For combatting loneliness, it helps to learn the difference between aloneness and loneliness. Meditation and contemplation can teach us deep lessons of aloneness and solitude, being one with oneself and alone with oneself.
Another way to deal with loneliness is to realize that creation itself is our companion. People in relationships with animals–dogs, cats, birds, etc. know this. Not all our friends need to be two-legged ones. Trees can be our companions and especially at dark times in our lives. French artist Claude Baudelaire reminds us that “we walk through forests of physical things that are also spiritual things that look on us with affectionate looks.” Notice: forests, not just a single forest. Such abundance!
One of my favorite teachings about loneliness is this. Several years ago, an Australian theologian was giving a talk in Africa, that was being translated into Swahili. He paused after each sentence or two for the translator to speak. Ending his talk, he said, “the number one spiritual problem in Sydney today is loneliness.” The translator asked him to repeat the sentence, which he did. The translator huddled with several other Africans, came to the microphone, and said, “I am sorry, sir, but in our language there is no word for loneliness.”
Imagine that. No word for “loneliness.” What’s wrong with them? Or is something wrong with us and our modern culture that has been so pitifully anthropocentric for years? Has western culture actually ushered cosmic loneliness into human history?
What spiritual price have we paid for an anthropocentric society the past 500 years? Our ancestors did not feel loneliness because they did feel a connection to all beings. “All our relations,” the Lakota people pray in every ritual context. No species narcissism there.
Howard Thurman spoke of the price we pay when we cut ourselves off from the rest of nature. Man cannot long separate himself from nature without withering as a cut rose in a vase….It is but a single leap thus to regard nature as being so completely other than himself that he may exploit it, plunder it and rape it with impunity.
Another insight about loneliness comes from African spiritual teacher Malidoma Somé who reminds us that “there is no community without ritual.” That UK students and growing numbers of young Americans find little drawing them to the rituals Western religion offers up today is a statement on the failure of religion in our time. Rabbi Heschel talks about the “insipid” character of so much contemporary religion. Today’s version of religious ritual is so eye-oriented, so much about finding a page in a book, that it bores and fails to arouse the heart.
That is why, for the last 30 years, I have been involved in celebrating Cosmic Masses which attract worshippers of all ages and all traditions and none. It does so by drawing on post-modern art forms like DJ, VJ, rap and rave dancing. Community happens when ritual is alive. This is not a theory: It is a fact I have seen play out in every one of the 125 cosmic masses we have celebrated in cities around North America.
Thinking of the current loneliness of college students in the UK, I recall a Cosmic Mass we celebrated on campus at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where 1400 persons danced and prayed together in the large university ballroom.
Following a Cosmic Mass at an “Earth and Spirit Conference” that drew 1400 people to a large ballroom in a San Francisco hotel, three young men ages 18 to 20 approached me. They told me they had been attending rave dances every week for five years, but what we were looking for in rave, we found here tonight–deep prayer, community, joy, and something rave does not have—multiple generations dancing together.
Because the first chakra is about vibration, it is about connecting with all the atoms of the universe, since they are all vibrating. Dance does that—engaging the first chakra, it connects us to the sacred universe, the Cosmic Christ. We have in the Cosmic Mass a ritual that engages all our chakras.
To be continued.
To read the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video meditation, click HERE.
Banner image: Woman walking in nature with a dog. Photo by Daniel Frank on Unsplash
Queries for Contemplation
Have you learned the difference between aloneness/solitude and loneliness? Do you recognize that anthropocentrism that kills our relationship to a world larger than the human sets us up for loneliness? Do you recognize dull ritual as a cause of loneliness and its opposite, a celebration of community, a medicine for loneliness?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality, p. 38.
“The Cosmic Mass: Reinventing Worship and Religion,” in Confessions: The Making of a Post-Denominational Priest, pp. 363-383.
“Acedia Invites a Cosmic Loneliness,” Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society, pp. 197f.
One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths, pp. 240-243.
Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations, pp. 216ff.
“The Cosmic Christ—Redeemer of Worship,” in Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance, pp. 211-228.
“Ritual: Where the Great Work of the Universe and the Work of the People Come Together”, in The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood For Our Time, pp. 249-295.
5 thoughts on “Loneliness, Part II: Ways Spirituality Combats Loneliness”
This resonated with me because I am most happy when singing and dancing.
My dreams confirm this. I’m 76 and that’s a great joy- to dance with others!
Let’s get a cosmic mass organized here in Omaha, Nebraska!!
Hey Eli!
If you’d like to talk more about the potential of producing a Cosmic Mass in Omaha, please send an email to: orderofthesacredearth@gmail.com.
Warmly,
Skylar
Yes, anthropocentrism has had many forms in human history, especially in western civilization the last several centuries. Many of those forms have been closely related to the growth of our beliefs in duality and patriarchal values that have separated and spiritually unbalanced us from awareness of our sacred identities as cosmic spiritual beings interconnected and interdependent with one another, with Beautiful Sacred Mother Earth/Her living creatures/graceful abundance, and with-in All physical/nonphysical spiritual beings and dimensions of Our Co-Creation and evolving LOVING COSMOS… Fortunately there have been many mystics, saints, prophets, good people, and indigenous societies in Our past and present evolving human history the have kept Alive Our Connections with Our Living Loving SOURCE CO-CREATOR in LOVING DIVERSE ONENESS in the Sacred Spirit/Flow of the ETERNAL PRESENT MOMENT….
When I read about the Cosmic Mass in Boulder, “where 1400 persons danced and prayed together in the large university ballroom,” I briefly imagined someone—the likes of whom the world has never seen before—challenged to organize a bigger mass under a ceiling aptly numbered “XVI” featuring an augmented-reality version of the creation of the New World in a ballroom so large that “no-one has ever anything like it.” Phew, it was a nightmare!
More seriously, making these DMs my first reading of the day is a healthy breakfast that adds to the sense of connectedness provided by nature the luxury of connecting with like-minded people. In a poem titled “Correspondences,” Charles Baudelaire wrote: “Man passes there through forests of symbols Which look at him with understanding eyes.” [https://fleursdumal.org/poem/103]
I am grateful for the privilege I had to participate on a few occasions in collective rituals led by you, Matthew, in the 1990s. When I walk in Nature, I still often sing a song you taught us then, inspired by the Navajo tradition: “I see beauty before me, I see beauty behind me, I see beauty above me, I see beauty around me, you are so beautiful Ô God(dess).”