COMMENTARY: The Cloud of Loneliness

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.) (UNDATED) Loneliness is like a cloud. You’re going along and suddenly become aware that the day doesn’t feel as bright. You discover the sun has gone behind a cloud. If […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

(UNDATED) Loneliness is like a cloud.


You’re going along and suddenly become aware that the day doesn’t feel as bright. You discover the sun has gone behind a cloud. If you’re lucky, you can see the far edge of the cloud. If not, you just wonder.

That cloud settles over me tonight as I take a walk after supper. My son has just been wounded by a friend. Kid stuff, but still hurtful and isolating. As I walk my loop, I see television screens glowing inside homes and not a soul out walking. I hear two voices: the dog that always barks at me, and a woman yelling at my dog. A runner draws near _ and turns her head deliberately away.

That’s it. For the entire loop, no contact. I think of how little contact I have in the course of a day. Lots of e-mail _ thank God for e-mail! _ and intense interactions in my small office, but otherwise, not much.

At least it doesn’t feel like much. A 20-second greeting at the coffee shop downstairs, 15 seconds at the gourmet food shop, professional courtesy from my “personal banker,” a cheerful wave from the elderly couple whom I pass every morning. Maybe that’s a lot, or what many consider enough.

I find it disconcerting. Some days I blame myself for having moved so much. Other days I suspect a whole lot of us live beneath this cloud, maybe because we are new in town, but also because people don’t interact much, and when we do interact, connections tend to be shallow.

I share this with you, not in a bid for sympathy, but as one glimpse of a common condition. The non-lonely need to know there are strangers in their midst. The lonely need to know they aren’t alone.

It’s a dilemma in many ways, but two come to mind: One is the political cost of isolation.

Here we are in an election year, with dull candidates but important decisions to make. How can we make them wisely, with any motivation beyond self-interest, when we are so isolated from one another and so shallow in the commitments that we do have?


Candidates speak grandly of “family values” and “faith-based services,” as if we just needed to open the curtains and discover a garden of goodness blossoming in our midst.

Don’t they know how isolated most families are _ living indoor lives, shopper lives, survival lives, with values we don’t begin to know? Not bad values, necessarily, but far more diverse and unseen than our public hankering for the mythical 1950s might suggest.

Don’t they know how shallow most religious communities are, with sporadic interactions, clubby atmospheres, bitter divisions, revolving-door memberships, and a few gate-keepers and pastors who are overwhelmed by the neediness of the lonely? How could we possibly give to our environments what we ourselves don’t have, namely, community, oneness, connection, a depth of mutuality?

The politicians are deploying code language, of course, using words that suggest moral uprightness and religious conviction without actually saying anything. Fine for sound bites, but one more source of isolation for families who wish they were part of something larger than their nests.

The second dilemma has to do with our understanding of God. In the Scriptures, God is portrayed in a profoundly communal context. They had tribes of long-standing, villages of deep familiarity, stories told from generation to generation _ in other words, nothing like the isolated, atomized world of today.

Jesus came to be known through charting a new course, behaving differently from his neighbors, stepping outside the patterns they would have expected from a child of Joseph and Mary. That story makes no sense if one doesn’t know Joseph and Mary, or the patterns, or the context.


This year I will teach a Sunday School class, the aim of which will be to help a few people know each other more deeply. That seems a small aim. It has nothing to do with tradition or doctrine. I have just come to believe that, for us to do anything meaningful as citizens and believers, the cloud of isolation must be lifted, if only for an hour.

DEA END EHRICH

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!