Theologian Miroslav Volf reflects on solitude, loneliness, and how being alone can reveal our humanity, selfhood, and relationship with God. This episode is part 1 of a 5-part series, SOLO, which explores the theological, moral, and psychological dimensions of loneliness, solitude, and being alone. “Solitude brings one back in touch with who one is—it’s how we stabilize ourselves so we know how to be ourselves with others.” Macie Bridge welcomes Miroslav for a conversation on solitude and being oneself—probing the difference between loneliness and aloneness, and the essential role of solitude in a flourishing Christian life. Reflecting on Genesis, the Incarnation, and the sensory life of faith, Volf considers how we can both embrace solitude and attend to the loneliness of others. He shares personal reflections on his mother’s daily prayer practice and how solitude grounded her in divine presence. Volf describes how solitude restores the self before God and others: “Nobody can be me instead of me.” It is possible, he suggests, that we can we rediscover the presence of God in every relationship—solitary or shared. Helpful Links and Resources * The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse [https://faith.yale.edu/resource-downloads/the-cost-of-ambition](https://faith.yale.edu/resource-downloads/the-cost-of-ambition) * Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2554](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2554) * Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours (Buch der Stunden) [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rainer-maria-rilke](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rainer-maria-rilke) * Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall [https://www.harpercollins.com/products/creation-and-fall-dietrich-bonhoeffer](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/creation-and-fall-dietrich-bonhoeffer) Episode Highlights 1. “Nobody can be me instead of me. And since I must be me, to be me well, I need times with myself.” 2. “It’s not good, in almost a metaphysical sense, for us to be alone. We aren’t ourselves when we are simply alone.” 3. “Solitude brings one back in touch with who one is—it’s how we stabilize ourselves so we know how to be ourselves with others.” 4. “Our relationship to God is mediated by our relationships to others. To honor another is to honor God.” 5. “When we attend to the loneliness of others, in some ways we tend to our own loneliness.” Show Notes Solitude, Loneliness, and Flourishing * The difference between solitude (constructive aloneness) and loneliness (diminishment of self). * COVID-19 as an amplifier of solitude and loneliness. * Volf’s experience of being alone at Yale—productive solitude without loneliness. * Loneliness as “the absence of an affirming glance.” * Aloneness as essential for self-reflection and renewal before others. Humanity, Creation, and Relationship * Adam’s solitude in Genesis as an incomplete creation—“It is not good for man to be alone.” * Human beings as fundamentally social and political. * A newborn cannot flourish without touch and gaze—relational presence is constitutive of personhood. * Solitude and communion exist in dynamic tension; both must be rightly measured. Jesus’s Solitude and Human Responsibility * Jesus withdrawing to pray as a model of sacred solitude. * Solitude allows one to “return to oneself,” guarding against being lost in the crowd. * The danger of losing selfhood in relationships, “becoming echoes of the crowd.” God, Limits, and Others * Every other person as a God-given limit—“To honor another is to honor God.” * Violating others as transgressing divine boundaries. * True spirituality as respecting the space, limit, and presence of the other. Touch, Senses, and the Church * The sensory dimension of faith—seeing, touching, being seen. * Mary’s anointing of Jesus as embodied gospel. * Rilke’s “ripe seeing”: vision as invitation and affirmation. * The church as a site of embodied presence—touch, seeing, listening as acts of communion. The Fear of Violation and the Gift of Respect * Loneliness often born from fear of being violated rather than from lack of company. * Loving another includes honoring their limit and respecting their freedom. Practical Reflections on Loneliness * Questions Volf asks himself: “Do I dare to be alone? How do I draw strength when I feel lonely?” * The paradox of social connection in a digital age—teenagers side by side, “completely disconnected.” * Love as sheer presence—“By sheer being, having a loving attitude, I relieve another’s loneliness.” The Spiritual Discipline of Solitude * Volf’s mother’s daily hour of morning prayer—learning to hear God’s voice like Samuel. * Solitude as the ground for transformation: narrating oneself before God. * “Nobody can die in my place… nobody can live my life in my place.” * Solitude as preparation for love and life in community. About Miroslav Volf Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and Founding Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. He is the author of Exclusion and Embrace, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World, and numerous works on theology, culture, and human flourishing—most recently The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse. Production Notes - This podcast featured Miroslav Volf - Interview by Macie Bridge - Edited and Produced 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 - Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
Theologian Miroslav Volf reflects on solitude, loneliness, and how being alone can reveal our humanity, selfhood, and relationship with God.
