Coffee With Sister Vassa: THE POWER OF LONELINESS

Coffee With Sister Vassa

THE POWER OF LONELINESS

 

“Now from the sixth hour until the ninth hour there was darkness over all the land. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’ Some of those who stood there, when they heard that, said, ‘This Man is calling for Elijah!’ Immediately one of them ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine and put it on a reed, and offered it to Him to drink. The rest said, ‘Leave Him alone; let us see if Elijah will come to save Him.’ And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit.” (Mt 27: 45-50)

For many years I thought of loneliness as a poisonous state of mind, which one needs to avoid or fix somehow. But Christ’s loneliness on the Cross, which preceded His ultimate triumph over death, shows us how loneliness precedes new bursts of life and grace, when we allow ourselves to be led and bound and put on trial through it, on our cross-carrying journeys. 

Loneliness becomes for us a crucible for transformation, for a new freedom and new understanding of ourselves and others, when we let ourselves be alone before God’s silence. While our friends and others we may have previously relied on prove not reliable or not helpful, as many of those who stood around the Cross, God’s silence leads us to focus on or “listen” to His presence in our lives in a new way. We need not despair, because loneliness is God’s call to us, to take pause and re-focus, because He is renewing our sense of His purpose for us. If we hang in there, and I mean, literally “hang in there” on our cross, our loving God invariably leads us into new life and light and growth, through our loneliness. This is what I find to be true, anyway, nowadays when God leads me into loneliness, my old friend. “Hello darkness, my old friend,” I say, and listen in to the sound of silence. 

Happy feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, NC-friends! And Happy Church New Year, to those of us on the Older Calendar!