Overcoming Loneliness

In a Peanuts cartoon Lucy is sitting in her small booth with the sign: "Psychiatrist, five cents." Charlie Brown walks up and asks Lucy: "Can you cure loneliness?"

She answers: "I can cure anything."

Charlie Brown says: "Can you cure deep-down, bottom-of-the-well, black-forever loneliness?"

Lucy responds: "All for the same nickel?"

It is easy to find evidence of loneliness. For example, the personal ads in newspapers and magazines and now on the internet, speak of the hunger men and women have for relationships.

In a section called "Women Seeking Men" a young lady writes "Washington woman, Catholic, refined, engaged in postgraduate study, desires to meet educated scholar and theocratic spirit with traditional values and reflective attributes." It sounds like the description of a Jesuit priest.

In the section called "Men Seeking Men" someone wrote: "Attractive, 32-year-old scholar, whose passions range from the authors Marcel Proust and Henry James to Frank Sinatra, seeks a relationship with a young man who is not averse to fun and the gaining of wisdom." I wish him luck. However, anyone who includes Frank Sinatra in a list of famous authors is himself in need of wisdom.

In the section called "Women Seeking Women" this ad appeared: "Stimulating PhD seeks an unattached woman capable of warm, loving relationship, with an interest in films, food, travel, and skiing--but none of these are essential." She is not going to be choosy.

In the section called "Men Seeking Women" A poet professor says he is seeking "a Margaret Mead type," which suggests a relationship with a short, highly opinionated anthropologist--a limited category. He better have a sense of humor.

Another man writes: "Engineer, forty-five, thin, likeable, and intelligent, seeks a slender, sensual woman, IQ greater than weight, for committed relationship based on love and respect. One night stand OK too." He will compromise.

The authors of the personal ads are only publicly expressing what lies in the hearts of most of us. I admire their courage in asking directly and openly for what they need. Their words spring from the depth of human feeling, from the terrible fear of isolation, from the need to be accepted by another human being.

In one survey 25% of those interviewed said they had suffered from the pain of loneliness within the past few weeks. In another study one in nine of those interviewed said they had suffered from serious loneliness as recently as the past week. And when researchers asked elementary school children what bothered them the most, their primary complaint was that they were lonely.

What is the origin of loneliness? My own theory is that loneliness begins when others hurt us as we grow up. We learn from painful experiences in our families, or in the school yard or in the classroom, to protect ourselves by holding back. And this holding back isolates us. As children we learned to lock our most private selves away. Our fear of being emotionally hurt by others keeps us from sharing our joys and our pain. We are afraid to touch or to be touched by another human being. Therefore, at times many of us experience profound loneliness.

In his book, The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm wrote that the Biblical story of Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge is a symbolic description of the anxiety that we feel when we realize that each of us is separate, different and alone. He said:

After Adam and Eve have eaten of the 'tree of knowledge of good and evil,' . . . after they have become human by having emancipated themselves from the original animal harmony with nature. . . . After man and woman have become aware of themselves and of each other, they are aware of their separateness, and of their difference, . . . But while recognizing their separateness they remain strangers, because they have not yet learned to love each other. . . . The awareness of human separation . . . is the source of . . . anxiety.

The deepest need of human beings is our need to overcome our separateness, to leave the prison of our aloneness. I first read these words of Erich Fromm's when I was about fifteen years old, and they became central to my own efforts to understand human behavior. The deepest need of human beings is our need to overcome our separateness, to leave the prison of our aloneness. People of all ages and cultures struggle with the same question--the question of how to overcome separateness, how to reconnect with others, how to transcend our individual life.

We humans try to deal with the anxiety we feel when we are lonely in many ways. Drugs including the drug alcohol, can free us from loneliness for a time, although when the drugs wear off loneliness can return. Sexual contact, like drugs can free us from loneliness for a time, but just as with drugs, when the sexual activity is over the loneliness returns, often with even more intensity. Gambling, like drugs, can relieve our loneliness for a short time. Shopping can give us temporary relief. Eating can have the same effect for some people. Powerful rituals, such as the rituals of religion, or sports or politics the military, can for a time, overcome the feeling of being separate and different. Work long hours can also be a temporary solution to loneliness. Conformity with a group is still another way that we humans cope with our anxiety about being alone. As an adult I see this desire for conformity in my children, who are passionate about the brands of clothing they will or will not wear to school. Of course, they see the same conformity in their father when I follow the rules of the book Dress for Success in selecting my conservative button down shirt, my tie, and my suit. It is all part of my effort to avoid the anxiety of loneliness.

