Loneliness seems to be part of what it means to be a relational being. Does that mean loneliness can never really be “solved”? Here’s one way to think about loneliness: As a gap between relational expectation and social reality—something that signals our essentially relational, reciprocal nature as human beings. This episode is part 6 of a series, SOLO, which explores the theological, moral, and psychological dimensions of loneliness, solitude, and being alone. In this reflective conclusion to the series, Macie Bridge and Ryan McAnnally-Linz explore loneliness not as a pathology to solve but as a universal, creaturely experience that reveals our longing for relationship. Drawing on insights from conversations throughout the series, they consider how loneliness emerges in the gap between what we desire relationally and what we actually have, and why this gap might be intrinsic to being human. They discuss solitude as a vital space for discernment, self-understanding, and listening for God; how risk is inherent to relationships; why the church holds unique potential for embodied community; and how even small interactions with neighbors and strangers can meet real needs. Together they reflect on grief, social isolation, resentment, vulnerability, and the invitation to turn loneliness into attentiveness—to God, to ourselves, and to our neighbors, human and non-human alike. Episode Highlights * “Loneliness is just baked into our creaturely lives.” * “There really is no solution to loneliness—and also that’s okay.” * “We invite a certain level of risk because we invite another person closer to our own human limits.” * “There’s no blanket solution. We are all experiencing this thing, but we are all experiencing it differently.” * “I realized I could be a gift to her, and she could be a gift to me, even in that small moment.” About Macie Bridge Macie Bridge is Operations Coordinator for the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Macie is originally from the small town of Groton, Massachusetts, where she was raised in the United Church of Christ. As an undergraduate at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, Macie studied English literature, creative writing, and religious studies. She spent a year in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with the Episcopal Service Corps after receiving her B.A. There, she served as Events & Communications Coordinator for L’Arche North Carolina—an emerging L’Arche community, and therefore an incredible “crash course” into the nonprofit world. About Ryan McAnnally-Linz Ryan McAnnally-Linz is Associate Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture and a theologian focusing on flourishing, meaning, and the moral life. He is co-author of Public Faith in Action and The Home of God with Miroslav Volf, and Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most with Miroslav Volf and Matt Croasmun. Show Notes Loneliness as Creaturely Condition * Loneliness as “baked into our creaturely lives,” not a sign of brokenness or failure * The “gap between what we want and what we have” in relationships * Loneliness as a universal human experience across ages and contexts Solitude and Discernment * Solitude as a place to listen more clearly to God and oneself * Time alone clarifies intuition, vocation, and identity. * Solitude shapes self-knowledge outside societal expectations. Community, Church, and Embodiment * Churches can be embodied spaces of connection yet still feel lonely. * Hospitality requires more than “hi”; it requires digging deeper into personal encounter. * Embodied church life resists technological comforts that reduce vulnerability. Grief, Risk, and Vulnerability * Distinguishing grief-loneliness from social-isolation loneliness * Relationships inherently involve risk, limits, and potential hurt. * Opening oneself to others requires relinquishing entitlement. Everyday Encounters and Ecological Attention * Small moments with neighbors (like taking a stranger’s photo) can be meaningful. * Loneliness can signal attention toward creaturely neighbors—birds, bugs, landscapes. * Turning loneliness outward can widen our capacity for care. Production Notes * This podcast featured Macie Bridge * Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa * Hosted by Evan Rosa * Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, and Hope Chun * A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School [https://faith.yale.edu/about](https://faith.yale.edu/about) * Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: [https://faith.yale.edu/give](https://faith.yale.edu/give)
Loneliness seems to be part of what it means to be a relational being. Does that mean loneliness can never really be “solved”? Here’s one way to think about loneliness: As a gap between relational expectation and social reality—something that signals our essentially relational, reciprocal nature as human beings.
This episode is part 6 of a series, SOLO, which explores the theological, moral, and psychological dimensions of loneliness, solitude, and being alone.
In this reflective conclusion to the series, Macie Bridge and Ryan McAnnally-Linz explore loneliness not as a pathology to solve but as a universal, creaturely experience that reveals our longing for relationship. Drawing on insights from conversations throughout the series, they consider how loneliness emerges in the gap between what we desire relationally and what we actually have, and why this gap might be intrinsic to being human. They discuss solitude as a vital space for discernment, self-understanding, and listening for God; how risk is inherent to relationships; why the church holds unique potential for embodied community; and how even small interactions with neighbors and strangers can meet real needs. Together they reflect on grief, social isolation, resentment, vulnerability, and the invitation to turn loneliness into attentiveness—to God, to ourselves, and to our neighbors, human and non-human alike.