This episode is part 1 of a 5-part series, SOLO, which explores the theological, moral, and psychological dimensions of loneliness, solitude, and being alone.
“Solitude brings one back in touch with who one is—it’s how we stabilize ourselves so we know how to be ourselves with others.”
Macie Bridge welcomes Miroslav for a conversation on solitude and being oneself—probing the difference between loneliness and aloneness, and the essential role of solitude in a flourishing Christian life. Reflecting on Genesis, the Incarnation, and the sensory life of faith, Volf considers how we can both embrace solitude and attend to the loneliness of others.
He shares personal reflections on his mother’s daily prayer practice and how solitude grounded her in divine presence. Volf describes how solitude restores the self before God and others: “Nobody can be me instead of me.” It is possible, he suggests, that we can we rediscover the presence of God in every relationship—solitary or shared.
Helpful Links and Resources
Episode Highlights
Solitude, Loneliness, and Flourishing
Humanity, Creation, and Relationship
Jesus’s Solitude and Human Responsibility
God, Limits, and Others
Touch, Senses, and the Church
The Fear of Violation and the Gift of Respect
Practical Reflections on Loneliness
The Spiritual Discipline of Solitude
About Miroslav Volf
Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and Founding Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. He is the author of Exclusion and Embrace, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World, and numerous works on theology, culture, and human flourishing—most recently The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse.
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.
Miroslav Volf: Being alone is not the state for which human beings are created. We are social, profoundly social, more broadly, also political kinds of animals. And in that sense, it's not good for us to be alone. It's not us to be alone. We are who we are in community with others, and maybe we sense something about what is necessary.
For us in the process of becoming human, nobody can be born in my place. I must be born. This is, in a sense, this is a solitary experience. Nobody can die in my place. I have to take that responsibility, or it happens to me. Somebody can help me in this, but it's happening to me as individual. I think nobody can lead my life between birth and death in my place, I must do it, and in this specifically individual responsibility that I have.
I have to kind of stabilize myself so that I know how to be myself in relationship with other people. And I think solitude is really important for that because otherwise we can get lost in the crowd. Put it this way, when I am. In solitude. I have relationship to God through my relationship to myself.
When I'm with others. I have relationship with God through my relationship with them. When I am with the environment, when I'm with the animals, I have relationship to God in my relationship to them.
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.
There's something dreamy and courageous about the ways we speak about living or adventuring on one's own. Young adults long for the day. They can move out of their parents' house, take on a new city, and get their own place. We see it in novelty stories all the time. Young, independent woman, renovates, van, and travels, country full time or undaunted.
Athlete scales, this life-threatening climb, or previously Untraversed distance. There's practically a whole category of Guinness World Records for things accomplished alone. When someone enters a new chapter alone, whether by choice or because of the hand life has dealt them, we encourage them with enthusiasm.
For starting a fresh new chapter, a chance to redesign their life, how they and only they want to live it. Indeed, there seems to be something essentially good about the ways we get to know ourselves, our needs, wants, hopes and dreams when we are alone and yet running parallel to this self. Reliance, esteem and rugged individualism.
Our culture praises is the epidemic of loneliness. It hits our elderly populations, our young people, and our working professionals. Our world is full. Of lonely people, and we describe this problem with the same descriptors we'd use to describe life-threatening disease. We are relational creatures and as Christians, there's a basis for relationality baked into our call to discipleship.
So what gives, how are we supposed to think christianly about solitude, loneliness, and being alone? Well, here are a few brief moments from each of my guests in this series. To give you a sense for what's to come.
Laura Marris: It's like the symptom that desires its cure, loneliness, disconnected from longing, disconnected from desire is a really dangerous thing. But I, I think at least with ecological loneliness, there are these ways to become reconnected and there are ways. Even very simple ones that like individuals can do to make the landscape just around them more hospitable.
