Suffering: A Test of Theological Method (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), 99–111; chapter 6, “Resting in Our Need.”
35 Often I have stared at a word with magnifying glass for extended times over days—and over years. Then, suddenly, the word is clear and unmistakable: no brackets of any kind. A little victory. Lucy McGill has been responsible for many such victories.
I
Good Neediness
“If you are not willing to be one with your neediness, you cannot be blessed.”
—Sermon 2
Sermon 1: Loneliness
Sermon submitted in Candidacy for Licensure
October 28, 1951
I looked on my right hand,
and beheld, but there was no
man that would know me.
No man cared for my soul.
(Psalm 142:4, KJV)1
We have all at one time or another, when we joined with an unfamiliar group of people, felt strangely alone. All of the time, I suppose, we are vaguely uneasy because no one quite understands us. We are always pushed by a subtle insecurity in an effort to show ourselves to our neighbor, to bridge the gap of ignorance and indifference between us. But at a party where no face is known, or in a new town to which we have just moved, we experience this insecurity and fear of loneliness in a peculiarly acute way.
On the other hand, when we go back to our parents’ house for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, we feel a wonderful reassurance because this loneliness is almost conquered. All the objects in the family home—the pictures on the wall, the designs in the rugs—are part of our own intimate past. To the people around us we are closely bound by the memory of experiences which we went through together. We love to tell the old jokes, to rehearse past events. Here we have a peculiar sense of belonging; here we seem to be known and accepted by others; here for a moment we seem not to be isolated, but together.
In the ancient world, the family was given tremendous importance in a man’s life, because there was here an understanding, a familiarity, and a loyalty among the members which made it a unique spiritual community. Here a man sank the roots of himself, here he was not alone. But in our day the family no longer has this meaning for children or for parents. We still have the custom of letting male children keep the family name. But the family is not consciously thought of and honored and defended as the place—the one place—where we are not alone, the place where others are loyal—truly loyal—to us, and we respond with loyalty to them, the place where we commit to others certain usually hidden parts of our personality. The family is not consciously valued in this way anymore. It is not appreciated or used by our souls. We have lost the ability to tap the spiritual resources which family intimacy offers. The liberal divorce laws and the automobile by no means caused the breakup of the family. They were merely occasions where our new inner attitude became visible in action.
Lacking the unique spiritual community of a family, you and I today are especially burdened with loneliness. Too often even the Thanksgiving dinners and birthday parties are not thought of as expressions of a real conscious sense of being together. Too often they are nothing but artificial attempts to escape from loneliness, attempts to fabricate a community which we wish existed but do not really experience as there in actuality. At the family reunions we avoid talking about the deep personal realities with which we struggle. We talk about the trivial things or about the irrelevant parts of the past. How many veterans come home and feel that it is utterly impossible for their parents to have the least understanding of their spiritual struggles. It was not always like this. In former times the father was the one to whom a son could communicate and share his spiritual problems. But today, even in the family, we feel cut off at the deepest springs of life.
Every person learns the awful fact of this loneliness very early in life. Perhaps you know the short story about the little child who one day hears the wind in one of the trees in his backyard. The tree acquires for the child a mystery, an aliveness, and becomes very special for the child. Then that tree is blown over in a storm; the child is bewildered and hurt and frightened. But when he comes to his parents and asks why that tree was destroyed, what can they understand? So they smile at the strangeness of children and explain how many other trees there are in the backyard. The child finds that his inner bewilderment is not understood—somehow he is alone with it.
Everyday experience is full of incidents that starkly reveal the gap which separates us from one another. Take something as common as pain. One might think that because many have endured pain, we should understand each other’s agony. But the very opposite is true. No one can understand how your physical pain fits into the complex hopes and fears and frustration which torment your soul. This is the part of pain which needs understanding and encouragement, yet this is the very part where we are alone.
I find hospital calls to be the most difficult part of the ministry. What do you say to your sick friend? You may show the furrowed brow of deep sympathy and concern. This may be all right, but it is not enough. It does not clarify or strengthen the sufferer in his inner struggles. If anything seeing the grave expression on your face only intensifies his bewilderment and frustration and feeling of hopelessness. Or, instead, you may visit your sick friend with jokes and gaity, trying to cheer him up. This may also be good, but it too is not enough. You do not touch the trouble and despair that is perplexing his soul. The smile you give him is just on his lips; you do not put laughter in his heart. The loneliness of pain makes us think of the suffering of Job, his anguish at the injustice of it, and the utter failure of others to understand his indignation.
How we want to run from the terrible pressure of this loneliness! We like to hear voices near us—the radio, the telephone. We do not ask that they say anything to us, but we plead with them to distract us from our sense of being alone. We join clubs and chat about trivial external matters like the weather and sports. We sniff about for causes in the service to which we hope to be united with others. We have a gentleman’s agreement with each other. I agree to appear happy when I see you, to ask after your health, to seem concerned over your problems and amused at your jokes if—if you will do the same for me. So we try to build artificial bridges across the gap that separates us from one another, bridges made of such easy and faithless acts as the shaking of hands.
How we flee from God! How we seek to make a false god of our neighbor, a god who will flatter us and do our will! How we seek the applause and love of men, hoping to find security and salvation in their approving eyes!
The Lord God Almighty, He alone knows us, and our loneliness is like a goad by which He leads us to Himself.
I looked about me but there was no man who would bother
to know me. All refuge failed me; I had nowhere to turn . . .
But I poured out my suffering before the Lord; I showed Him my trouble.
(Psalm 142:4, 2; no translation match found)
For men can only know us from the outside, on the basis of appearances. God alone knows us from the inside. He made us as we are, and only He knows us as we are—knows us as we do not even know ourselves.
That is why there is no justice among men. How can any man judge you justly if he has no knowledge of you from the inside? To be known by other people is to be unjustly known—it is to be alone in the deepest
