In this thread I'm going to dump quotes from material I've been working through lately. I've ordered these disconnected quotes and excerpts to build a kind of narrative, one I don't have the energy or skill to describe, but which I think will be clear to the reader, the way the mind can parse a sentence even when a word is omitted, oftentimes absorbing the meaning so gracefully the missing word isn't even noticed. I'm going to begin with some theological sources I came across through reading A Theology of Liberation and working on the other thread.



"In the language of the Bible freedom is not something man has for himself but something he has for others... It is not a possession, a presence, an object,... but a relationship and nothing else.  In truth, freedom is a relationship between two persons.  Being free means 'being free for the other,' because the other has bound me to him.  Only in relationship with the other am I free."  –Dietrich Bonhoeffer  

"The freedom to which we are called presupposes the going out of oneself, the breaking down of our selfishness and of all the structures that support our selfishness; the foundation of this freedom is openness to others.  The fullness of liberation -- a free gift from Christ -- is communion with God and with other men." Gustavo Gutierrez

I'm reminded of 10 years ago, doing statistics homework with the woman who was my girlfriend up until last summer. We had most of our first experiences in life together. Even drinking alcohol was an event for me back then since I wasn't old enough to buy it. I didn't drink often, but when I did she would say with mock seriousness, "the answers to life aren't found at the bottom of a bottle!" Doing our statistics homework together, I'd constantly be flipping to the answers in the back of the book to check my work or help find my way through a problem. "The answers to life aren't found in the back of a book!" she riffed. I almost choked trying to stifle a laugh, because I'd just finished a re-read of the Hitchhiker series, which, quite literally, contains the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

When we count up afterwards the sum of all that we have done for a woman, we often discover that the actions prompted by the desire to show that we love her, to make her love us, to win her favours, bulk scarcely larger than those due to the human need to repair the wrongs that we do to the loved one, from a mere sense of moral duty, as though we did not love her.

…

It is moreover the property of love to make us at once more distrustful and more credulous, to make us suspect the loved one, more readily than we should suspect anyone else, and be convinced more easily by her denials. We must be in love before we can care that all women are not virtuous, which is to say before we can be aware of the fact, and we must be in love too before we can hope, that is to say assure ourselves, that some are. It is human to seek out what hurts us and then at once to seek to get rid of it.

Statements that are capable of so relieving us seem all too readily true: we are not inclined to cavil at a sedative that works. Besides, however multiform the person we love may be, she can in any case present to us two essential personalities according to whether she appears to us as ours, or as turning her desires elsewhere. The first of these personalities possesses the peculiar power which prevents us from believing in the reality of the second, the secret remedy to heal the sufferings that this latter has caused us. The beloved object is successively the malady and the remedy that suspends and aggravates it.

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah



It's weird, I'll spontaneously feel the urge to put my arm around her, I'm moments away from reaching out to hold her, but there's no one there lol. Like a ghost limb, she's a ghost person, a ghost mate. She knew me well enough it was almost as if she were a part of myself. But now she's gone, excised from me. I have this giant book called "The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe." Wolfe has a real flair for the dramatic, sometimes almost to the point of camp, but he's my favorite writer because of the beautiful way he has with words and the fervor and energy with which he writes. So, drinking a Bud Light Platinum and looking for life's answers, I read Wolfe's essay "God's Lonely Man." I haven't seen it online anywhere, so I transcribed a sort of lengthy excerpt.

Just as the Book of Job and the sermon of Ecclesiastes are, each in its own way, supreme histories of man's loneliness, so do all the books of the Old Testament, in their entirety, provide the most final and profound literature of human loneliness that the world has known. It is astonishing with what a coherent unity of spirit and belief the life of loneliness is recorded in those many books – how it finds its full expression in the chants, songs, prophecies, and chronicles of so many men, all so various, and each so individual, each revealing some new image of man's secret and most lonely heart, and all combining to produce a single image of his loneliness that is matchless in its grandeur and magnificence.

The total, all-contributory unity of this conception of man's loneliness in the books of the Old Testament becomes even more astonishing when we begin to read the New. For, just as the Old Testament becomes the chronicle of the life of loneliness, the gospels of the New Testament, with the same miraculous and unswerving unity, become the chronicle of the life of love. What Christ is always saying, what He never swerves from saying, what He says a thousand times in a thousand different ways, but always with a ventral unity of belief, is this: “I am my Father's son, and you are my brothers.” And the unity that binds us all together, that makes this earth a family, and all men brothers and the sons of God, is love.

