My Loneliness Led Me to God

Simply writing the title makes me feel over-exposed.

Just now walking our dog, Hobbes, I found myself contemplating my lifetime need for God.

I felt extremely lonely as a child. Hard to believe in a loving household of a family of five with pets living in a small tract house with a single bathroom, sharing a bedroom with my brother. And we were part of a loving church and Christian school which shared our beliefs, values, and hopes. And I had so many friends in those places and later, high school and college.

But I had a secret about who I was so terrible I might as well have been abandoned alone on a lifeless asteroid, with little hope for rescue.

I was homosexual.

No “gay” then, no “same-gender loving people.” “Queer” and “faggot” and “dyke” and “fairy” were not words used with pride as they are by some today reclaiming them from those who use them pejoratively. “Homophile” was in use in the 1950s, but not in the circles I travelled.

At first, I thought I was the only one—at the time, a common experience among “my kind.”

Then, my “role models” were societal stereotypes and caricatures, sick and unhealthy, condemned and excommunicated.

On this morning’s walk, I found myself reviewing all the clues in my writings to my extreme loneliness. My understanding of my childhood baptism as a way of belonging to God and Jesus and my family forever. The occasional days when I was too lonely and depressed to go to school. My compassion for others who felt alone. The passion with which, as part of my high school choir, I sung our beloved principal’s favorite song, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”  My clinging to a college “best friend” and later, my first boyfriend. In a brief round of therapy in seminary, the identification of my “separation anxiety.” My most common “sexual” fantasy: waking up with a lifelong partner.  My appreciation of Alfred North Whitehead’s quote, “Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.” My gratitude for Henri Nouwen’s teaching how the spiritual life transforms loneliness into creative solitude. My receptiveness to process theologian Daniel Day William’s insight that we are less afraid of not being than we are of not belonging.

Sitting in a car with a close lifelong friend from childhood whose former partner was clearly dying of AIDS in the hospital before us, I asked why he hadn’t come out to me—a gay activist by then—earlier. “What difference would it have made?” he responded. “I would have felt less alone,” I answered. “You would have felt less alone,” I added.

I explained in my first book, Uncommon Calling, that as a youth, afraid of being condemned by either a minister or a therapist, God became my minister and therapist, with whom I had hours-long conversations. That marked the beginning of my interest in the contemplative life. Today I might describe the relationship as anamchara, “soul friend.”

My fear writing about this now is that some might write off God, or at least my own experience of God, as some sort of “imaginary friend” I’ve created to get me through rough times.

But aren’t those times that we exclaim “Please be with me, God!” the most authentic and least pretentious prayers? Reaching out to that which is greater, higher, deeper, and more complete makes sense as we realize our humble circumstances in this vast universe.

And it isn’t as if I did this alone. Thanks be to God for those in the Bible and in the church who discerned and learned, taught and practiced their faith, often in dire circumstances, and passed it along to all of us.

Now I know I’ve never walked alone.

Today’s post also appears on Believe Out Loud.

This Sunday, March 23, I will be speaking during the 11 a.m. worship of Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church here in Atlanta, imagining what a “lost gospel” from the Samaritan woman at the well might be like. I will also speak there on Easter Sunday, April 20, and Sunday, May 18.

Each Wednesday of Lent, I am providing links for the following six days, should you wish to use this blog as a Lenten resource for reflection.

Thursday:      Interrupted Lives   

Friday:            Wear Flowers in Your Hair

Saturday:       Spiritual Picassos

Sunday:          On the Threshold of the Church

Monday:         Thanking God Anyway

Tuesday:        Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

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Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Spiritual Yearnings

Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.

Forgive the alliteration, but I have come to understand that three primary spiritual yearnings are to belong, to believe, and to be loved.

Process theologian Daniel Day Williams wrote about belonging in his book, The Spirit and the Forms of Love:

…The fundamental human craving is to belong, to count in the community of being… If we begin here we can say that the root anxiety is that of “not-belonging,” of not counting. [Human beings] are not afraid of not existing nearly so much as they are afraid of not being wanted.

This confirms my own experience when I responded to an altar call in my Baptist church at the tender age of six or seven and was baptized. I did so because I wanted to belong to God and Jesus and my family forever.

Research of social scientists exploring the origins of religion reveals people who join a New Religious Movement (NRM) do so first of all because of a connection with someone in the group, a sense of belonging. 

The same researchers have discovered that belief is secondary in associating with an NRM. But I would say that to believe is to the head what to belong is to the heart. For the intellect, shared belief is a way of belonging.

But to belong and to believe is not enough. We yearn to be loved. We all know marriages and families and churches that are based more on belonging than on love—and we now label them more or less “dysfunctional.” This dynamic is most radically manifest in hate groups where belonging is based on a shared belief of who is to be feared and hated and excluded. Unfortunately, that has become a litmus test for belonging to some religious groups. 

That’s when a belief in yourself as a beloved child of God who belongs here is needed, one of the central messages of the Christian gospel. Daniel Day Williams wrote that sin can be “unbelief in ourselves”:

We betray our real self, with its struggling, its hopes and fears. We refuse to trust ourselves in our real relation to anything. We refuse to believe that life is good and worthy for us as we really are, that our small margin of freedom with all its risks makes the difference between fulfilling life and destroying it.

My spiritual mentor Henri Nouwen became known for an early book that describes the minister (every Christian) as The Wounded Healer. Yet later in life, he felt compelled to remind himself that “your true identity is as a child of God” in his journal The Inner Voice of Love, warning that people try to hook us in our wounds:

When you let your wounded self express itself in the form of apologies, arguments, or complaints—through which it cannot be truly heard—you will only grow frustrated and increasingly feel rejected. Claim the God in you, and let God speak words of forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation, words calling to obedience, radical commitment, and service.

People will constantly try to hook your wounded self. They will point out your needs, your character defects, your limitations and sins. That is how they attempt to dismiss what God, through you, is saying to them.

To paraphrase Williams, we are not as afraid of dying as we are afraid of being dismissed.

Join Chris for an online seminar open to the public, “Sexuality and Christianity,” Saturdays at noon ET, Dec. 3 & 17; Jan. 7, 14, 21, & 28. It will be largely conversational, based on readings for each session.