BLOG 4/13/2016. LONELINESS: FROM THE GARDEN OF EDEN TO iPHONES

BLOG 4/13/2016. LONELINESS: FROM THE GARDEN OF EDEN TO iPHONES

As an octogenarian I am continually fascinated, as I sit several times a week in my favorite coffee shop, at the proliferation of information age equipment in operation there. I’m looking at folk much younger than I who have on their iPhones more information than we had in my college library, and those iPhones are like appendages to their bodies. The problem comes however, in the studies that show that for all of their connectedness, and access to awesome resources, the information-age folk continue to be those with an endemic sense of loneliness. They are still those who, for all of their ostensible relational quests, have a very difficult time entering into fruitful interpersonal and emotional relationships of true intimacy.

This, admittedly, is not a new problem. A generation ago there was the best-selling book, The Lonely Crowd, or T. S. Eliot’s poem, The Wasteland, with its inhabitants of “hollow men, headpieces filled with straw.” … But to get to the root of it all, one goes back to that primordial word in the creation story/myth in Genesis in which God declares that “it is not good for man that he be alone,” and so made a complementary companion for him, so that initially humankind was intimately and joyously and transparently in harmony with both their creator God and with each other. Then, the explanatory tragic moment came when those first humans succumbed to the temptation that if they declared their autonomy, that they could be their own gods. And so it has been the impossible attrmpt to play god that has alienated them from one another, and from the God who created them for love and for true relationship both with each other and with God-self, i.e., we can’t both be god! (And we can question whether even God is god over us).

It is also true that such a quest for authentic and sensitive and intimate emotional relationships with others is still present in most normal men and women. They can be the most exciting and erudite persons, or the most wonderful contributors to the general welfare, i.e., artisans, scientists, innovators, clerks, IT wizards, etc. … and yet be desperately lonely, and awkward at relationships, and lonely when all is quiet and their iPhones are put aside.

What is worth pondering is that when God became incarnate in his broken creation, and with his design to inaugurate his New Creation/Kingdom, that a huge dimension of this was the reconciliation and restoration of true human community. Jesus came quite knowingly and sensitively in out-of-the-way places as teacher, healer, miracle worker, etc. … but he also knew that those observing and listening were formed by the culture of god-players what with all of the snarls and conflicts and frustrated dreams and brokenness of this age, and that it would take significant time to enable them to both know and understand who he was, to understand the implications for their own lives, and to be formed in what following him would  bring about. He knew that making disciples and forming them into new creation persons was not going to be a quickie operation. So what did he do? He invited a group of twelve to “come be with me.” He invested such significant time (over two years) with them that they they were formed into his image, and so into reconciled relationship, and the motivation to love one another as he had loved them. These loving reconciled relationships would be the foundation of his new humanity.

And this formation, this disciplemaking discipline, continued from the earliest days of the Christian community (after Pentecost) where we read that the thousands of new converts in Jerusalem not only were together in crowds for instruction, but were regularly together in homes, in koinonia (intimate, caring relationships), around common meals, and in the apostles’ teachings, and none considered his/her possessions their own, but mutually cared for each other.

The institutional church of today has lost that call out of loneliness, and that sense of koinonia, so that participation in many church institutions can be sterile experiences in religious loneliness. True discipleship has the blessing of calling us out of loneliness into love of others.

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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