Felicia Wu Song: The disciplines of solitude and and silence have always been challenging for people, but wondering if in these days, in our times. As we are being formed by these technologies, we are unaccustomed to God's silence or God's stillness, right? Because we are a people on the move, always getting content, always getting some kind of feedback from someone immediately, right?
And so what happens then with our interior spirituality, you know, like the shape of our souls,
Hetta Howes: Marjorie frames herself as a figure who is. Constantly looking for connection, sometimes finding it, but sometimes it being rejected in really painful ways. And her sort of imaginings are often about finding this sort of spiritual community.
She's not managing to find on earth for someone who in. Insisted on keeping within the world. She, you know, she wants to remain married. She's still a mother, she's still going on pilgrimage, visiting people. So many of the book is her conversations with other people, but there's a really strong sense out of her feeling isolated.
But it's hard not to read, um, the text and feel her loneliness. In
Lydia Dugdale: my current clinical life, I have large numbers of patients that we refer to as unrepresented. The old language for this was un befriended who are sick and unable to make decisions for themselves. And these unrepresented patients have no one.
They have no family member, no adult children, no neighbor, no one in their lives. Who can help guide their medical decision making. And the number of patients I've cared for here in New York for whom that is true is, is an extraordinary number
Macie Bridge: to kick off solo, my series on solitude, loneliness, and being alone.
I'm speaking first with the center's own Miroslav Vo Marla's, thinking about what he calls aloneness. Loneliness and solitude foregrounded much of my thinking in the curation of these interviews. I'm thrilled for you to venture with us today into his previously unshared Theology of Aloneness, how this differs from a practice of solitude, humanity's need for relat.
And what we may learn of God when we go to God alone. Thanks for listening today,
Miroslav. It is always good to be with you, but especially good to be with you on the podcast today. Thank you for making time for this. Uh, I'm,
Miroslav Volf: I'm delighted.
Macie Bridge: So the idea for this series in the first place started because a little birdie told me that you had done some thinking a number of years ago on some ideas of.
Solitude and loneliness. Those were particularly poignant in our moment with the pandemic and those are themes that I've been thinking on in my own life and now it's kind of blossomed into this whole series on the podcast, and I'm grateful to have you offering to our listeners these initial ideas that that started your thinking on it, and which have inspired some of my thinking with our other guests on these ideas.
So. The big giant questions that I'm hoping we can get to today are thinking around what the place of solitude is to a flourishing life and what our responsibility. To our own loneliness or to loneliness of others should be, or maybe as we experience it now, how we can change that. Those are the biggest questions we could tackle.
But before we get there, I'm hoping that you might introduce us first to how you define loneliness, or I believe you've used the term aloneness, then how you differentiate it from solitude.
Miroslav Volf: Yeah. You know, I have been thinking off and on about solitude and about loneliness, about aloneness. The COVID Pandemic obviously accentuated this inexperiences of many.
I myself was not afflicted during COVID. I ended up coming to my office from where we are now recording this, and there was nobody in the whole building and I was just perfectly fine to work. Mm. Though I love being with other people. I wasn't troubled by spending days alone, so maybe the introvert me kind of kicked into gear and I was enjoying simply, simply working, and even that description a bit.
I could be alone for hours and not feel lonely and loneliness I take to be a sense that. I miss the contact with the other. I have been in myself kind of diminished, even emotionally rattled because I don't have anybody around, I don't have this affirming glance, I don't have a smile, I don't have somebody else.
Mm-hmm. Uh, they're present with me in my life and that's how I tend to, to think of loneliness. And there were times when I was lonely, not. During these hours, uh, during COVID. Solitude on the other hand, would probably be how I would describe those times. Solitude here in my particular case was solitude.
To attend to what I thought was really a task that I had before me undisturbed by other interactions. I was there to devote myself to it. Solitude can be for some particular task, but solitude can also. Be significant for my work on myself. Mm. Um, my own coming back to myself, being at one with myself and in that oneness with myself.
Finding strength, a new perspective for living with others or. Engaging in my tasks.