In contrast, to these solutions, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber suggested three healthy ways to overcome the feeling of loneliness.

• First, we can overcome loneliness by engaging in creative activity, such as painting, or singing, or writing a poem, or acting in a play. For example, suddenly a piece of music can reach out to us, and can shatter our loneliness. Hearing the music we will feel a unity that binds us together with others.
• Second, we can overcome loneliness by communing with nature--taking a hike in the woods, or watching a sunrise, or digging in a garden.
• Third, we can overcome loneliness by entering into healthy relationships with others. These are relationships where we treat others with care and respect, while simultaneously we preserve our own integrity. In healthy relationships we care about others without losing our own identity.

Starting out about forty-nine years ago, the founders of this church set out to establish a safe place where people could overcome their feelings of loneliness in these three healthy ways, through creative activity, through relationships with nature, and through relationships with other people.

In the winter of 1950-51 All Souls Unitarian Church on 16^th street in Washington was struggling with a waiting list in its church school and standing room only in its sanctuary. Rev. A. Powell Davies recommended that rather than add more Sunday services or try to move to a larger building, they should start a new church in Montgomery County, Maryland.

The Board of Trustees of All Souls Unitarian Church voted in June 1951 to support the formation of a Montgomery County Unitarian Center. All Souls agreed to furnish ministerial services. It supplied printing, publicity, the use of mailing lists, the use of office equipment and staff support. The Greater Washington Committee for Unitarian Advance gave the new congregation $1500 to provide high fidelity telephone equipment for the transmitting of the services at All Souls to speakers at the Chevy Chase Woman's Club, which the new church rented Sunday mornings for services. The speaker for the sound system was hidden behind flowers.

The first Sunday, September 24, 1951, the Sunday School for children, which they called the School of Religion, was unable to open. They had planned for an enrollment of about sixty children. However, parents registered one hundred and seventy children, and twenty other children were placed on a waiting list. The founders delayed the opening of the School of Religion for two weeks while they gathered more teachers and materials.

In the next few years this church grew quickly. Recognizing their financial limitations, in 1958 the founders built this auditorium as a temporary worship space, with the hope and the dream that future members would build a sanctuary. People poured their time and energy into building this community. Men and women, often new residents of the county and for the most part strangers to each other, served on projects and committees and task-forces of the church. They built social and personal relationships by means of which they could overcome the loneliness and isolation many were feeling. In this religious community, men and women who were geographically, and sometimes emotionally, distant from their families of origin, established new friendships based on shared experience and shared need. Some of those friendships have lasted forty-nine years.

Relationships with people, with nature and with the arts have been important throughout the history of this congregation. Our buildings are located in a lush forest of trees. Our congregation is home to Cedar Lane Stage, and to a wonderful choir, and occasional art displays. Forty-nine years after our founding, Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church is a powerful ally in the battle against loneliness. Not only Sunday mornings, when we gather for common worship, but in the fellowship of the church dinners and social events; in the friendship of the singles group and the mens's group; in the companionship of the aging support groups and our pastoral care visitors; in the stimulation of the adult education classes; in the care and sympathy of the pastoral counseling services; in the religious education of children; the mental endeavor of bridge and the emotional satisfaction of flower arranging; in the sacred ceremonies of birth, marriage, and death --the battle against loneliness is fought on many fronts.

The healthy church is a vast network of contacts and connections, of unions and associations, of warm relations and spiritual harmonies. We are, of course, not a perfect community. We make mistakes. Still, we do our best to maintain a religious community so that to some significant degree we reduce the feeling of loneliness in those that seek us out. Here we try to maintain a community where reaching out to each other feels safe, in contrast to our childhood experienced in the school yard. I look at the past forty-nine years of this church, and I say a prayer for the future:

• May our church continue to be a community where we will accept each other, where we will laugh at each others jokes and listen to each others nightmares.
• May we continue to love our energetic children, our dedicated workers, our quiet teenagers, our elderly neighbors, and our shy newcomers.
• And may we find here a place for the healing power of love. Amen

Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
9601 Cedar Lane, Bethesda, Maryland 20814-4099
Tel: 301-493-8300    Fax: 301-897-5713
e-mail: office@CedarLane.org
Sunday Services at 10 a.m.
© 1998-2008, Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
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