A Cure for Loneliness: Telling our Stories 10-17-11

Pickens County, South Carolina

Throughout much of humanity’s unwritten history, collective wisdom was archived in oral tradition. Stories containing their imperatives for better living were shared frequently with most members of the community present. Many indigenous societies built their culture around the telling of story.

In recovery we often hear reminders to share experience, strength, and hope with each other. We gather daily to share story. Telling stories provides a form of healing sometimes astounding in its efficacy. We share stories of shipwrecked lives, spiritual transformations, and the good, productive, and purposeful lives we now live. Often slack-jawed in awe, we embrace the possibility life can get better, inspiring us to not give up a day before the miracle.

Yesterday I was climbing a thirty-two-hundred-foot granite outcropping of rock here on the Blue Ridge Escarpment. On an expansive October Sunday, Mary and I spent seven hours covering about eight horizontal miles and two thirds of a vertical mile. We saw a happy collection of Sunday afternoon hikers with a fine assortment of grand dogs and large cameras people were not quite sure how to use. As we progressed on our journey the crowds thinned considerably along with the thready light found in mountain valleys at dusk. In dim light Mary noticed a curious tree root on the trail, with diamond patterns on it, wondering if autumn leaves had fallen to create this pattern.

Tree roots with diamond patterns on them, able to move of their own volition don’t make for happy endings. These mountains are replete with copperheads and rattlesnakes. Some nearby logs cut in trail management proved efficacious in prodding this snake to move on. The last crowd we had seen earlier was a platoon of fifteen rescuers heading up-mountain to take off a woman injured three miles above. They did not need to be stepping on sluggish rattle snakes in total darkness.

Mary’s story was at least as interesting as that of mountain rescues and rattlesnakes. It contains a profoundly important imperative of the wisdom in waiting for the miracle, not taking matters into our own hands. We get God’s best when we let Him do the choosing. When we take matters into our own hands we often exile ourselves in decades of empty living, devoid of purpose.

At a young age Mary met Jerry and enjoyed eleven years of happy marriage, little money, and two fine children. As was the case sixty years ago, young couples learned to have rich happy lives despite the absence of money, credit cards, and SUVs filled with consumer goods from gray box retailers. Mary described happy moments when a fistful of ordinary wildflowers said it better than vast arrangements from a florist. Alas, this happy chapter came to an abrupt end when Mary was barely thirty. One May evening after making a fine meal, Jerry took their nine-year-old son and his younger sister to the lake for a brief swim. The spring waters proved surprisingly cold. In short order Mary found her husband and son floating face down in the small lake. Mary entered into the darkest possible of human experiences.

Time healed, sort of.

Two years later Mary met Bill and they were soon married. For the next two miles of our ascent she described an empty loveless marriage spanning thirty years offering little more a roommate, a difficult one at that.

Incredulous, I asked her what Bill had or said that enticed her to say “I do”.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“He brought nothing to our marriage.”

In his immensely successful The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm described our desperate bid to ‘belong to the herd’, to achieve union, to avoid the acute anxiety which derives from separation. Separation is seen as a great existential evil, one to be avoided at all costs. Loneliness is the great bane of an individualistic competitive consumer society.

Mary described having no meaningful opportunity to meet men, no opportunity to rejoin the herd. Fearful of never meeting another man, when Bill came along on a chance encounter, she decided any man was better than no man. As she was to discover, “There’s no loneliness like the loneliness one has inside an empty marriage.” Eventually Bill died after decades of self-induced bad health. How I wished I had three decades in my pocket and could offer them to Mary with the imperative “Let God show you how to use these well.” She gave up the best years of her life.

I hardly know Mary, having only seen her twice previously in the context of two formal events which afforded little opportunity for conversation. What proved wondrous was her willingness to share story with a near stranger as we literally made an uphill journey through life. Somehow Mary’s sharing her story made our mountain journey much easier, even with its snakes and snares.

In recovery rooms we luxuriate in stories, even those that don’t have happy endings. So often these provide a needed measure of caution, temperance, reminder. We speak of forgetting those things we need to remember. Even here in the autumn paradise of the Blue Ridge, caution and temperance embedded in story imparts wisdom. Those of us on recovery journeys embrace the concept of learning hard lessons from others who have already paid often exorbitant tuition. Under the first crimson and cadmium leaves of a newly crisp fall, I find myself grateful for the wisdom Mary offered me, wisdom which cost her dearly. It’s my choice to learn from her experience or to pay the high tuition myself. I was powerfully reminded that when we let God be the foundation of our lives, when we turn our lives and will over to His care, we get His best.

Interestingly, after seven hours of story, we were no longer near strangers and I found myself forgetting my loneliness. Regularly sharing our stories and God’s story make us part of the herd, never required to be truly lonely again.

“I will make up to you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the creeping locust, the stripping locust, and the gnawing locust, My great army which I sent among you. And you shall have plenty to eat and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God.”