Lonliness, a Homily by the Rev. Charles James Cook, Class of 1974 and Professor of Pastoral Theology, delivered on August 26, 2005, during New Student Orientation, in Christ Chapel

Jesus' personal struggle in the garden is, at the heart of it, one of loneliness. Several times, he returns to his friends, his own followers, to make a simple request -- might they stay awake to share this difficult moment with him? They do not, and Jesus is left to face the darkness and difficulty on his own. No one can do this for him.

There is, in all pastoral leadership of any depth and significance, a quality of loneliness. We belong, yet not quite in the same way as others -- and perhaps there are those moments, similar to what Jesus must have been feeling in that darkest of hours, when we might even say, "I was there for them in crisis; but they are not here for me."

But we all know that loneliness, grounded in solitude, can provide as much opportunity as difficulty. There were times that Jesus, as pastoral leader, prophet, and teacher, intentionally chose such a condition. For example, in Mark, just before the great miracle, the feeding of the multitudes, we learn that Jesus went to what the evangelist describes as a "lonely place."

Frederick Buechner: "That you can be lonely in a crowd, maybe especially there, is readily observable. You can also be lonely with your oldest friends, or your family, even with the person you love most in the world. To be lonely is to be aware of an emptiness that takes more than people to fill. It is to sense that something is missing which you cannot name [but must seek]." Buechner knows that there is an element of mystery, even holiness, to such an experience.

Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker, a remarkable community, a movement, if you will, that offers Christ's "works of mercy" for the poor, the homeless, and the lost in this life -- seemed to identify for herself just how to fill that emptiness, that missing and essential part of our existence as human beings.

Her biographer wrote this about her: "All of us, she believed, have a yearning for love. Deep down, buried beneath the clutter of our days, there was in every person the longing for community. But there was a loneliness that persisted even in the midst of others, the essential isolation that belonged to any commitment or vocation. There was a kind of loneliness to which Christ invited his friends. Yet, of this 'long loneliness' she wrote in the words of Mary Ward, a seventeenth century English nun, 'The pain is very great, but very durable, because he who lays on the burden also carries it.'" Thus, when she wrote her own autobiography, she gave it the title -- The Long Loneliness. It was her own experience of ministry and she traveled that road gladly.

There are two expressions of loneliness in pastoral leadership that I particularly find in our own time. The first is that I call the loneliness of belonging, and yet, set apart. Marilynne Robinson describes such an experience in her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gilead. It is the story of an elderly pastor, married late in life, who is writing a letter to his young son, who will probably read it some day, long after his father's death. In one section of the letter, the Reverend John Ames makes this observation:

"I really can't tell what's beautiful anymore. I passed two young fellows on the street the other day. I know who they are, they work at the garage. They're not churchgoing, either one of them, just decent rascally young fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They're always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don't know why they don't catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent.

"When they saw me coming, of course the joking stopped, but I could see they were still laughing to themselves, thinking what the old preacher almost heard them say.

"I felt like telling them, I appreciate a joke as much as anybody. There have been many occasions in my life when I have wanted to say that. But it's not a thing people are willing to accept. They want you to be a little bit apart. I felt like saying, I'm a dying man, and I won't have so many more occasions to laugh, in this world at least. But that would just make them serious and polite, I suppose. I'm keeping my condition a secret as long as I can. For a dying man I feel pretty good, and that is a blessing. Of course your mother knows about it. She said if I feel good, maybe the doctor is wrong. But at my age there's a limit to how wrong he can be.

"That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either."

In the pastoral ministry, we feel and know all too well the tension in such an account…to choose and respond to a vocation that both includes the joy of belonging and the mysterious loneliness of feeling set apart. But it is sufficient, because the one who lays on the burden, also carries it.

There is the loneliness in pastoral leadership of proclaiming the Gospel. This is particularly true in the culture that seems less and less inclined to be shaped by defining commitments, stories, and traditions. The claim of the Gospel demands and invites sacrifice, service, and living as if another life might be just as important as one's own. It is a Gospel that engages the depth of life -- including loss -- rather than skimming the surface, promising entertaining and easy solutions.

In Graham Greene's wonderful novel, Monsignor Quixote, the story of a not-so-talented, but faithful, priest -- there is a moment in which the protagonist is awakened from a terrible dream:

"He had dreamt that Christ had been saved from the Cross by the legion of angels to which on an earlier occasion the Devil had told Him that He could appeal. So there was no final agony, no heavy stone which had to be rolled away, no discovery of an empty tomb. Father Quixote stood there watching on Golgotha as Christ stepped down from the Cross triumphant and acclaimed. The Roman soldiers, even the Centurion, knelt in His honor, and the people of Jerusalem poured up the hill to worship Him. The disciples clustered happily around. His mother smiled through her tears of joy. There was no ambiguity, no room for doubt and no room for faith at all. The whole world knew with certainty that Christ was the Son of God.

"It was only a dream, of course it was only a dream, but nonetheless Father Quixote had felt on waking the chill of despair felt by a man who realizes suddenly that he has taken up a profession which is of use to no one, who must continue to live in a kind of Saharan desert without doubt or faith, where everyone is certain that the same belief is true. He had found himself whispering, 'God save me from such a belief.' then he heard the Mayor turn restlessly on the bed beside him, and he added without thought, 'Save him too from belief,' and only then he fell asleep again."

Yes, with Dorothy Day, and so many others, we accept this call to pastoral leadership -- and begin the pilgrimage of what might be called the long loneliness. But it is possible because the one who lays it on also bears it. At the conclusion of her autobiography, Dorothy Day wrote these words:

"We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know him in the breaking of the bread, and we know each other in the breaking of the bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with the crust, where there is companionship. We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community."

May it be so for us, in this moment and in this place.