Macie Bridge: Mm. Mm-hmm. In some of your writing on this idea that you shared with me, you wrote a little bit about Adam and Eve and the creation story. Do you understand an experience of loneliness or having a sense of aloneness as fundamental to.
Our humanity on some level.
Miroslav Volf: You know, Adam's story is quite an interesting one. I think it comes to us in the process of the second account of creation. Mm-hmm. Which means Adam wasn't finished yet. Mm-hmm. Or the paradise wasn't finished yet. This was still, as things were in the process of being created.
And there we also see something about. The features of our humanity. A good friend of mine by the name of ek, the Economist from Jack Republic, he is written quite a bit about biblical stories and how they intersect with our economic imagination, and one of the things that he says. First emotion recorded in the Bible is that of loneliness.
Adam was lonely and I'm not sure whether it's right that it's a first emotion recorded when God says it is not good for human being to be alone. It means the world hasn't been created yet, but it there is a kind of indication here that. Being alone is not the state for which human beings are created.
We are social, profoundly social, uh, more broadly also, therefore also political kinds of animals. And in that sense. It's not good for us to be alone. It's not us to be alone. We are who we are in community, in community with others, and maybe we sense something about what is necessary for us in the process of becoming human.
I'm thinking for instance, of a newborn. You can feed a newborn, right? Uh mm-hmm. But if the newborn does not have touch, if the newborn doesn't have a look into their eyes, if there's no smell of another person, if a newborn cannot be held closely, the newborn will not develop, will not thrive, will not thrive, will not be what that.
The young little person was supposed to be. In that sense, it's clear that presence of others are just constitutive to who we as human beings are. In that sense, it's not good in almost like a metaphysical sense. It's not good for us to be alone. We hunt ourselves when we are simply. Alone. And I think then when we, in certain kinds of situations, when we are alone and feel that other people are missing, a certain sense of loneliness can come to be.
Macie Bridge: So then that leads me right into this very large question of then what is the place of solitude in a flourishing Christian life if we understand relationship as so fundamental Also too. The flourishing life.
Miroslav Volf: Yeah. So in a sense you can say we, we live in this dynamic relationship over time. Um, a time of togetherness with other people, time being alone by ourselves sometimes.
Togetherness with other people feels like, uh, penalty. Uh, you don't want to be, uh, with other people. There are too many of other people. Wrong kinds of other people. So our sociality has to be, so to speak, managed. It has to fit our own measure at any given time. I think the same is true also for our aloneness.
That too has to be measured. It can be. Very damaging for us. Mm-hmm. When we don't have a touch, that that leads us into life. When we don't have a recognition of another, that we are, when we are completely left, cut off other people. When we have a sense maybe that we are worthless, we are nobody. Mm-hmm.
Nobody cares for me, nobody wants to see me. I am completely left alone and almost like imagine I'm last human on the planet. That would be a kind of sense that some people might have because they feel simply, completely bereft of relationship. Now, the different kind of aloneness, which one can describe as solitude is aloneness, which is also constitutive of me.
Which I can, and which I need to properly come to myself and be in touch with who I am as myself. And you'll see, for instance, in the life of Jesus, that he takes time away from the crowds, away from his disciples, and he spends time in in prayer. That's, that's solitude. That's solitude. That. Brings one back in touch with who one is, and I think it reflects something that's really fundamental to us.
There are things in which other people cannot be my substitutes in which other people cannot function as in my place, which I cannot lean on them. Nobody can be born in my place. I must be born. Nobody can die in my place. I have to take that responsibility, or it happens to me. Somebody can help me in this, but it's happening.
It's happening to me as an individual. I think nobody can lead my life between birth and death in my place, I must do it, and in this specifically individual responsibility that I have. I have to kind of stabilize myself so that I know how to be myself in relationship with other people. And I think solitude is really important for that because otherwise we can get lost in the crowd.
For instance, we can get lost. The friendship and sometimes it's simply seeking to merge with the crowd. Then we become echoes, mere echoes of the crowd or mere echoes of the relationship, which, which we are so, so close. Sometimes it can be the crowd has invaded us. It's invaded our psyche, and no matter what we do, we just hear this sometimes not being able to recognize what's me, what's somebody else.