The central purpose of Christ's life, therefore, is to destroy the life of loneliness and to establish here on earth the life of love. It should be obvious to everyone that when Christ says: “Blessed are the poor in spirit: For theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted,” “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy,”–Christ is not here extolling the qualities of humility, sorry, and mercy as virtues sufficient in themselves, but He promises to men who have these virtues the richest reward that men were ever offered – a reward that promises not only the inheritance of the earth, but the kingdom of heaven, as well.

Such was the final intention of Christ's life, the purpose of His teaching. And its total import was that the life of loneliness could be destroyed forever by the life of love. Or such, at least, has been the meaning I read into his life. For in these recent years when I have lived alone so much, and known loneliness so well, I have gone back many times and read the story of this man's words and life to see if I could find in them a meaning for myself, a way of life that would be better than one I had. I read what He said not in a mood of piety or holiness, not from a sense of sin, a feeling of contrition, or because His promise of a heavenly reward meant much to me. But I tried to read His bare words nakedly and simply, as it seems to me He must have uttered them, and as I have read the words of other men – of Homer, Donne, and Whitman, and the writer of Ecclesiastes – and if the meaning I have put upon His words seems foolish or extravagant, childishly simple or banal, mine alone are no different from what ten million other men have thought; I have only set ti down here as I saw it, felt it, found it for myself, and have tried to add, subtract, and alter nothing.

And now I know that though the way and meaning of Christ's life is a far, far better way and meaning than my own, yet I can never make it mine; and I think that this is true of all the other lonely men that I have seen or known about – the nameless, voiceless, faceless atoms of this earth as well as Job and Everyman and Swift. And Christ himself, who preached the life of love, was yet as lonely as any man that ever lived. Yet I could not say that He was mistaken because HE preached the life of love and fellowship, and lived and died in loneliness; nor would I dare assert His way was wrong because a billion men have since professed His way and never followed it.

I can only say that I could not make his way my own. For I have found the constant, everlasting weather of man's life to be, not love, but loneliness. Love itself is not the weather of our lives. It is the rare, the precious flower. Sometimes it is the flower that gives us life, the family of the earth, the brotherhood of man. But sometimes love is the flower that brings us death; and from it we get pain and darkness; and the mutilations of the soul, and the maddening of the brain, may be in it.

How or why or in what way the flower of love will come to us, whether with life or death, triumph or defeat, joy or madness, no man on this earth can say. But I know that at the end, forever at the end for us – the houseless, homeless, doorless, driven wanderers of life, the lonely men – there waits forever the dark visage of our comrade, Loneliness.

But the old refusals drop away, the old avowals stand – and we who were dead have risen, we who were lost are found again, and we who sold the talent, the passion, and belief of youth into the keeping of the fleshless dead, until our hearts were corrupted, our talent wasted, and our hope gone, have won our lives back bloodily, in solitude and darkness; and we know that things for us will be as they have been, and we see again as we saw once, the image of the shining city. Far flung, and blazing into tiers of jeweled lights, it burns forever in our vision as we walk the Bridge, and strong tides are bound round it, and the great ships call. And we walk the Bridge, always we walk the Bridge alone with you, stern friend, the one to whom we speak, who never failed us. Hear:

“Loneliness forever and the earth again! Dark brother and stern friend, immortal face of darkness and of night, with whom the half part of my life was spent, and with whom I shall abide now til my death forever – what is there for me to fear as long as you are with me? Heroic friend, bloodbrother of my life, dark face – have we not gone together down a million ways, have we not coursed together the great and furious avenues of night, have we not crossed the stormy seas alone, and known strange lands, and come again to walk the continent of night and listen to the silence of the earth? Have we not been brave and glorious when we were together, friend? Have we not known triumph, joy, and glory on this earth – and will it not be again with me as it was then, if you come back to me? Come to me, brother, in the watches of the night.

“Come to me in the secret and most silent heart of darkness. Come to me as you always came, bringing to me again the old invincible strength, the deathless hope, the triumphant joy and confidence that will storm the earth again.”

After typing that out, I emailed it to my sister, who was a master's theology student, and she wrote me this response:

I think this is sad...sad for many reasons, although I'm not sure if I entirely understand the end. The end seems to have a note of hope and joy, but I cannot quite determine its source. The figure of loneliness becomes a companion? Is that what it means?

