Joy Is Never Alone

 This hairy year I have, if I may be so bold, faced the two greatest fears known to man, and I daresay much of the world has had to do the same. 

... I promise this is a happy one with a hopeful seed.

On the 29th of March, as the residential campus sat down to Sunday evening roast dinner, our bright convivium was aggressively invaded by the rude announcement that our university was transitioning online. The word jumped about like a germ and the sober lenten night exploded like a glass as we ourselves exploded into frenzy and fear. We all talked nervously and thought it over and, one by one, came to a solemn decision. The next morning, campus was much quieter. In the cold dead calm, we emerged in eerie escorts only to stare with hazy eyes as another car drove out the gate and turned into nowhere. 

The number rotted till only 14 remained. I was one of the survivors.

The rest of the semester I sunk down in my dorm and festered. Classes were on a screen, hardly human exercises: souls can hardly be squashed into pixels. Even in the rare and privileged position of being able to encounter others on Campus, I only really joined them for mealtimes. 

So often, I was alone. 

This is the first fear: cultivated in the soul from that first cold time we look for our mother's warm face and find nothing. What a chill, a sinking chill, to seek and not find, to stare out naked upon the naked universe and feel only ice and dark. Crying out and hearing no answer but an echo. I used to think this a romantic idea, but I know better now. Just imagine: sit down in the quiet and let it extend out and out forever. Imagine that every single person on this planet disappeared and left you behind, just like once happened for a horrid second in the shopping center letting go of your mother's hand, or diving down in the water and taking a moment too long to break the surface. Imagine that: alone, cold, you yourself the whole universe.

Well, in my closed drab little dorm box, when the darkness stagnated deep in folds over everything and the wide winter night leaked vilely through the window in wet dribbles, I felt that a bit. Loneliness is the worst disease, Mother Teresa apparently would say, and it seeps deep in the bones, killing the heart even while it yet beats. The true pandemic in any age.

Hold on, perhaps we should find something to lighten our hearts. I don't know about you but I cannot stand too much reality at once.

Well ... Merry Christmas! I pray you are sharing it.

Anyhow, blown south by the wind, next semester I found myself part of a volunteer mission team for the Immaculata community down in Tassie. How lonely sits the south island, and how cold! After four weeks of isolation I crashed into intense mission life with 17 brothers and sisters, emerging from my quiet little box of control into the glorious commotion of community. Humans! Ah! How mysterious, ineffable, unmanageable, uncontrollable, loud, smelly, and oh so infinitely lovable! How they usher the unexpected, accomplish the impossible, demand compromise; itch and rub you until you're frayed bare of all your flimsy covers; polish and sharpen you into an ornament of beauty or a weapon of virtue. How they teach you to feel, to hurt, daily die and well, in short, to love.

So this here is the second great fear: fear of love, fear of belonging.

In a world composed of billions of Me's! convinced that their particular Me! is the centre of the universe (consider MeBank's adds for an apt image), how it hurts to belong. We are hopelessly dependent, but how we loath to accept. Even the clothes you're wearing (yes, I make a bold assumption here: but I do hope you are wearing clothes!) were made by poor hands in some little corner of the world, without which you would be little a bit cooler. Even the very thoughts in your heads, the language it takes, echo out of a deep deep tradition, a tower of thoughts below us! We stand upon foundations deeper and broader than we could possibly imagine and are branches of a tree taller and prouder than any bold monument of stars. Don't be that silly twig that tries to jump ship and grow its own fruit. In a year where a disease has brought nations convincingly to their knees in days, we have been shown our weakness, our absolute dependency. And how good! The lie is that "You are all you need; you can make it on your own if your hard enough." But we were made for nothing if not to belong. As we fear covenant, commitment, sacrifice, service, the more we choke any seed of peace. You will rage in a pithy blaze and burn yourselves, but not the tree. Alone in the outer dark, you will be afraid ... forever.

So I found two fears plaguing me, warring to claim me for two very different ends. What piece of work must be such a walking contradiction? Fleeing to what he fears? Surely one must self-destruct before he learns to walk, crawling at once to his mother and away! But of course, we do know the answer. Children have not yet forgotten it (although I worry they will: it seems some prefer their iPads to their siblings and parents). But children are generally best to ask for the truth, and they simply know: of these two fears, one is a terror, and the other an ecstacy.

For just as out of the long labour breaks a cosmic smile on a mother's face as she shines down on her bubba, so too, through that impossible trial called family is forged the most triumphant and impenetrable of joys. It is in giving that we receive; in emptying we are filled. Indeed, I once heard a philosophical explanation for why in looking away from the self and giving away ourselves that our very being increases, like we so often suggest when we talk of hearts growing and flowing with bubbling streams. I don't think I have seen more potent joy, or a finer miracle, than family done right. Indeed, now I think of it, I don't think I have ever experienced joy by myself. Happiness perhaps, but joy is always shared.

No, it is not good that we should be alone, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. Even when we seek solitude (as we absolutely should), we do not desire to be alone. Mother Teresa soaked in solitude and long slow hours of prayer not to be alone, not by any means. Mother Teresa, I'm sure, wanted nothing less than to be with herself. Quite the opposite. Everything in her was orientated to the other. She had nothing for herself. No! It is never healthy to desire to be alone, incurvatus in se, but we long for solitude: to be alone with the Alone. To climb the mountain and come face to face with God. To be with Mary and Joseph, alone together with God in a manger in a cave in midnight stillness.

"In the silence of the heart, God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you." St. Mother Teresa

In short, two fears wrangle and wrestle the human heart: the fear of hell and the fear of heaven.