When I was in my thirties and my children were in grade school, I attended Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. My commute to the seminary was one and half hours and because my children were young, I worked to fit a full-time schedule of classes into two days. This meant that after packing back packs and lunches and lining up clothes, shoes, hats, and coats, I left my house in the very early morning and arrived home around ten thirty at night.
Exhausted in every way possible, I would drive into the small town of Ligonier, Pennsylvania. The town was deserted at that time of night, and as I made my way to my house, I would drive past Covenant Presbyterian, a beautiful old stone church. On the side of the church facing the road is a large round stained-glass window depicting Jesus praying in the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus is sitting on the ground, his hands stretched out, folded, and resting on a rock, and his face is pleadingly looking toward the sky. This window is backlit at night and at the end of my very long and demanding day, the sight of that window would reach right into my heart and the loneliness within me would find communion with the loneliness of Jesus.
I am well acquainted with loneliness. I have never lived in somebody else’s shoes, so while I suspect that I am more often aware of loneliness than others, I do not know if that is true. What I do know is that throughout my life, I have been familiar with loneliness. I don’t really know what lies at the root of my loneliness, but it has more to do with an inability to find communion in the depths of my being than it has to do with numbers. I think that maybe the emotional abuse I suffered from my mother and the deep wound of needing and not receiving her love, led me to become more keenly aware of the loneliness that surrounds all of us. I became sensitive to lonely feelings, lonely places, and lonely pursuits. That sensitivity has never left me and so feeling lonely is a familiar experience for me.
While it may be true that my early life experiences made me sensitive to loneliness, loneliness is an aspect of every person’s life. All of us are born alone, all of us die alone, and all of us visit many lonely spaces and places along the way. The most important gift loneliness offers is awareness of the deep ravine of emptiness that lies within us, a hole we cannot fill, a void that urges us to reach beyond ourselves, to cry out to God, to pray. Loneliness tells the truth about the basic poverty inherent in our human condition.
We may be able to repress our feelings of loneliness for a time, but ultimately, a time will come when we cannot escape our inherent loneliness. When this time comes, Jesus praying in the garden of Gethsemane offers us a way to face our stark, lonely moments.
The grace Jesus experiences on the Mount of Olives is not a warm and comforting grace. It is harsh.
In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground.
Luke 22:44
There are times of loneliness that cannot be converted to moments of warm and loving presence. There are times when loneliness is stark, oppressive, and harsh and our faith does not transform these moments, does not make them pleasant, does not prevent us from suffering failure, endings, and death. The lesson Jesus teaches us is not that a life of prayer will prevent us from experiencing loneliness. The lesson is something deeper, more difficult to articulate.
When I remember my lonely car rides home from the seminary and my encounter with the stained-glass image of Jesus praying in the garden of Gethsemane, it is not Jesus’s example of prayer or his teaching that reached into my heart. What that image communicated was the deep communion between my loneliness and the loneliness of Jesus. What struck me was that Jesus was acquainted with loneliness. Jesus understood the loneliness I often experience, understood it better than I do. I do not have to find a way to escape that loneliness in order to find God. Rather, God is with me in those moments of loneliness and my communion with God runs deeper and wider than any of the turbulent feelings that are stirred up in me through the circumstances of my life.
I will never know for sure, but I think it is possible that the solitude I experienced on those lonely car rides home from the seminary may have been as formative as any academic class I attended. Furthermore, my sensitivity to loneliness awakened by my mother’s inability to love may have cultivated the space within me that is most receptive to grace, the space that responds without thinking, the space that recognizes a kinship between Jesus’s loneliness in the garden of Gethsemane and my own.
Thank you, Patty, for sharing your experience of loneliness and the grace that has come with and in it. Your thoughts prompted me to reflect more deeply about the lonely spaces of my own life and to consider how I’ve met God in them. The image of the stained glass window of Jesus in the Garden, still on vigil late at night in the deserted streets of Ligonier (with one exception–you) , is powerful. His solidarity with us in our suffering continues, making it possible for us to find rest with him in his struggle.
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Thank you so much!
Thank you Kimberly! You description of Jesus still on vigil late at night in deserted Ligonier is moving!