When the Homily is about Immunology

Lonliness and Sin

I'm really beginning to feel the "stress" of lonliness...I say "stress" because I really cannot think of any other way to phrase it. For those of you who may not know, my wife and kids are on a long vacation in Minnesota (I'll actually be joining them for four days beginning this friday - THANK GOD). Anyway, the house remains eerily quiet...dead really. Not much laughter, running, screaming, or crying - you'd think you wouldn't miss the regularly scheduled noise and chaos of the Ferrenberg house, but you do. Community life is noisy.

Now many good friends from Church and my local family have been very much present with me, but frankly it is those "private" family times such as going to bed, awakening in the morning, coming home from work - all of which now take place in a house utterly devoid of life (my dog and snake don't count!) It feels so unnatural...and indeed it is.

And the LORD God said, "It is not good that man should be alone;"
Genesis 2:17

Well not that the LORD God needs any sort of consensus, but the Mental Health professionals agree, here's an interesting article.

And This one was particularly intriguing to me because it is a list of some of the effects that lonliness has on people. You'll notice that ALL of them in someway connect to what I would consider to be sin. Pardon me while I ramble now.

I think we'd all admit to being generally selfish...and such selfishness often (if not always) interferes with our relationships with other people. Yet we NEED these relationships! We are selfish and yet we cannot survive without the community of others. It is paradoxical. The effects of lonliness tends to only multiply the lonliness by driving others away from us because they seem to inspire more selfish behavior. It is like a powerful whirlpool that spirals us down into deeper introversion and self-pleasuring - or self-destruction as the case may be. Absence of community breeds sin in our lives. Apparently, lonliness can even have very serious ill effects on our physical health. Hmmm...now this has me thinking.

Heart Disease and high blood pressure are listed, among others, as ailments which can be connected to lonliness! Wow...perhaps we ought to quit looking at the foods that other cultures eat and ponder how their sense of community might be more "healthy" than our western inbred glorification of the individual? Just a thought.

It also makes me think of hell. The Orthodox understanding of hell is rather different than in the west (I'll not go into that now), but I wonder if hell is not a sort of culmination or fullfillment of a life lived in isolation - a life of perfect selfishness it would seem to me would bear the ultimate and final fruit of lonliness. Again...just a thought.

Anyway...my thoughts turn to the Church. Community. The Saints are right behind me on the wall...and I feel connected, plugged in (if you will). There is a good deal of solace to found in that "great cloud of witnesses" - not to mention encouragment to avoid the sins that so easy tempt the lonely.

None-the-less, the quiet is deafening and a crying baby would be most welcome right about now.