Loneliness (Shoulds & Coulds, wk 3)

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Against the backdrop of constant discussion of authoritarianism, free speech and political violence, Vince traces the way late modern culture can lead us toward a lonely competition tormented by coulds, or it can lead us toward deep experiences of consolation with others that make life worth living. How do we help point things toward the latter?

SPEAKER NOTES

Loneliness (Shoulds & Coulds, wk 3)

Intro

Against our social backdrop this week with constant discussion of authoritarianism and free speech and political violence, the encouragement I want to begin with this morning (the same I ended with last Sunday) might seem quaint, too small potatoes.

The encouragement is to, best we can, try to remain open, call-able, interrupt-able for those moments when we feel a pull, a lure into interpersonal connection with another — text that person, call that person, go say hi to that person, ask a question, introduce yourself, respond to that empathetic impulse, to that impression that stays in your mind or that you feel in your body.

I’m going to push hard that, small though this may seem, it is incredibly important for our moment. It is Jesus’ description of the Rule of God beginning as a tiny mustard seed yet growing into a plant that provides shelter and shade.

I’ve been taught to regard these calls, these invitations we perceive within us as God guiding us, speaking to us — God is not a puppet master up in the sky; God is a Relational, Universal Spirit, present to all in the flow of our lives, luring, inviting, calling us into more and more and more relationship.

Anything good or beautiful or just happens through relationship.

It is the isolated, the egotistical, the self-obsessed that threaten our social fabric right now, right?

Oh, do we need more open-ness and call-ability — more space and modeling and permission for people to respond to the divine pull toward interpersonal connection — that births relationship.

(PAUSE)

If we can set aside all the social evidence around us negatively demonstrating this, I wonder if you can direct your attention to the evidence in your own life positively demonstrating this? Those experiences that remind you: Yes! Relationship is what it’s all about.

In my experience, it’s a really deep conversation followed by laughter to break the tension of having gone so deep. Do you know what I mean? We can’t necessarily live our entire lives at such depths; we’d like explode or something. But without regular visits to the depths, we just give in to a flat emptiness. So we long for this, instinctively. It’s what makes us humans made in the image of a relational God.

(PAUSE)

All month, we’ve been talking about what makes such a beautiful disposition so difficult and elusive for people living inside the culture of late modern city life.

• Yes, it often begins with the events, the crises, the social discussions all around us.
• But what is it about the way we are formed at the deepest level today that we experience all those happenings in a way that erodes our relationality, that makes life not beautiful, but alienating?

Our shorthand for this has been: the torment of shoulds and coulds.

• Feeling kept down by external shoulds that whip us to conform to a role, fit into a box.
• And feeling overwhelmed by internal coulds, where we whip ourselves to be this kind of person, do these kind of things.

Crises around us aren’t just heavy because they’re heavy, they’re extra heavy because they all seem to poke at things we should be doing or saying, or things we could be doing or saying.

The swirl of external shoulds and internal coulds produce a baseline noise floor in life. No wonder it is so hard to be open, call-able, interrupt-able. Our heads are down. Our faces are stiff. Our minds are occupied.

Our lives and the world are not things that might call to us with the voice of God; our lives and the world are points of contention and aggression; our lives are obstacles to be controlled and overcome as fast and efficiently as possible; our world is a news feed to be kept up with at all costs and managed with “takes” — What’s your “take” on this? What’s your “take” on that?

Constant noise.

Digging further though, we’ve identified how coulds are more pernicious than shoulds.

Today, in the 2020s, we have thankfully built a great deal of awareness about the torment of shoulds — which is great!

• We rightly see more readily than ever today the shoulds that oppressively restrict those of us for whom parts of our identities are marginalized in society, and we demand freedom for all. Amen!
• I’ve mentioned my kids' bookshelf: The moral of the story of nearly every children’s book we own is something like: you can be your true self. That’s great!
• In the last 40 years, therapy has become increasingly less taboo, helping so many people address themselves and affirm themselves, so they can break free from shoulds, and tryyyy defyyyying gravity. So great!

AND YET, precisely because we’ve raised such awareness of shoulds, we have a tendency to over-diagnose all of modern life’s heaviness as should problems needing freedom for the self.

• And, as an unintended consequence, we inflame could problems.
• Because could problems don’t need more freedom; they are sort of the result of too much freedom!
• It’s amazing to be freed to be our truest selves.
• But when I could always be working smarter to be my truer self, or could always be vacationing better to be my truer self, or could always be optimizing my body better to be my truer self, or could always be parenting better or processing my emotional wounds better to be my truer self, or could always be responding better to the events and crises and social discussions around me like those other people who seem so much more true to themselves — then all that freedom is recoiling on me, burying me, hardening me, closing me off.