Episode Highlights
“Loneliness is just baked into our creaturely lives.”
“There really is no solution to loneliness—and also that’s okay.”
“We invite a certain level of risk because we invite another person closer to our own human limits.”
“There’s no blanket solution. We are all experiencing this thing, but we are all experiencing it differently.”
“I realized I could be a gift to her, and she could be a gift to me, even in that small moment.”
About Macie Bridge
Macie Bridge is Operations Coordinator for the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Macie is originally from the small town of Groton, Massachusetts, where she was raised in the United Church of Christ. As an undergraduate at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, Macie studied English literature, creative writing, and religious studies. She spent a year in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with the Episcopal Service Corps after receiving her B.A. There, she served as Events & Communications Coordinator for L’Arche North Carolina—an emerging L’Arche community, and therefore an incredible “crash course” into the nonprofit world.
About Ryan McAnnally-Linz
Ryan McAnnally-Linz is Associate Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture and a theologian focusing on flourishing, meaning, and the moral life. He is co-author of Public Faith in Action and The Home of God with Miroslav Volf, and Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most with Miroslav Volf and Matt Croasmun.
Show Notes
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, this is for the life of the world. A podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Macie Bridge: I'm Macie Bridge with the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, and this is solo. A series on solitude, loneliness, and being alone.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Hey, Macy.
Macie Bridge: Hi Ryan.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: It's good to be here talking to you. The tables have turned, the host of now the interviewee.
Macie Bridge: It's true. Thanks to helping me wrap the series.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Uh, I'm really excited for this. I've been interested in the question of loneliness and solitude for a while. I was really excited to see you take up the series.
I was, I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about what you were hoping for when you started your investigatory journey.
Macie Bridge: Mm-hmm. So I think you were the one who pitched loneliness to me because Marisol had done some thinking on it as well, and. I was excited about it because loneliness has been something that I have also been thinking about, partly because loneliness is a thing that I have experienced in my own personal life over the last few years, even though I'm a person who I think is very well surrounded by incredible people.
Loneliness is an emotion that I have built and that I have sat with, and it's also something that I've observed quite a lot in different forms in my peers, uh, and just in the world around me. And that's. I've heard the buzz in the media, so I was, I was coming into the series personally curious for myself and for my generation, I think.
And one of the things that I was. Particularly curious about coming into the series was I didn't want to, as I was curating these interviews, approach it with the goal of trying to look for a solution to loneliness, because I think that loneliness, it's a human experience and going in with the, with the approach of trying to solve it, like not something that would be worthwhile.
And that, that's where kind of the lens of also thinking about solitude came into the series as well. So I, I kind of came in with this conviction of like, let's be curious. That's where we. We ended up creating this beautiful diversity of, um, experts and thinkers to kind of chime in on the subject, and I'm really grateful to have had the space to just dive, dive in in so many different angles.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Where, where did your curiosity lead you? What are the big takeaways for you after all these conversations?
Macie Bridge: Mm-hmm. So many directions. I think one of the things that stands out to me as. Maybe the, the heaviest hitting takeaway for me was that loneliness simply is something that we're all gonna have to sit with.
And it's, I think, you know, I said I'm not looking for a solution, but there, one of the definitions of loneliness that came up throughout all of these interviews was, uh, loneliness, being this gap between what we have in our lives relationally and what we want in our lives relationally. Mes love and I.
Kind of talked about the creation story and the ways that loneliness shows up in Genesis and in God's creating of Adam is not good. That man was alone. And so realizing that for many of us, uh, if we have a gap between what we. Want in our lives relationally and what we have, we are going to sit with feelings of loneliness and, and that's just going to be a part of our human experiences.
And so for me it was kind of like, oh, there really is no solution, but also that that's okay. So what do I do with that? Um, and there were a lot more directions coming out of this series than I anticipated. One of those being a number of, uh, my conversations pointed towards the church and pointed outside of ourselves thinking about loneliness as.
An opportunity to look outside of myself, okay? I'm sitting with these heavy feelings of, of, I, I don't have what I want in one facet of my relationships or another. How can I use that as a motivation or a signal to turn towards my neighbor? In my interview with Laura, we got into what does that look like when that's the outside world, when that's our creaturely neighbors, whether that's going on a walk and actually observing the chipmunks and the birds and the, and the bugs that we share our world with.
