in such a situation. Or once was.
In the infinity of space and eternity, He looked around in all directions and dimensions and there was no one there. If we imagine that then the cosmos was just as dark and huge, then a terrible picture appears to my imagination, unbearable for the consciousness of an ordinary person. God was alone, absolutely alone in this dark endless "room" without walls! In our everyday life, the cure for loneliness is communication. God decided to create billions of living beings with whom he could share his all-powerful loneliness.
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Probably, this is when we do not let anyone into our soul. Or maybe it comes when we acutely feel that no one needs our soul. Sometimes both options are combined.
Or maybe it's just a person's awareness of his existence? I am, and truly, experientially, I know only that I am. Therefore, I am, in principle, existentially alone. Perhaps that's what Sartre or Camus would have said. But this answer is missing something. Better yet, someone.
We continue to look for an answer.
Loneliness is suffering. Indeed, in loneliness you are always left alone with your pain. And, probably, most of humanity will put an equal sign between loneliness and suffering.
However, in history there have always been people who themselves were looking for loneliness. There are many such writers, artists, musicians. They flee from the world in order to later give it the fruits of their seclusion. Genius music that we admire. Paintings that gather millions of people around them. Books that amaze with the depth of thinking. All this is born of creative loneliness - and it is always accompanied by the inner suffering of the artist.
Geniuses are people who seek loneliness and at the same time suffer from it. Everyone else also suffers from loneliness, but they run away from it.
The human soul naturally desires to open itself to someone, share itself and feed on another soul. But at the same time, letting a person very close to us, we feel uncomfortable because of the invasion of the holy of holies of our hearts and the inevitable bitterness of misunderstanding.
This situation was described by Schopenhauer in the famous "porcupine dilemma". When porcupines are cold, they huddle together to keep warm. Feeling pain from needle pricks, the animals scatter, but soon freeze and approach again, gradually finding an acceptable distance. So inner emptiness and cold push people towards each other, but, having received mutual wounds, they disperse - in order to converge again when loneliness becomes unbearable. Secular politeness and accepted culture of behavior is nothing but a safe distance between our loneliness.
In general, Schopenhauer has simply crushing aphorisms on this subject, as accurate as they are bitter. For example: "People's sociability is not based on love for society, but on fear of loneliness." Or: "Each person can be himself only while he is alone."
We will not be asked in the next world how they loved us here. They ask if we loved
Along with the development of megacities, the strange phenomenon of loneliness in big cities has spread widely. It turns out that the larger the crowd bustling around you, the sharper the blade of loneliness can be, cutting the heart. Why? Because you understand that they live their own life, not yours. A huge number of "not you", which do not care about your person, poison the soul in proportion to their number. The more “not you” around you, the more alone you feel.
If there is someone in this faceless crowd who thinks about you and is waiting to meet you, then the feeling of abandonment and uselessness seems to go away. But someone else's love is like a drug. The more you use, the more you depend. On the other hand, you get used to it and appreciate it less. The real victory over the depression of loneliness comes when you learn to love others and give yourself to them. So it was, is and will be. Any psychologist will tell dozens of stories about how their patients overcame an internal crisis through service to others. And indeed, we will not be asked in the next world how we were loved here. They ask if we love.
For someone who is inclined to think and loves to learn, loneliness can become a school of self-knowledge and God-knowledge. If a person retires, reduces communication with the world to a minimum, three possible scenarios await him. Either he cannot stand it and interrupts his peace, or he goes crazy, or intense inner work begins in his soul.
I remember Chekhov's wonderful story "The Bet". A wealthy banker and a poor young lawyer argued: if a lawyer sits in solitary confinement for fifteen years, he will receive two million rubles from the banker. Having settled in an outbuilding in the banker's garden, the young man went through several stages of development. The first year he was bored, read novels and detective stories, played the piano. In the second year the music stopped, and the hermit demanded volumes of the classics. In the fifth year, the prisoner asked for wine, the piano sounded again. Books were not read during this period. In the sixth year, the lawyer began to scrupulously study foreign languages, philosophy and history. After the tenth year, the sage spent days and nights reading only the Gospel. Then books on the history of religions and theology were demanded. In the last two years of seclusion, the recluse read everything indiscriminately. Five hours before the end of the fifteen-year term, he left the wing, thereby breaking the bet. The note he left behind said that he no longer needed the millions. Years of solitude, spent in self-education and self-knowledge, led to God and resolved the question of the meaning of being.
And here is a case not from literature, but from the life of a very famous person - the last ataman of the Zaporizhzhya Sich, Peter Kalnyshevsky. After the abolition of the Sich, the 85-year-old Cossack was sent to the prison of the Solovetsky Monastery, where he spent 25 years in a cramped solitary confinement cell. He was let out on the street three times a year: at Christmas, Easter and Transfiguration. After the pardon, 110-year-old Kalnyshevsky refused to return to Ukraine and remained in the monastery. He lived on Solovki for almost three more years, spending most of his time in prayer. Now he is glorified as a locally revered saint of the Zaporizhzhya diocese.
