My Longing For Meaningful Connection

There are times when my probing questions take me to places that are dark and sad and a little bit more than scary.  I was led there some time ago and have been ruminating on the experience for a couple of months now.  I was visiting with one of the ladies working at a bagel and coffee establishments I frequent.  It was quite slow in customers that particular morning.  She had noticed on previous occasions that I bow my head in prayer and sometimes read from my ipad at which she had asked what I was reading.  I shared and she sat on the stool across and asked what I thought about support groups.  "What sort?" I asked.  "Kinda grief and personal development; I suppose spiritual also," she responded.  

It’s been some years since being active with a support group or involved with the dynamics of one.  Asking her the reason for asking, she reported that she is having some concerns about the one she is involved in and has been for a number of months.  After listening for maybe ten minutes I had a strong sense as to the reason for the concern.  This support group had morphed a private chat time and was using it more and more to commune.  What alarmed me more was that there were supposed professional life coaches involved who were never present in person; persons pawning themselves as spiritual guides, using Bible passages along with other spiritual guiding works using social media as a conduit . 

I told her what I had experienced in an environment of a healthy support group but also that here there are some communities that tragically seem to miss something vital in their communing.  I also told her of my concern with a support group that leads a person to delve deeper into the behavior that isolates them.  

Since then, I have discovered that there are websites which are linking strangers together who are, in turn, simultaneously committing suicide.  Moreover, the sheer number of online confessionals reveals the need for a community where one can be real about plaguing guilt, failures, and offenses.  Members clearly express a need for the fellow humanness of a flawed community, and at the same time a need to remain, in some ways, somewhat inhuman—unknown, nameless, faceless.

Brandon's is a name and a story over which I paused.  The 21-year-old died in the privacy of a chat room full of people who watched by web-cam as he killed himself with drugs and alcohol.  Their conversation was disquieting, left behind in a hauntingly silent script.  Voices cheered him to pass out on screen.  Brandon responded with his phone number.  "Call if I look dead," he said.  But even after he passed out, they spoke as if he was something less than real.  "He's dead," said someone.  "Happy trails," said another.  "Should I call 911?"  "No!" they agreed in unison.

After this tragedy, columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. wrote in The Detroit Free Press “Another like to connect us doesn't work;” the shock of Brandon's story and what seemed to be the telltale signs of yet another failure. The very “community”, he reminded, that we were promised at "the dawn of the Internet Age, the one that would link all humankind in brotherhood, sisterhood, enlightenment." Such connectedness clearly failed Brandon.  Even if his friends would have stopped to call for help, they didn't even know his real name.

Beneath the promises of my personal, my friend's, my children’s, my grandchildren’s, successfully linked world, with my ever-growing friend list on Facebook  and more ways to connect than I have time for, a poignant undertow of despair has emerged.  Ironically, I and most of the people I know are living in a disconnected, lonely world, where the need for true community and meaningful connectedness has never been more piercingly heard and severely felt.  In my research I find it is the longing most often voiced by teenagers around the world; it is the reason most often cited for discontent in every thing from jobs to suburbs to relationships: real connection.  "What does 'friend' even mean now," asked one columnist recently.  When the diaries of the famed atheist, Madeline Murray O'Hare were auctioned off several years ago, they sadly found punctuated throughout her journals the words: "Will somebody somewhere please love me?  Will somebody somewhere please love me?"  

I confess my longing for meaningful connection is real, and it is a longing that runs deeper than any one area of my life: virtually, spiritually, intellectually, socially.  I admit I am looking for connections of heart, soul, and mind.  This is the reason, I am addicted to visit mother with dementia, aged aunts, intimate friends of sixty years and previous trusted professional and pastoral colleagues. 

The same teacher who said the greatest commandment on earth is to love God with all my strength, soul, and being, once held a child in front of him and said, "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.  Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.  And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me."

Showing a child as a sign of the community of God's kingdom, Jesus seems to be telling me something deliberate about the kind of community he is drawing together.  Little children love readily with all of themselves.  Their connections are real; their unity genuine, perhaps because their minds have not yet been deterred by suspicion, disappointment, or pride.  And as such, their hearts grasp something about communing I often do seldom anymore.  This morning I am soaking in what G.K. Chesterton, once wrote after he had learned more by watching children than any philosophy book, once observed that children have in their ownership the obscure idea of loyalty even to a thing.  I think it’s like Andy who had not gone to bed without Woody in Toy Story. I interpreted that he felt more than sad without the little cowboy.  Perhaps he felt in some transcendental way that Woody was sad without him.

I am thinking that Jesus suggests that I, being like a child, seeking love, it also seeks me.  In other words, the very community I long for is governed by One who longs for me to be in it. I suggested to the older lady:  If God is like the shepherd willing to leave the flock to go out searching for the one who has strayed, there is nowhere she or I can flee from his presence; there is never a time we won't belong, I told her.  Indeed, there is no greater love, no greater connection, no greater communing.

Father, God, thank you for your assurance of ultimate love, connection and communion.  I pray for my new found friend who waits faithfully on the customers at my breakfast place and any others, especially in the last couple of chapters of this life. And especially me, in understanding the depths of which You have gone to provide Your Son as a sacrifice for all my guilt, remorse and pain of sin.   Amen