Really using that as motivation to to think ecologically about like how are we tending for the world around us? But then in many of the conversations that also turn towards the church, that surprised me actually. Why? I guess when we talk about loneliness, we talk about solitude, we're talking about ourselves as individuals, and again, I was so upset on I'm not coming up with any solutions.
When a number of the interviews kind of naturally turned towards, like, actually this is a call to our communities, um, that was a surprise to me and. Yeah, an exciting turn. Um, it was Felicia who first brought that up. I think talking about the digital age and the ways that, you know, technology in some ways is fostering relationship across geographical, uh, divides, but.
At the same time, it's just not in person with us. And that's where the church is. Um, and so having that revelation, uh, that interview with Felicia was exciting. Oh, the church is embodied where people are, and that means the church is at such a advantage to speak into what's happening in our world and that I'm taking away some hope, a lot of hope from the series with
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: that's interesting to me.
I, I kind of feel like I wanna push a little bit on your no solutions. I know and say, and loneliness may be inescapable, it may be part of our creaturely lot, but that doesn't mean that there are no gradations of loneliness, no better and worse lonely situations. And I, I think you're bringing up the kind of in-person and body community in the church points to ways that we might say there are.
Yeah, there are some. Some particular forms of loneliness in our culture today. Yeah. That might be worth asking some intentional efforts to address, but I'm gonna ask you. Mm-hmm. And hope you have some thoughts. It has struck me that churches can be pretty lonely places even when they're in person.
Oftentimes even, uh, congregations are especially good communities for the peoples who've been there for a long time. Uh, which is to say like, like it can be a lonely thing to come into a place where a bunch of people seem like they've got a good community thing going on. Absolutely. I wonder if you have any thoughts on ways churches in particular ought to be kind of intentional about.
Resisting the forces that might make them lonely, making places rather than loneliness is met and moves through and stuff like that.
Macie Bridge: Absolutely. Yeah, that, that didn't come up specifically in any one of the interviews, but thank you for bringing that up because I think the thing when we were talking about the church, what was embedded there?
Maybe not that the church is, the church isn't addressing this perfectly right now, right? Because we have this problem in the world, and if the church were on top of it, maybe who knows what it would look like. Um, but rather that this is an opportunity for the church to do some self-evaluating and step up those of us who consider us ourselves.
And I think that what, what you're naming speaks to when we're carrying loneliness. Experiencing loneliness in a community, we can be surrounded by people and still feel lonely. Yeah. The key there is when we're building a relationship, we're looking for people who really see us and who are, who are digging into our lives.
That was language Lydia, um, brought up. And my last interview is, um, who's, who's really digging into the dirt of your life with you? Hmm. Um, and I think the, so when you. Enter into a church and they've got this great community, uh, thing going and you're sitting in the back pew and waiting for somebody to say hi to you.
Yeah, of course that's gonna be lonely because nobody there is ready. You haven't built that relationship yet to, to dig in. Um, I think that is probably one of the. Points of focus that um, those of us in the church who are trying to be attentive to this issue can really take away as like a very concrete approach to the loneliness epidemic would be to say when that person who's never visited before comes in and is sitting by themselves, not just to say, hi, welcome.
Come to coffee hour, but say who are you? Uh, and, and what brings you here and to really do that listening work. Um, and it's once, once you, uh, get into that second layer of relationship that we start to see, I think feelings of loneliness shift. Um, and that's also to say like when we're saying that loneliness is.
Just a part of our human experience, like I'm feeling lonely because I've lost a parent, or I'm grieving the loss of some specific relationship that's the church or other relationships in the world are not. Necessarily going to fit that exact box. Right. Um, but as humans, we desire a variety of relationships and we need a variety of relationships.
And so there is, uh, a sense of kind of filling the cup in other and, uh, and surrounding ourselves with community that will some ways, uh, maybe help us to hold those. Those gaps in our relational needs a little bit more gently with a little less heaviness.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. There's the kind of first order loneliness of loss in the example that you're talking about.
There could also then be the second order of loneliness of being, feeling abandoned in your loss, right? Yeah. Of, of not having people around to hold you and, well, that gets into all the, that gets into all of the, the hard pastoral relational stuff of grief, which I've always felt about myself. But we talked with Lydia about death a good bit.
