The Piradian Null Device Company

Reflections on Loneliness, Solitude, and Henri J. M. Nouwen's Reaching Out

January 29, 2010

The late Henri Nouwen has become one of my favourite spiritual writers because he was fearless and soul-bearing in articulating the things about our basic human nature which we try to ignore and of which we are ashamed. His writings are so universal. I will leave his background check to you, but here is a snippet from his book Reaching Out:

Sitting in the subway, I am surrounded by silent people hidden behind their newspapers or staring away in the world of their own fantasies. Nobody speaks with a stranger, and a patrolling policeman keeps reminding me that people are not out to help each other. But when my eyes wander over the walls of the train covered with invitations to buy more or new products, I see young, beautiful people enjoying each other in a gentle embrace, playful men and women smiling at each other in fast sailboats, proud explorers on horseback encouraging each other to take brave risks, fearless children dancing on a sunny beach, and charming girls always ready to serve me in airplanes and ocean liners. While the subway train runs from one dark tunnel into the other and I am nervously aware where I keep my money, the words and images decorating my fearful world speak about love, gentleness, tenderness and about a joyful togetherness of spontaneous people....

The roots of loneliness are very deep and cannot be touched by optimistic advertisement, substitute love images or social togetherness. They find their food in the suspicion that there is no one who cares or offers love without conditions, and no place where we can be vulnerable without being used. The many small rejections of everyday—a sarcastic smile, a flippant remark, a brisk denial or a bitter silence—may all be quite innocent and hardly worth our attention if they did not constantly arouse our basic human fear of being left totally alone with "darkness... [as our] one companion left" (Psalm 88).

As I make my way through campus each day for the next 400 days, I see people all plugged in. If they're not talking on their cell phones, they're sending text messages. If they're not sending text messages, they're listening to their headphones. Just once I'd like to see what would happen if cell phones and iPods evaporated and people were forced to have a real conversation with the people adjacent to them. It might be chaotic at first, but soon it might remind us of our humanity. If your phone were taken away, would you be forced to have a real conversation (eye contact and everything)?

As for having a "smart" phone, I reject the idea outright. I want a smart phone like I want a pager and weekly electric shock therapy and a lobotomy. Nouwen writes about "community" so much it makes me want to vomit, but I have been absorbed in his books for too long, so it's not a fair criticism of him. Community is not a place where we have everything in common. It's a place where we have at least one thing in common: our common search for and attraction to the spirit of the universe.

What I most resent and appreciate about Nouwen is that he challenges me to think about the day-to-day minutia, why I do it, why it's important, and whether I'm taking enough time to smell the roses.

On Star Trek, the Romulan pistol weapon is called the "disruptor." Ironically, we carry many of these around in our daily lives... disruptors, just waiting to interrupt whatever we were doing and demand attention. When the phone rings, do we not give it an immediate anwer? When the text message arrives, does it not demand an immediate response? Do we not hover hawkishly over our email accounts? What would happen if we missed one? When was the last time there was a knock at your door and it wasn't someone delivering the mail or selling something?