If I’m honest, I’ve spent large chunks of my life feeling lonely.
The odd part?
I’ve never been without people who loved me. People I relied on. People who mattered to me and who made me feel that I mattered too.
Nevertheless, also loneliness and longing.
We watched Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, last Friday, and at one line I began fumbling furiously for my phone. Paused the movie and skipped backward. My notes app open, I tapped this line from Bruce Springsteen’s character.
“It’s a hard thing realizing people aren’t who you want them to be.”
And there it is.
How often does life disappoint, not because no one shows up, but too often people are not capable of being who we want them to be. Too often, we don’t have the capacity to be the person our child, sibling, parent, spouse, friend wanted or needed us to be.
What to do with this problem of being human?
This angst in the asking?
This wretched realness of raising our eyes to the mirror?
I know the “proper” Christian answer, but I don’t think Jesus himself is all that impressed with the way we’ve gilded reality and refused to go below the surface.
In the mornings, as I brush through my hair, make an attempt at presentability, add some mascara, brush my teeth; I tap play and Richard Rohr reads his book The Universal Christ aloud to me. It’s undoing me in all the best ways.
He writes:
“Unless religion leads us on a path to both depth and honesty, much religion is actually quite dangerous to the soul and to society.
In fact ‘fast-food religion’ and the so-called ‘prosperity gospel’ are some of the very best ways to actually avoid God—while talking about religion almost nonstop.”
I think Jesus lived the most misunderstood life of all.
And on this maundy Thursday, this holy week commemorate, I see His figure surrounded by those who loved him, those whom he loved so completely, and I see the grief of loneliness and longing reflecting from his soul, I feel the reverberations reaching out.
I see him take bread and wine, eschew our egos, step into solidarity with us.
“My friends,” he says. “My friends.”
“I come not to be who you think you want me to be, but to simply be.”
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