“A person matures in solitude, in a cold void, in which it is clear to a person: he has to be born and die alone. In this emptiness, a person begins to pray. And then the void is filled with God, the past life is comprehended, eternity becomes obvious,” writes a modern preacher.
Loneliness shows us who we are and gives us the opportunity to fill the gaping emptiness of the human soul. Whether it will be filled with God, or the crackle of the TV, or an escape from oneself into the labyrinths of social networks - we decide for ourselves. But there are examples in history that can help us make better choices.
When the Lord comes to a person, he is no longer alone
There is also a special loneliness -. Loneliness and monasticism are in some ways the same root words. Monasticism comes from the Greek word "monos", which means "one". This kind of voluntary loneliness is also defined by the words: and God. Monasticism is me and God. Better to say: God and me. If monasticism is like this, then it becomes the true and only justification for loneliness. However, what should a layman say about monasticism? It is like a beautiful but closed treasure chest. You can love. It is impossible to feel and understand while remaining in the world.
However, he wrote about “monks in tails”, that is, about lay people leading a real evangelical life, knowing about mental prayer and other exploits not only from books, but from personal experience. One can find similar thoughts in St. Theophan the Recluse. The saint himself sent letters from the cloister to a certain lay landowner asking for advice in prayer work. Subsequently, the remarkable preacher and writer, Archpriest Valentin Sventsitsky, developed the theme of “monks in tails” into his idea of “a monastery in the world.” So loneliness filled with God is an ideal that is achievable outside the walls of a monastic cloister. Only then, perhaps, is it better to use the word "solitude." When the Lord comes to a person, he is no longer alone.
We can never completely avoid loneliness, but we are able to meet God within it and come out of the shell of alienation to meet people. And most likely, there is no other way out of the problem.
Do you want to be released from years of torture of loneliness? Become irreplaceable for at least one person in the world. Serve someone who needs help. Understand that happiness is being useful.
A hospital, a prison, a nursing home, an orphanage - these are the places that help to turn from philosophers into doers. Within these walls, the very quality of our loneliness changes. In any case, despondency and depression are guaranteed to make room, because there is simply no time for them.
Loneliness is inevitable. It is a constant companion of any individual on all paths of his being. This feeling is allowed by God and is normal for a sinner who has fallen away from the Creator. A branch that has broken away from the vine will always feel its insufficiency and loss. Whether a person is happy on earth or deeply unhappy, until the end of his days he will retain the natural, ontological experience of loneliness as a personal uniqueness and personal pain - that very “I am”. The abyss of our soul, destined for the infinite God, always makes itself known to us. The abyss calls upon the abyss with the voice of Thy waterfalls…(Ps. 41:8).
Loneliness is necessary. It gives self-knowledge and reveals the age-old pain of sinning Adam, who is still hiding from the Lord in the bushes of his loneliness. From under these branches one must come out to meet the Creator and His creation. Yes, walking this path can be even more painful than sitting in Adam's bushes. But only on this road will the abyss of our soul find the One Who is able to fill it, and will meet those who carry the same depths inside. “Call to the Creator from the abyss of your heart, and He will fill your limited infinity,” this is how loneliness tells us.
For this meeting, the incessant voice of loneliness sounds in us, and for it we live on earth.
Today there is a lot of talk about the disunity of people. In the bustle of this world, the problem of human loneliness seems to be as acute as never before. At the same time, more and more you can meet those who consciously strive for loneliness - they are burdened by relationships with friends, do not want to create a family and exist in their own isolated inner space, where they are comfortable and even joyful. Why is loneliness painful for some and bliss for others? The editor of the newspaper Abbot Nektary (Morozov) reflects on how a Christian should treat loneliness correctly.
Trouble or blessing?
When it comes to loneliness, we often think of the words of the Bible: It's not good for a person to be alone(Gen. 2 , eighteen). In my opinion, they should not be taken literally: the Lord saw Adam created by Him and, realizing that he was lacking something, created Eve for him as an assistant. Both Adam and Eve were in the original creative plan of God, which existed even before the creation of the world and anything else that started to be(In. 1 , 2). We cannot explain why it happened the way it did, or why exactly two, he and she, were created. It can be assumed, according to our human reasoning, that it would be very difficult for one person after falling away from God. Someone may object: after all, it was Eve who tempted Adam, which means that without her there would have been no fall into sin. However, it is obvious that one person does not need another at all in order to be tempted. Adam originally carried within himself the possibility of falling, so the serpent would have found a different approach to his heart. But after the fall, getting out of the state in which a person found himself, alone, would probably be harder, so Adam and Eve turned out to be needed by each other.