The same is true in individual relationships. Sometimes even in bad friendships. Bad religion will do that to you. Bad marriage will do that to you. Bad friendships and so forth. And in those kinds of situations, and more broadly, even when that's not the case, we need a place where we could. We could stand by ourselves, see ourselves as we are seen by others, think about our identity, come back to ourselves so that we don't end up in all the exchanges that we have with others.
Kind of lost. We don't lose ourselves to ourselves. We're lost. We're not who we are. And suddenly we find ourselves, well what? What has become me?
Macie Bridge: Before we share the rest of today's episode? Here's what's coming up next time in our limited series solo, I had the luxury of
Laura Marris: being close to like these marshlands where I could just like get. Knee deep in marsh mud and look at all the crabs and the birds and things coming through. I think that kind of proximity combined with my dad's nudging to notice and to name.
Also, I think like names can be kind of important, not for some kind of exact classification or memorization, but. The name of a plant or an animal can be the beginning of that creature's story, you know, their life history.
Macie Bridge: Glad you're with us now, back to the episode. When we do have these feelings of loneliness as I think that in many ways people may encounter.
Acute loneliness when they're circumstantially in situations of solitude, but perhaps don't have a strong sense of self or a strong sense of seeking self in God as you're kind of naming as a positive of an experience of solitude. As Christians, I think I worry about a danger in suspecting that an experience of loneliness is a fault of.
Relationship with God. I think that there's a line of thinking that might suggest that to grapple with feelings of loneliness. We are not. Seeking relationship with God well enough or that that's a fault in our faith.
Miroslav Volf: Yeah, that's that. That is often the case, more and more kind of pious circles among consensus that I remember also talking to my mother.
She would often think that as if somehow God is not enough and she needs something in addition, but God. Say by definition should be enough. Right? And God isn't enough. I think in a sense that what this kind of attitude forgets is that we are social and material beings. Mm-hmm. Which is to say that we live as part of environments that we cannot, and even our relationship to God cannot be.
Extracted from the relationship in which we are so that you could have this pure relationship with God, that should be enough. And then you have other relationship. It seems to me that very often relationship to God come to us are mediated by relationship to others. And so it's not that I am with God in solitude, but I'm.
Away from God. When I'm with others, yes, both in solitude and with others, I, in many ways can be seen as being with God, and I think this kind of idea that even when I'm with others, I. There before God and with God. It's interesting what Di Bon says, uh, when, um, he discusses the creation, uh, of a woman who ends up being named Eve later on, and he says that, that the other human being for us is a limit, which I think is very interesting concept because other human being occupy space mm-hmm.
Is in time. And to me, that other human being. Is a limit that I cannot and ought not transgress. And you can see already in that giving of the limit. The giving on of another human being as a limit in the account of creation. There is a sense that already they're in relationship to that other. I am in relationship to God, honoring other, I do honor God.
Mm-hmm. At the same time, dishonoring other, I dishonor God at the same time. This kind of sense that other is demand, but other is demanding of me. This respect for the limit is a mode in which I engage in, in which I am spiritual. Because I honor this space, I have to withdraw. I cannot transgress it. The moment I transgress it, the moment I do not honor and love that other person, they become negative limit for me.
They're that against Twitch. Under whatever circumstances, my freedom bumps, and when my freedom bumps at them as an undesirable limit, I end up not just indifferent to them. Often I end up hating them. This kind of proximity then can be for me, in those cases, it can be a sense of kind of loss of my own calling to my own life.
So all this to say is that having another person as my companion, living together with others is a mode of expressing my creature hood and my responsibility to other, to love them and to honor them. And in that I recognize. Who I am before God. I am one of the many creatures that God had made, and this is part and parcel of my relationship to God.
So I have relationship with God in relationship with others, but I have relationship with God also in my relationship myself before God. You can put it this way. When I am in solitude, I have relationship to God through my relationship to myself. When I'm with others, I have relationship with God through my relationship with them.
When I am with the environment, uh, when I'm with the animals, I have relationship to God in my relationship to them. Bongo is very interesting on this, by the way, and you find that in that text in Genesis two. Because he talks that about God first bringing animals to Adam and to figure out as a response to the problem, Adam was alone, whether Adam would recognize himself.