And so it is especially the torment of coulds behind the difficulty and elusive-ness of maintaining that disposition of openness, call-ability, interrupt-ability we long for.

Today

If you take one thing from this series, take this:

• This is a societal problem. Not a problem with any individual alone.
• The most insidious thing about what I've just described is that individuals carry all the weight of the world on their shoulders.
• And when that happens, it means... - First, unjust and broken status quo systems that perpetuate this remain un-critiqued because we’re yelling ourselves hoarse critiquing individuals. - And second, and this is what I want to zoom in on for the rest of today: Everyone feels lonely, but embarrassed to admit it because they think they’re the only one… which is even more lonely. - Our culture is in what has been called a loneliness epidemic. slide off

Anecdote

If we are able to set aside for a moment our matters in the public square, let me also help us consider the intensely personal in this.

I remember years ago some friends of Keziah and mine had a miscarriage. We offered several ways we might come and be with them, clean their place, just sit, or even lead a little memorial service with just the four of us. They weren’t part of any faith community, so we were the closest thing they had to that.

Their responses to us were that they were so grateful and that they felt really loved, but then they’d turn us down saying something like “we don’t have anything to eat” or “the place is such a mess because we’ve been such a mess”, or “we like the idea of a memorial service, but we’re just not sure what we’d say and we don't want it to be weird or awkward”.

And we’d assure them: please don’t worry about any of that. We’ll bring food! We don’t need you to host us; we want to come and clean for you! And you don’t need to say anything. We want to serve you!

But going back and forth for a while, at some point they just never got back to us.

Eventually I saw them post on social media about it. And people were of course so kind and supportive, which I was glad for them to receive.

But, overall, I was left feeling sad that this experience for them that was so sorrowful and significant ended up only ever memorialized as a social media post — nestled between funny viral videos and rambling political screeds. It felt lonely. my friends deserved more.

Happiness and sorrow

I wonder if you can see some of the societal realities of modern life we’ve been talking about this month contributing to what happened to my friends in their sorrow?

We could go in lots of directions here. But one I want to point to is that:

• In a culture that preaches freedom from the shackles of shoulds and revels in the promise of coulds, one of the biggest burdens our unrestricted selves end up feeling is the drive to achieve happiness.
• So when you’re not happy, and especially when you’re in a season of sorrow, you feel something akin to shame — - like you need to hide that sorrow because you wouldn’t want to be a burden on others, - or if not hide it then at least you need to present it in a carefully-curated way, so you can feel like you didn’t hold it in, but also still didn’t burden anyone else.
• With the unprecedented ease and reach of sharing via social media we have today, it can seem like we’re more vulnerable or open about sorrow than ever before in the 2020s.
• But are we really? Or is this just another reflection of modern life forming us to experience our world and our lives as points of contention, that we must subdue and control.
• Have we been formed to try to subdue and control even our sorrow? Yes.
• It’s embarrassing, uncomfortable, stressful to just put all our sorrow out there in some uncontrolled environment, with other people — What if we can't keep it together? Or, again, what if they feel burdened?
• It's better to try to control the situation, we think. A social media post may be a bit lonely, but it feels safer.

Romans 3:28

My mind goes back to our Bible Study grounding this series.

• From the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans…

  For we maintain that a person is justified by [the faithfulness of God] apart from works of the law.

• Reinterpreting this for today’s society tormented by coulds, we’ve re-phrased it:

  For we maintain that a person experiences “okayness” by [the faithfulness of God], apart from the compulsion to prove themself to themself.

• This is meant to communicate relief from the torment of the coulds — it is God’s faithfulness that is on the line, not yours! And God is faithful, so rest in okayness.

• However, when we’ve been formed to subdue and control life as much as possible, even our sorrow, it can feel like there is just as much risk as there is relief entailed in the promise of receiving okayness as a gift from outside us (from God or from someone carrying out the work of God), rather than the familiarity of trying to prove ourselves to ourselves.

• And so we make a home inside an anxious loneliness. In all cases this is sad; in a handful it can even be dangerous. slide off

Authenticity and recognition

To help us brave the risk of experiencing okayness through relationship, and feel the relief of that, I want to bring in one more piece of the puzzle that is our society tormented by coulds, by proving ourselves to ourselves — as explained by another of the big social theorists I often bring us to, because I feel so helped by them.

This week let’s learn from philosopher Charles Taylor…

One of Taylor’s big ideas is that the highest pursuit of our society is authenticity.

