Why Isolation Doesn't Work

It is not good for man to be alone. As in warfare and most games of strategy, isolation often precedes defeat and death.

Man is born for community. The whole business of living a meaningful and enjoyable life—with support systems, community, self-respect, and being respected by others—has to be addressed. The day of the lone wolf, the solitary monk, the hermit seeking enlightenment in isolation is over. Healing is an act of communion.

The world only exists in your eyes, your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. Your difference doesn’t require walls for its guarantee. Your difference from every other person, the “unshared experience,” occurs every moment within the shared because of the uniqueness of your individual identity.

When one loves, one does not calculate. Rather than prevent us from being hurt, indirectness and dishonesty only heighten our isolation from what it means to be alive. We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master, and in relationship, we are at least not alone in the workshop.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Human connections are deeply nurtured in the field of shared story. We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full in the presence of another. We need people in our lives with whom we can be as open as possible. To have real conversations with people may seem like such a simple, obvious suggestion, but it involves courage and risk.

Pain’s beautiful humiliations make us naturally humble and force us to put aside the guise of pretense. In real pain we have no other choice but to learn to ask for help, and on a daily basis. Pain tells us we belong and cannot live forever alone or in isolation. True belonging has no prerequisites. Eventually, new perceptions and values will bring you naturally into constructive cocreation with others.

Truth cuts the shackles that bind us. It continues to release us from conflicts and miseries beyond reckoning; it banishes fear and isolation. Compassion automatically invites you to relate with people because you no longer regard them as a drain on your energy. For listening to the stories of others—not to their precautions or personal commandments—is a kind of water that breaks the fever of our isolation.

Our own destiny, in God, is impossible in pure isolation. Each one of us works out his own destiny in inseparable union with all those others with whom God has willed us to live. This connectedness calls us to spiritual awakening—to love. In the biblical book of John, a passage reminds us that “anyone who does not know love is still in death.

We are born in relationship, we are wounded in relationship, and we can be healed in relationship. In the shelter of each other, we live. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them. – Matthew 18:20 King James Version

Song accompaniment: Bakar, Hell N Back

Artwork: The Art of Seth