And so rather than dismissing the animals as sometimes, oh, those are just inadequate now. The woman is created now everything's good. Bon for other things. Uh, no, they're, they're also compan. Mm. There are wordly creatures. They're companions, but but they're just not fully adequate companion for, but they too are a limit, right?
So it's a kind of world of limits in which IE exist, and sometimes in solitude I reflect before God or myself in the environment with the others. What is it that's happening to me? In relationship to others, what is it that I'm doing to others? Mm-hmm. In relationship with them. And that's how spirituality is nurtured in this time alone.
And yet in this time alone, I'm alone and I bring others and myself to God, so as to shape the way in which I live in the world.
Macie Bridge: This is making me reflect on something else you shared with me recently, which is some thinking around sensory experiences of the gospel and touch, and I've been thinking a lot about the ways that touch is so present in Jesus's ministry.
Mm-hmm. It's so fundamental to. Most of the miracles and just Jesus's way of being with people. I mean, that is the incarnation. God was in a body, God was with us. Um, we spoke a little bit about Mary's anointing of Jesus and the significance of her kissing Jesus's feet. And as I've been reflecting on that, I've had moments of.
Feeling disappointed of, well, why can't my relationship with Jesus include such physicality? And then I, I catch myself realizing that I don't think that God has intended to leave us bereft of relationship in these very concrete, very physical ways. Simply because Jesus is no longer with us in the flesh in that sense.
And this is where we need Eucharistic theology as well. But, um, I think I have been reflecting a bit on is this the role of the church in response to our problem of loneliness in the world as it's being named at large. To take seriously our responsibility to each other, to be physically present and not just as solution to our own individual loneliness, but as in living out.
The gospel.
Miroslav Volf: Mm-hmm. That, that's really great question. I like the way you pose it and it seems to me that as physical beings, we are beings of senses and all of our senses are also. Modalities of touch, perhaps you might say. A site is not a modality of touch. That's a very distant right. The rest of them seem to be forms of touch.
Some more intimate, others less. But even the size also, it's, it's real interesting. I was just reading, uh, a recently I've started reread reading, uh, ques book of hours. His poems in German. I like to read them in, in German. I, I, I have a translation, which I think is really lousy and sometimes, sometimes it helps me a little, but, uh, but often doesn't.
And in very first poem, he says, my seeing is ripe. And then he says, and the things come to me. As a bride. So in a sense of what I imagine here, that there's a relationship between the seeing self and the things one sees, but he see is as a ripe fruit so that whatever he sees. Feels welcome to come to it, is invited to enjoy the site.
Mm-hmm. With which they're being seen. And in that sense, it's the bride that comes to the one who sees because it's affirmed and, and sees the beauty in the seeing itself. Right? Yeah. So even in that, uh, activity, activity of simply seeing how do I see others, how do I see the other person when they pass me?
They're not touched, they're not spoken to. They're just being seen. Even there, our site can be ripe so that it invites the other person in a sense to come to us. Or in a sense to feel that they're welcome to come to us. And of course it's true of other senses as well. And I think you're right to take us to the church as a site of where we encounter others in very much a material kind of away.
Now census is also where we. Can be very lonely.
Evan Rosa: Yes.
Miroslav Volf: Where we can be very intimate and very lonely at the same time. So that they're very ambivalent kinds of things that we're at our best in our senses and we're at our worst.
Macie Bridge: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh,
Miroslav Volf: in our senses and in that sense. I, I think it requires senses, require, census, require a really particular spirituality.
And the fear of the census, I think was there because. So much can go wrong. Hmm. And hence they require disciplines. And what I mentioned earlier about what Bon mentioned often through senses that we transgress against the limit that the other. Presents Absolutely. Um, make and remake the other into something that they're not and do not wish to be at all.
So they're both a site where the communion and where overcoming of solitude happens in a very. Concrete way of somebody's lonely. Especially we have so many people who live alone, elderly people who live alone, who are probably never touched by somebody else. Uh, we go there, we spend time. We see, we smell.