And it sounds like grief is a thread in these conversations. Is there, how much is it worth distinguishing. Different kind of loneliness such that you could, as, as you're thinking about it for your own life right now, would you treat kind of relating to somebody who's dealing with a grief of loneliness different from somebody who's, uh, feeling kind of social isolation because, uh, they don't have a bunch of friends?
Macie Bridge: Yes. Yeah. I think it's important that we do. That's where we do the evaluative work ourselves, I think, and that we try to, uh, be attentive to those around us who we think might be experiencing loneliness because. Everybody's experience of loneliness comes from. A different gap. Uh, Felicia and, uh, Lydia and Laura May have as well, all defined loneliness as something that's different from social isolation.
Social isolation is a real, like, that's something that's circumstantially happened to a person and really is a different kind of crisis than loneliness itself. Um. Absolutely. When we look at the reason we're feeling lonely, there are gonna be certain types of loneliness that are maybe more attainable to or, or we can have more hope to, to have that gap build in a very specific way than say, a loss, where you are not able to refill that gap with.
That same person. Um, and, and so that grieving process is gonna be different. Uh, one of the things that's really important with, which I hope our listeners will take away listening to this series is that there is no one experience of loneliness. And that being said, there's also no one way forward from loneliness.
With a lot of the interviews touched on different way, so many different ways that we can think about our solitude and our l loneliness and even kind of positive ways of reframing loneliness as something that can be beautiful and can be telling us like, oh, I'm longing for this one particular thing in my life, or, um, God made me this way.
And so that can be a beautiful thing. Uh. At the same time, that's not going to be the case for everybody's loneliness. Some experiences of loneliness just have to be hard because they are just a really hard part of the human experience. And, and so there, there is no blanket, uh, solution. And that's, I think that was my initial impulse against solution was.
We're all experiencing this thing, but we are all experiencing it differently. So there's al there, it, it's futile to try to say, here's the way out.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Right, right, right. You can't, can't do cookie cutter, but you can talk about the ways that careful attention will help in given cases. Yeah. So have you been paying careful attention to yourself?
Uh, how, how has, uh, how has doing this series changed the way that you. Think about the time you spend alone.
Macie Bridge: Oh, yes. First of all, my interview with Heda and with Laura, both really and with ol, actually a lot of them, they all encouraged me to be thinking really positively about solitude. Solitude can be such a formative.
Important thing for ourselves to get to know ourselves as individuals and to kind of find what we want for our place in the world and, and with God. Um, and not just in the sense of I am. Alone. And so it's quiet, so I'm talking to God more. But in the sense of as I am navigating my life alone in these different dimensions, um, I am able to listen a little more clearly to what are my intuitions, how did, how, who is the person God designed me to be?
And, uh, getting really clear on that outside of voices. And so I've been kind of enjoying. Thinking about that aspect of things as I engage with, uh, aspects of my time alone. But I think one of the things that's been really helpful language to me coming out of this, Marisol named it first in. Our, our relationships involving risk.
When we seek relationship, we invite a certain level of risk because we invite another person closer to our own human limits, and we have to trust that person to not mm-hmm.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Cross.
Macie Bridge: It's, that's where we see situations of harm and hurt in relationships, but thinking on a larger scale of the ways that trying to, uh, create room for relationship and opening ourselves to relationship inherently involves risk.
Um, I don't know. It's been exciting to me. Uh, to me it's raising this question of like, do we wanna live our lives comfortable? I think there's a lot of mm-hmm. Um, movement in our culture towards comfort. And that's something that. Was kind of baked into, uh, my conversation with Felicia as well about the way that tech, um, has kind of infiltrated all of our dynamics.
It's made relationships in some ways easier on the surface, um, and, uh, certainly is aimed at making a lot of different aspects of our lived daily lives more comfortable and. So realizing, oh, we have to be willing to embrace some risk in our lives and to, to take a step towards this might hurt me, uh, in any form of relationship that.
I think is something that many people in my generation and I think in our world at large are maybe, um, inclined against right now, and we're built relationally and therefore I just have to, I have to be open to taking these risks in order to flourish. Um, I, I mean, have to, is something that I hold to myself personally, um, but I think it's.
Asking yourself that question of how much risk am I willing to take to fill that gap that I have between what I want and what I have when we're sitting with these, uh, lonely emotions, um, is an important self evaluatory question. So I'm coming away encouraged by that, thinking about when I step into a relationship acknowledging that this is a risk.