I also find it sad because it seems so happy at first that loneliness is conquered by Christ, but Thomas Wolfe cannot make this his way and so therefore he returns to loneliness. How sad! The hope for happiness is made futile, and in his depiction love becomes a thing of pain more than a source of joy. So sad! And even if I'm right and somehow loneliness becomes a companion and therefore one is not actually alone, that is one depressing companion! And to imply that loneliness is the only eternal companion...yikes!

I prefer my happier interpretation...these were just my thoughts after I read the passage:

While I would agree that there are many depictions of loneliness in the Old Testament and that within the entirety of the Bible somewhere we are always able to find some figure that perfectly represents ourselves (at least figuratively, if not also literally), I cannot say that I find the Old Testament to be a book of loneliness. Because the end result of all the loneliness (generally accomplished because the Israelites are disobedient in some way) is that God comes and pulls them out of the deep loneliness with which they have entrenched themselves and brings them joy and relief. And more beautiful than the rescue I think is the fact that the Israelites insult God, estrange themselves from God, say, "I don't need you," but when they find themselves stranded and in deep need God comes despite their past behavior. I find it extremely comforting to know however much I entrench myself in sin, however far I fall into a pit of despair, sadness, loneliness, and self-concern, God comes to me and takes my hand and pulls me out. And even when I walk back into the pit over and over again, God again humbles himself and brings me back. This unconditional love seems to be the antithesis of loneliness to me. And I think that the New Testament and the coming of Christ makes this an even greater and more beautiful story. God himself becomes human to repair our distorted nature, takes on all of our burdens that we have chosen for ourselves, and fixes all of it. And in becoming human and healing our brokenness we can become united to God in a way we never could before. God does not just pull us out of the pit through Jesus, He literally makes us His sons and daughters. Through Christ being both fully human and fully divine, we too can become so united with Him that we too become fully human and fully divine. And if one is united with God, loneliness ceases because one is united to another.

Not that this isn't difficult to feel often. I consider that to be so because of my own weakness, but a lot of very holy people talk about the "dark night of the soul" which sounds horribly lonely. I guess I find the above way of thinking comforting because even when I feel incredibly lonely or upset, I know that I am not alone. There are some great psalms that about despair/loneliness that I like to read when I'm upset...mostly because I find it somehow comforting to know that those who have gone before me have felt lonely too and so in a way I'm not alone in my loneliness...I'm in solidarity with many others. It doesn't seem like Thomas Wolfe find that comforting though. I guess I must be one of those people who agree that with the axiom, "Misery loves company."

I also find it sad to think that Christ just came/lived in order to teach us a lesson and do no more, but maybe this is an inadequate interpretation of what Wolfe was saying. There are a number of people who's lives and words I have learned from. If God was going to become man, why would He just come to do that? It doesn't seem more helpful than what regular people do, which begs the question, "How was Christ different from regular men?" If He just taught us how to live, it's easy to think He wasn't really God, and if He wasn't really God then He really was just a regular person. In which case He wasn't really sent by anyone. He just lived. Just as, for example, Dr. Martin Luther King lived and taught and changed us. The reason why I find this sad is because I believe Christ is God, I believe He came to earth to help us, teach us, and restore us to where we were before the fall...but not just this but to unite us to Him in love. And since I think that Christ coming was the pinnacle to the beautiful love story between God and humanity, it seems very sad to me to think that Jesus just is a teacher.

Despite all of this, I have to say I really like his style of writing and find this passage incredibly beautiful and moving. What a gift to be able to write like that!!!!

One more thought that is random and probably unnecessary/only noticed by me because I studied theology:

There's one thing that bothers me theologically, but I won't go into much detail because I don't want to bore you with my theological ravings. I find it to be a very modern approach to "to read His bare words nakedly and simply, as it seems to me He must have uttered them....I have only set ti down here as I saw it, felt it, found it for myself, and have tried to add, subtract, and alter nothing." I do really like his honesty about this, but people have only been reading the Bible like this for about 500 year (at the most), which may sound long, but that means for the other 1500 years people didn't. And they didn't read it that way intentionally because they felt it was presumptuous to believe someone could just sit down with it and understand it without first being taught. They might be able to understand the words, but to them much meaning would be lost/misinterpreted without the assistance of tradition.

So those are my thoughts. I did think about it, but these were just my initial reactions, so don't hold me to them too completely! Maybe you can help me with understanding the end which in turn may change the meaning of everything else and make my comments completely incorrect.

Anyway, ah... Cheers!