• Which is defined as the opposite of being a conformist or a poser (freed from shoulds, we might say)
• When he first articulated this in the 1990s, Taylor was very optimistic about authenticity, - which went against the grain among many of his peers in the academy. - This was the era of NWA and Public Enemy in hip-hop and Nirvana and Pearl Jam in rock, - and the powers that be at the time called these new expressions of popular culture “hedonistic” — - utterly devoid of morals or ethics in their pursuit of individual pleasure.
• Taylor, however, saw these new expressions as, yes, a new journey further into individualism never before seen, BUT, he argued, they DO have ethics! - They have the ethics of authenticity, of being true to oneself. - Of being skeptical of sell-outs. - This is a moral vision! It’s just different than the generations prior.
• And what is the primary ethic if authenticity is our highest pursuit? - Recognition. - The height of immorality in our culture is to refuse to recognize another’s authenticity. - That is a powerful moral center!
• So Taylor is right; this is not pleasure-focused hedonism. - Authenticity’s ethic of recognition animates, for example, an insistence on inclusion, regardless of someone’s racial or ethnic identity, or someone’s gender identity or sexual orientation. - It says: respectful, receptive, consoling space must be made for all to share their personal experiences, needs, and best visions of the good life. That’s beautiful! - That’s behind a good deal of the righteous anger many of us feel right now in our public square.
• However, here’s the challenge… - This same demand for recognition that can support a community of authentic sharers and listeners can conversely devolve into a lonely competition, - when absorbed by a produce-and-consume capitalism where meaning is only looked for in work and purchases, - when leveraged by cynical people in power, - when attention becomes dictated by algorithms designed to prey upon our most base individual and group psychological motives, delivering message after message of how much more authentic we could be.
• This is another way we can tell the origin story of the torment of coulds - when the ethical demand of recognition is thrown into a blender with things like an obsession with speed and growth, and front facing cameras on smartphones… it’s no longer an ethic leading to consolation. - Now recognition becomes a metrics game, a competitive contact sport — how many likes? how many reactions? how many comments? - It could always be more. - We’ve got to maximize our reach. - We’ve got to craft and perform our authenticity so that we put out to the world only our most recognition-winning selves. - And so we get the lonely drive to achieve happiness and curate our sorrow. (Ironically, that’s not very authentic anymore.) - And authoritarianism and political violence gain a foot hold, claiming to offer solutions to those fed up with that game. - Our high value on authenticity, one of the best things about our culture, can simultaneously be one of the worst things about our culture.

Consolation, not competition

So my encouragement to us all inside our culture’s pursuit of authenticity is to think: Consolation, not competition.

Embrace authenticity for all its ability to facilitate deep connection and open sharing of personal experience and convictions, AND resist authenticity for all its pull toward a lonely, competitive culture, that leaves the door open for authoritarianism and political violence.

It cuts both ways: consolation and competition. So we have to be discerning.

Our culture, like every culture, is a mixed bag of inspiring and challenging. slide off

(PAUSE)

For the sake of our community’s effort toward consolation, not competition, let me speak two things over us:

• Those who currently feel lonely in your life, remember: your sorrow is not an embarrassment you need to apologize for. - Your sorrow is not a contagion. - Your sorrow is not a burden on others that you have to manage. - There are complex cultural forces at work convincing you of this. - Part of the role of a church in the 21st century is to save you from that, to bring you consolation from that. - I want Brown Line Church to be committed to saving people from this.
• Those who don’t currently feel as lonely in your life, remember: leadership is being awkward so others don’t have to. - Everyone feels a little bit insecure and a little bit awkward when it comes to longing for consolation, - And the best way through that is people willing to go first, willing to lead, just going for it. - Cutting the tension, asking the deeper question, saying: “I’ll be there at 6 with some dinner for you”, offering to pray, right now, out loud. - It can be awkward, yes, but awkwardness is not our enemy. Loneliness is our enemy!

This is one of the core values of our church: presence in suffering and sorrow.

• We do not run from sorrow because it’s uncomfortable.
• We do not explain away sorrow as mysteriously God’s will.
• We, like Jesus, hold sorrow. - Sometimes not saying anything at all and just listening. - Sometimes painting a picture of a better God, the fellow sufferer who understands. - Sometimes praying. Sometimes not. - Always being present.

Prayer

And so, again, I want to end with the invitation to listen, to practice a disposition of call-ability.

• In the belief that God, the Spirit present to all, is actively in the business of connecting people interpersonally.
• Because we are in a loneliness epidemic.
• And there are serious individual and political consequences to this.

Pray with me…

• To whom are you calling us God? To console. To be present with.
• Speak to us in our minds and our bodily sensations…
• May the experience of perceiving your calls reorient our relationships to the world, to our lives.
• May that liberate us to loosen our tight, controlling grip.
• May we feel liberated by the tethers of relationships with others, of being bound to others — the liberation of wise constraint, rather than unlimited freedom.
• This is “freedom to” rather than “freedom from” — freedom to experience deep relationship, what life runs on.