The feeling of loneliness is a consequence of the fall, before it a person was able to feel the constant presence of God in his life in a direct way, which now we are able to very, very rarely and in the most minimal way. As soon as a person broke the union with God, he became lonely. Therefore, no matter how many assistants or close people are around, even if they are truly loving, attentive, caring, - all the same, as long as a person lives on earth, loneliness to some extent will be his lot. After all, even the closest and dearest people, who understand us and give us much-needed warmth, cannot always be near, cannot fully relieve us of the feeling of loneliness. Because in everyone's heart there is such a depth to which no other person can go down with him. And this is the depth of not joy that we can still share with someone. This is the depth of grief. When we experience grief, extreme mental pain, we find ourselves face to face with the abyss of our own suffering heart. But it is there that the Lord meets a person, and at this meeting with God, at being with God, loneliness disappears.
We can say that the ability of a person to feel alone is a great blessing - after all, it is this feeling that should lead him to God. Blessed Augustine wrote: “God created us for Himself, and until then my heart is troubled until it rests in my God.” The abyss of the human heart can only be filled by the abyss of the Divine, and only God can give a person everything that he needs. It is so surprising that man was created - he will always either seek God, and in Him find a way out of his loneliness, or he will suffer and suffer from loneliness.
Not contrary to intent
The biblical words that it is not good for a person to be alone refer primarily to marriage, but nevertheless they can and should be understood more broadly. The fact that a person is alone and has no one very often means that he does not love anyone, lives in himself and for himself. The one who loves people and knows how to cherish them, as a rule, even if he is alone in this life, does not suffer from loneliness, because the whole world is before him and he feels unity with this world, created by God. But when a person is fixated on himself and does not notice those around him, he becomes really painfully lonely.
It also happens, of course, that a person is truly attentive to people, he has many relatives and friends, but he cannot find a spouse for himself and suffers. Such loneliness can hardly be called good. But the fact is that about every person, without exception, God has a plan. And this idea did not appear simultaneously with the birth of this person into the world, but originally existed even before the creation of the universe. This is the eternity of each of us: I will not only always be, but in a sense I have always been - present in the intention of God. Therefore, the torment of a person from the absence of something or someone in his life is due to the fact that he is trying to live contrary to the Lord's plan for him. There is the will of God that gives us the best of the opportunities that we could have in this life. And if we do not receive something, then one of two things: either God has some other plan for us, or there is something in ourselves that prevents God from giving us what we want and ask for.
Sometimes a person lives with clearly defined goals for himself: I have to create a family, give birth and raise children, plant a tree, buy a car, an apartment, achieve this and that at work. And in no way can he perform any of these tasks, and he suffers from fruitless efforts. And the other simply tries to open up to the maximum extent in everything that the Lord has given him and to which his activity extends. And everything happens by itself: and a life partner meets, and everything works out with work, and everything else is arranged. It’s just that when we get hung up on one thing, even on the necessary and important, and we start demanding it from life, from God at all costs, we don’t get it. We need to be able to accept the gifts that the Lord gives us, to be grateful for them, and He will give us much more - perhaps, including what we so desire. And in the fact that a person categorically wants something that the Lord does not yet consider useful for him, lies the essence of unfaithfulness to God.
How to come to a feeling of loneliness as a blessing, and not torment? There is only one way to this, indicated by the Apostle Paul: for those who love God everything works together for good(Rome. 8 , 28). The same things can both create and destroy a person, depending on his ability or inability to see the hand of God in what is happening to him, the gift of God.
Lonely but united
The fact that today many people are fatally alone with that painful and not good loneliness, from which they go crazy, commit suicide and die, is not an illusion. The world is aging and in one way or another is approaching its end - close or not very close - and it is natural that this movement is filled with all the processes that the Lord warns about in the Gospel: both a decrease in faith and an impoverishment of love. Our time is characterized not just by the flourishing of self-esteem, but downright painful love of people in themselves. And the more a person loves himself, the more lonely he is. The unwillingness to notice anyone around is the realization of Satan's prayer in a person's life, one might say so. We remember the so-called High Priestly Prayer of Christ the Savior, in which He says: Father (...) may they all be one(In. 17 , 21). The will of God consists in the fact that the people created by Him, by nature alone, were nonetheless united in love, in their faith in Him, and constituted a single whole - the Church. But we know that Satan asked for power sow these of people created for unity, like wheat(See: Lk. 22 31), that is, to scatter us in different directions so that we do not abide with each other in Christ's love. Therefore, the one who rejects himself from unity fulfills just this petition and, of course, falls into a very evil, disastrous state.
Why does the prayer that the Lord gives us begin with the words "Our Father"? Many interpreters paid attention to this - namely “ours”. Not "mine" just - no, ours. We are Family. Only through this understanding, this feeling, a person embarks on the path of salvation, but as long as “mine”, “mine”, “me”, “me”, he remains outside the path of salvation.
Photos from open Internet sources
Newspaper "Orthodox Faith" No. 9 (533)
Hegumen Nektary (Morozov)Recorded
