I felt achingly lonely for much of my life. This is not to say I longed for companionship: I am blessed with myriads of loving relationships and often actually enjoy being alone. Rather, this loneliness was a deeper, lingering sense of emptiness and craving for something greater. Reading about other religious thinkers’ experiences with loneliness helped me greatly as I moved through life from this emotional posture. Theologians of the last century have written extensively on loneliness, and thinkers from various traditions agree that it is to be lauded as an integral part of the faith experience. While in the past this had comforted me, I have begun to question whether loneliness must be a constant in a religious person’s life. I have learned to push back on these teachings, and, with time, I have begun to seek a religious stance of personal wholeness.

Loneliness as a Religious Ideal

For a long time, the understanding that loneliness could be a positive quality in a religious person was soothing to me. The religious and civil rights leader Howard Thurman writes that among the many types of loneliness, “there is the loneliness of those who walk with God until the path takes them out beyond all creeds and all faiths and they know the wholeness of communion and the bliss of finally being understood.”¹ Through one’s own emptiness, one strives to reach God to sooth that ache. I identified with Thurman’s words, for loneliness helped me develop stronger spiritual feelings.

Thurman is not alone in his regard for loneliness. I have been comforted to see that in my own faith, others see loneliness not just as an asset to spirituality but as an integral part of connecting to the divine. The Jewish philosopher Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, in his aptly named essay The Lonely Man of Faith, reveals that his loneliness:

is a strange, alas, absurd experience, engendering sharp, enervating pain as well as a stimulating, cathartic feeling. I despair because I am lonely and, hence, feel frustrated. On the other hand, I also feel invigorated because this very experience of loneliness presses everything in me into the service of God. In my “desolate, howling solitude” (Deut. 32:10) I experience a growing awareness that, to paraphrase Plotinus’s apothegm about prayer, this service to which I, a lonely and solitary individual, am committed is wanted and gracefully accepted by God in His transcendental loneliness and numinous solitude.²

Like Thurman, Soloveitchik’s pain propels him toward God, whose acceptance helps ease the pain and thus creates a powerful bond with the divine. God Godself exists in “transcendental loneliness” and wants our prayers. The loneliness creates a pull from one being to another, and for Soloveitchik, this is the foundation of the faith experience. Reading Soloveitchik as a teenager helped normalize my emotional experience and give it value.

Henri Nouwen, a Catholic theologian, exalts this loneliness even further and frames it as central to Christianity. In his work The Wounded Healer, he explains that:

The Christian way of life does not take away our loneliness; it protects and cherishes it as a precious gift. Sometimes it seems as if we do everything possible to avoid the painful confrontation with our basic human loneliness, and allow ourselves to be trapped by false gods promising immediate satisfaction and quick relief… The awareness of loneliness might be a gift we must protect and guard, because our loneliness reveals to us an inner emptiness that can be destructive when misunderstood, but filled with promise for him who can tolerate its sweet pain.³

Not only is loneliness fundamental to faith, but Nouwen goes so far as to say that we should be cautious when looking to escape from the loneliness. To Nouwen, attempting to fully overcome these feelings is futile, and the sources of relief are “false gods.” While Soloveitchik and Thurman’s writing had comforted me, Nouwen put loneliness on a pedestal that felt uncomfortable. As he pushed against modalities of faith other than loneliness, I wondered what other modalities could exist.

Faith Need Not Be Lonely

I cannot overstate the value of these texts which position loneliness as a holy experience. They help provide a framework through which even our most painful moments can be elevated to religious heights. They had been personally helpful to me. However, I am hesitant to go as far as these texts do to make the faith experience entirely one of loneliness and pain. As Jewish thinker Rabbi Shai Held warns about religious postures of suffering, “it is important to tread carefully here, lest we fall into the temptation to glorify suffering or see it as inherently redemptive in some way.”⁴ There is a danger that by exalting suffering, it can become all-encompassing. Pain is a part of life, but it need not be the meaning of life. There are ways of approaching God other than through pain. We may not be able to access these feelings all the time—or even most of the time—but we can aspire to them. There is hope for a more joyful type of worship.

Pain is a part of life,

but it need not be the meaning of life.

I spent a long time thinking this was not possible. I took for granted that the most meaningful religious experiences I would have would stem from a gaping inner emptiness. From this brokenness, I would approach God to be with me. I might even feel joy in the feeling of cleaving to a God who would fill those spiritual holes, but I would know that the holes never could—or should—be filled.

Over time, I have grown to see that we can have powerful spiritual experiences without pain by achieving a feeling of wholeness in and of ourselves. This may not happen with any sort of frequency, but it is possible. I have learned to feel whole by recognizing my inherent self-worth, which exists even as I am separate from those around me. This difficult task of experiencing moments of wholeness required work and time: I meditated, prayed, read, engaged in many conversations, and distanced myself from relationships which made me feel lesser. A few weeks ago, I found myself praying without desperation, but with a sense of peace in my full self singing in the presence of God. Of course, loneliness still comes and goes, and I recognize it as an important aspect of my religious identity. However, I have learned to find joy in reaching toward God, not in an anguished need to cleave to another being, but in a joyful encounter between one whole being with an infinitely whole other. I have learned, to my surprise, that these experiences are no less meaningful than calling out to God from the depths. Faith may be strong without being lonely.

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1. Howard Thurman, The Inward Journey (New York: Harper & Row, 1961; Repr., Indiana: Friends United Press, 2007), 130–31.
2. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2009), 4.
3. Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society (New York: Image Books, 1979), 84.
4. Shai Held, Essays on the Weekly Torah Portion: Genesis and Exodus, vol. 1 of The Heart of Torah (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2017), 193.