Today’s Reflection
Moral Loneliness

Many years ago, I wrote a book on loneliness, suggesting that there are four essential kinds of loneliness: alienation, restlessness, rootlessness, and psychological depression. If I was to write that book today, I would add another category, moral loneliness.

Loneliness lies at the very centre of our lives. Feeling lonely, restless, and set apart isn’t something we experience at the edges of our lives. It’s a fire that burns at the heart. We aren’t restful beings who occasionally get restless, but restless beings who occasionally experience some rest.

This is true at every level of our being: body, psyche, soul, sexuality. We are perennially restless, driven, hungry, longing creatures, never perfectly in union with others. In this life, we never fully overcome this. Always we are somewhat alone, separate. Sometimes this restlessness is more inchoate, we can’t really name what we need or want, and sometimes it is so painfully focused that it becomes an obsession. Always it is there.
 
Where we are most alone is in the moral part of our souls, namely, at that place where we feel most strongly about things and where all that is most precious to us is held, cherished, and guarded. It is precisely in this place, a point-vierge, that we feel violated when what is precious to our integrity is attacked.
 
Our deepest loneliness is for someone to sleep with morally, a kindred soul, a soulmate in the truest sense of that phrase. Great friendships and great marriages always have moral affinity as their real basis. Persons in these relationships are “lovers” in the deepest sense because they sleep with each other where it most counts, irrespective of whether they have sexual union.
 
In the experience of moral affinity, we have the experience of “coming home”. Sometimes this is coloured by sexual attraction and romantic feelings and sometimes it is not. Always though there is the sense that the other is a kindred spirit, that he or she holds precious what we hold precious. Biblically, we are feeling what Adam felt when he first saw Eve: “At last, flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone!”

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