I think I also am able to acknowledge that I'm not. Entitled to relationship. I'm, uh, able to embrace those relationships of any form as a gift in my life. And that's been, that's been new language, so I've been really grateful for that in particular.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. Your reflection there reminds me of this realization I had shortly after my daughter was born, my first child, where it suddenly struck me, and I don't know why it hadn't before, but it struck me, I think, in church one afternoon.
As we were singing a song that suddenly there was a whole new kind and degree of sadness that was possible in my life. Mm. That this kind of, this new relationship with Ible infant meant a whole new array of awful things could come to pass that would crush me in ways that, that I hadn't been o like open to before.
And that's I, that I think is that kind of. Risk side of attachment. We think it's interesting to hear you talk about solitude. It's important, but I hear you pushing against the idea that solitude, that it might be worth seeking to be that kind of person who could be kind of content alone. Definitely, yeah, right.
That there, that there's a kind of, uh, systolic diastolic rhythm to solitude and relationship and maybe, if anything, the relational side has the kind of more fundamental. Place in, in that relationship. Is that right?
Macie Bridge: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think that solitude is, and because I, I think I said in my intro narration for the first episode that we hear these headlines all the time about like solitude being, uh uh, um, like, oh, this incredible athlete did this thing by themselves, and it's like such a feat that they were able to do that by themselves.
Um, and there's an element of that's true, and I think we need solitude. Wherever you place yourself on the introvert, extrovert scale, we need some solitude in order to know ourselves, in order to know God, and in order to know God in ourselves. Um, and at the same time, we're, we're just, we just are relational creatures.
Um, and one of the things that I think, uh, when you do listen to the interviews and you'll find, uh, interesting in my conversation with Heda about, um, Julian and the Anchorite was how we. Kept conceptualized them, or maybe this is just me kind of being a fan from the 21st century, having dug into the deepest work on, on the anchor rides was how we envision them in these little brick cells.
Totally by themselves, uh, just completely cut off from the world. And that was their, that's what the vocation solitude looked like. And actually, uh, had a kind of disrupted that by saying, well, they had this window to the outside and actually it was a real problem. Yeah. How much people were talking with them.
And even beyond that, how they were completely dependent on their community within the parish. Um, keeping them sustained, keeping them, uh, supportive so that they could continue to. Live within that cell. And so even within this, um, sort of extreme of defined vocational solitude. They needed community and sure they were made themselves content with, uh, not living, uh, necessarily with a family as everyone else maybe was, or even even partaking in the, uh, regular rhythms of the convent life.
Uh, they still needed to be surrounded by people. Um, and so, yeah, I guess, and that's kind of what, um. Comes up for me when I'm saying that like loneliness is just baked into our human experience. I, I experienced that both as like a, a hard thing to kind of embrace, but also as liberating that when you're feeling lonely, like this is just part of it.
It's not that we're necessarily doing something wrong or. That we've gotten ourselves off track in some way.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yeah. It's, it's not like I'm broken and therefore I'm lonely.
Macie Bridge: Right. And I think that one of the things that I've been thinking about around the language of like the epidemic of loneliness now that I've had these conversations is how if we label loneliness as this kind of disease outside of ourselves that's like kind of infiltrated our lives, I think it.
It paints it as something that has happened to us that is bad, that we need to get rid of. Mm-hmm. And I think that's just not true. I think it's, I think it's a, yes. It's uncomfortable. Yes. I don't want anyone who's listening to the series to be living with loneliness in heavy waves for too long and at the same time.
It's there to tell us really important things about the way that we were built and about our relationships, and I hope that in listening to this series, folks might come away with this same sense that I have of like, okay, when I feel loneliness, I don't have to be kind of beating up on myself for, well, why?
Why am I shouldn't be feeling this? I should come up with a solution for it. I have all these ways of being connected to people that negative self-talk. We can be liberated from that and say, actually, I'm feeling lonely because it's part of the way that God designed me. I want to desire a relationship.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So here's a place I want to push and explore just a little bit more, if that's okay. Mm-hmm. It strikes me that one possible step from the stance that you just laid out would be something like resentment, because if I'm chronically lonely and. Don't infer that this means that there's something wrong with me, that I'm emotionally regulated or malfunctioning or something of that sort, but they, but that is pointing me to the fact that God made me for relationship.
Macie Bridge: Yeah.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: But the world seems to be offering me no relationship. Hmm. There seems like a pretty easy step in towards a sort of resentment or anger or rage.
