Spending Time Alone Well

As you probably have, I’ve been thinking a lot about loneliness. Human beings, according to Genesis 2, were born in isolation. In this story of creation, God makes Adam from the dust of the ground. Literally, the Hebrew says God formed man from the earth. The image is that of a potter with clay (see also Jeremiah 18). This stands in stark relief next to God’s method of creation in Genesis 1, where the sovereign Lord of all creation speaks and things happen. (Some people call this the Biblical “Big Bang” where God speaks creatively in the silence and BANG! things start moving, and chaos becomes order). In Genesis 2, God comes down and molds a man from the earth (‘adam from ‘adamah) and breathes life into him and he becomes a “living being.” And the man is alone.

In verse 18, God says it is not good that the man should be alone, and eventually creates a woman to have partnership with the man. But there is a time where the man is alone, and even the introduction of the woman creates only the smallest community for the man. Marriage is wonderful, but as many of us are going to learn in the next few weeks, even having one person with whom you spend most of your time is not exactly what we are created for. But there is a time to be alone, isolated, or physically and “socially” distant from the communities to which we belong. In the Christian tradition, the discipline of distancing yourself from others is called solitude. Often people devote themselves to solitude for a time in order to draw closer to God. In his important book Life Together, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “Those who take refuge in community while fleeing from themselves are misusing it to indulge in empty talk and distraction, no matter how spiritual this idle talk and distraction may appear.” Over the next few weeks, as we distance ourselves from one another and as we learn to have community with one another in new and less physical ways, I think we have an invitation to draw near to God who sees through our spiritual talk, to our very hearts. I think we fear being alone because when we are alone with God, we can no longer keep up the masks that we put up in our communities. If we are alone in our thoughts, we necessarily follow them through to their natural conclusions and we recognize ourselves for the shallow, weak, hypocritical creatures we can be. We might ask God to make us more than this, and indeed God might use this time to grow us, but we also need to be prepared to hear our maker say, “you are what you are, at least now you know; but my strength is made perfect in weakness” (see 2 Corinthians 12:8-10). So our invitation, right now, is to allow God to use this time of social distancing to help us to be honest with ourselves. Even when Adam is alone in the garden, God gives him a blessing: “every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food” (Genesis 2:9). This is how we grow. We focus on what is beautiful and what nourishes us. Draw near to God. Use this opportunity to spend more time in Scripture and in prayer. Call a friend you may have lost touch with over the years, whose conversation you find life-giving. Read good books. If we spend this time intentionally, we can come back to our life together nourished and ready to take on whatever challenges “business as usual” will bring whenever this time of social distancing is over.