Thursday, February 9, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Diverse gifts
The Lord God said, “It is not good for man to be alone.”
Adam named all the animals, but there was at first, none like him. To fix this, the Lord settled on the first surgery, accompanied by the first anesthetic.
The Lord God cast a deep sleep on the man, and then he took out one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. Then the Lord God built a woman out of the man’s rib. And the man gave thanks. “This is at last bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”
And so was born the first marriage, filled up I imagine with joys and sorrows like every marriage, unique like every couple, each man and woman made into one partnership.
So this is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one flesh. The man and his wife were both naked, but they felt no shame.
We’ve come a long way, baby. Now it seems we’re born with shame. And while we still cling to each other, it’s more likely that we cling so we don’t lose what we desperately think we need from the other, rather than clinging so we can generously give to the other what we have to give. Mostly, our partnerships are made up of one giver and one needer (taker).
Never happy those two. Always looking to lie down in green pastures.
Alone.
Just for a little while.
And that bring up loneliness, a necessary counterpart to marriage. Thomas Merton, a priest who never married but who did fall in love, wrote, “The absence of married intimacy in my life constitutes a fault in my chastity.” For many of us married, it goes the other way: a too-often fault in our marriage is an absence of solitude, even including the sadder sort of solitude we call loneliness.
Isn’t that interesting? My favorite philosopher-priest Ron Rolheiser thinks so. One of his heroes, Soren Kierkegaard, “is the patron saint of the lonely.” Kierkegaard, a Lutheran, refrained from marriage because he could not sacrifice the treasure of his loneliness. Rolheiser tries to explain this:
What loneliness does for us, especially very intense loneliness, is destabilize the ego and make it too fragile to sustain us in the normal way. What happens then is that we begin to unravel, feel ourselves become unglued, frighteningly aware of our smallness. And we know in the roots of our being that we need to connect to something larger than ourselves to survive. This is a very painful experience and we tend to flee from it.
However, and here is a great paradox, our experience of intense loneliness is one of the privileged ways of finding the deep answer to our quest for identity and meaning. Because it destabilizes the ego and disorients us, loneliness puts us much more intimately in touch with what lies below the ego, namely, the soul, our deepest self. The image and likeness of God lies in there, as do our most noble and divine energies.
That’s the truth behind the belief that in loneliness there is depth.
And so the lesson is this, whether married or single: Don’t run from loneliness. Don’t see it as your enemy. Don’t look for another person to cure your loneliness. See loneliness as a privileged avenue to depth and empathy.Â
Rolheiser also writes profoundly about the difference between and celibacy and chastity. A chaste marriage (one in which we experience “the enchantment of life”) is one in which we both “experience all of life reverently, leaving each of us more integrated. I am chaste when I let life, others, and sex be fully what they are. Chastity is respect and reverence. The fruits are integration, gratitude and joy.”
To be altogether together and altogether alone might take turns, but they both have their place in the bone of my bones, the one flesh, of marriage.
Always when he speaks, Ron Rolheiser begins with a poem. Here is a poem he shares, written by the ancient Persian poet, Hafiz:
Don’t surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft
My voice
So Tender,
My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.
 (Genesis 2, Psalm 128, James 1, Mark 7)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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