Macie Bridge: Yeah.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Towards a world that is. Maybe like actually wording some of, uh, some of the relational needs that God has given me or that could go, I mean, nobody's gonna see this clearly, right?
So it could, it probably quite, quite often goes through, I have. Certain socially defined Yeah. Understandings of what it is that, what relational needs I have and what the world owes me. And I, and I'm kind of resentful in very malformed ways. Yeah. You see the sort of the kind of like the emotional constellation that I'm potentially worried about here.
In thinking like,
Macie Bridge: yeah.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And trying to, trying to support the loneliness is just a problem.
Macie Bridge: Yeah. Yeah. Um, that is something that I've been thinking about and I think for me, this is where I. The role of faith really intercedes, um, in that I really don't believe that God wants to skimp on relationships for any of us.
Uh, I really believe that if God created us for relationship, that if we turn ourselves that way, that. That will delight in bringing us those relationships. And at the same time, absolutely. There are people who are just in circumstantially unfair situations and are really struggling to, uh, have access to those.
And in that case, I, that's where I, I grieve along with them that they're, that we live in a world that, um. Is imperfect and that we live in a world where it's possible for some people to be isolated and to have to live with those emotions. That is a reason to grieve. I think, and this is also where I'm thinking about those who are listening who are not.
Sitting with specific feelings of loneliness. This is the call to the church that, like Felicia was naming mm-hmm. Of this is where we need to be more proactive in seeking out those in our communities who might be feeling lonely. Um, and so it has to be a both end. I think if we're sitting with feelings of loneliness, we have to try to, uh, take that as a signal to say, okay, where, where are my neighbors that I can just.
Reach out a little bit, um, and to try to open ourselves to that risk, even if our neighbors are the, the outside world, as Laura, Laura was talking about. Yeah. Yeah. That's such an important aspect of being.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Yep, yep. That is more, more immediately available, more of the time, more people than potentially.
Social relationships. Right. So much more.
Macie Bridge: Yes. And I think our cups can also be filled in that sense by smaller interactions. And once we start, I, I was, uh, reflecting on the other day, I was taking a walk in my neighborhood and, um, when I'm. When I'm on a walk, I usually get like pretty deep in my imagination and I'm like kind of zoned out to the world around me.
And I was walking for a while and it took me a number of, uh, moments to realize that there was a woman, uh, trying to get my attention, who had been like yelling at me for a little bit. Um, and uh, and when she finally got my attention she was like, hi, I'm so sorry to interrupt your walk. I, um, am hoping that you might.
Come over to my porch and take a picture of me in front of my house because I just moved here and I don't know anybody, and my family wants a picture of me in front of my porch. Um, but I don't, I don't have anybody to do that. And I said, oh. I'm so sorry you had to chase me a whole block. Yes, absolutely.
I'll come take a picture of you. Um, and my first instinct when I was having this interaction was like, oh, I feel sad for her that she doesn't have roommates or friends immediately here to take this picture for her.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Mm-hmm.
Macie Bridge: Um, but then I took the photo and she introduced herself and I introduced myself and I asked where she was coming from and where her family was, and we had this, just this little interaction.
She said, thank you so much. And then we went our separate ways. Um, and I'm probably never gonna see her again. Um, but I realized like, actually. I was there, um, and I was able to share that moment with her. And sure, we're not gonna build a deep relationship. She's not gonna be one of the people who's digging into my life and the way that, um, we, we really need.
But that was something, and I think that was a really beautiful exchange. Uh, and so it's, it's moments like that that I think. We are capable of cultivating, um, uh, if, if we open ourselves to them. And so again, that's not to say like there are absolutely circumstantial situations that are going to place people in unfair situations of loneliness.
Um, and that's, that's where I hope that we can, uh, as. People of faith continue to try to seek out those people, um, where they aren't able to seek out others. Um, but at the same time, those of us who are going about our lives with these different varieties of loneliness that maybe we do have the opportunity to turn outside ourselves.
Um, I think we can't underestimate what those small interactions can do for the world and each other.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I was going to ask you, what would you wanna leave listeners with? But maybe that's it.
Macie Bridge: That might be it. Yeah.
Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Thank you, Macie. This has been a really fun conversation.
Macie Bridge: Thank you for joining me. Thank you for being on Solo Ryan
Evan Rosa: FOr the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for. Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Macie Bridge. Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, and Hope Chun. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu and lifeworthliving.yale.edu where you can find past episodes, articles, videos, books, and other educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity.
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