We. Talk, um, sensuality is there in a, in a kind of pure sense of sensuality, is there, and, and they flower, they blossom. Mm-hmm. They open up because that's what that relationship does. At the same time, I was just, as you know, I'm, I'm steeped in those stev. Yes. And so, so I, I, I listen multiple times, uh, his great, uh, great novels.
Uh, and just recently I was listening to Crime and Punishment and there is this, uh, one elderly woman. She is generally alone, but she is also pawn Broker, and that's the person that just called, he comes. One easily becomes alone as she was, or she was hoping that she would be, she would be alone. One could become very easily prey to others, uh, violence.
And that violence can take so many different forms, and my sense is sometimes that our loneliness comes from the fear of being violated. Of other people not respecting the limit. And one thing worse than being alone for many people is to be violated, being in communion, being in a company of others. So that that idea of respecting the limit.
And loving one who takes space and creates a limit for us. That, in a sense, ends up being a, a, a kind of a key to overcoming both solitudes, loneliness of our own and loneliness of others. So, because when we attend to loneliness of others, in some ways, we tend to our own. Loneliness. If we do it well, we discover ourselves afresh and, and new, and are nourished by the very food that we give others.
Macie Bridge: Hmm. That's so rich. So one of the questions that I wanted to ask you is, or the listener who is coming to this episode, perhaps sitting with their own feelings of loneliness or who has had experiences of loneliness. And presumably we'll have more experiences of loneliness to come. What are the questions you think we should be asking of those emotions?
Miroslav Volf: That's way beyond my pay grade to answer this. I am, uh, so, so I'll, I'll say what I often say when I'm asked a very concrete, practical question. I am a systematic theologian, which is to say, or constructive theologian, which is to say that I am impractical theologian.
I have no idea how to answer these, these questions we have, we have addressed some of the, uh, some of the questions. Already, but you know, for me, do I dare to be alone? Mm-hmm. How do I practice pulling myself out, resisting the temptation to be immersed? Where do I. Draw strength when I feel lonely, or how do I overcome the fear and extend a word, smile, touch to another person.
We often, especially I think somehow in this, um, socially connected, uh, age, uh, physical kind of connection ends up being very difficult. And we're clumsy. We are unwilling. We feel that we are. Burden to each other rather than in some ways relieving their own loneliness. And we end up as those teenagers that I see every time I drive to, to work, uh, waiting for, uh, for a school bus.
Uh, they've been there for five years on that same corner every single day. And they are saying nothing to each other. They're just looking at their. Phones and there is a no sense of some kind of connection between them that there's, they're completely disconnected. So, so my sense would be questions that I ask myself are, are some, some such, uh, questions, or how do I become part of something larger in which I can contribute?
Inversely, how do I avoid being swallowed by it? How do I. Find and root my sense of who I am before God, who has established me as a human being and as a human being. And communion questions are interminable, uh, for me. Mm-hmm. Because this, this issue of being alone, being with others, and how does one be alone?
Well with oneself and how does Swan be well with others? These two questions are just about the fundamental questions, uh, of, of our lives. And how do I come to think that I don't need to give anything concrete to somebody to relieve their loneliness? How do I discover that? By sheer being, having a loving attitude toward them, by them discovering that I honor a firm, cherish them as they are, that that's probably the one of the most important things that I can do for another person.
We're so utilitarian in what we think love is. Okay. And then miss the subtler, and I think in some ways, more important ways of being there for other people. Hmm.
Macie Bridge: Amen. That is not an impractical answer. Is there anything else on this subject that you feel like we missed
Miroslav Volf: in this area where, where, uh, importance of being alone?
I have a phrase here that I didn't mention when I talked about it. Nobody can be born on my place. Nobody can. I think behind it lies nobody can be me instead of me.
Laura Marris: Yes,
Miroslav Volf: I must be me. And since I must. Be me to be me. Well, I need times with myself and getting to know me, working on my, on myself, naming myself to myself, going through.
Um, kind of narrating myself to myself and seeing whether I recognize myself in my narration. So deeper knowledge of myself, deeper knowledge of the effects that I have on others and what I do with the effects that I have. On others, how do I manage them? How do I grow in relationship as myself in relationship to others?
For all of this, it seems to me that I need to be alone. I need solitude.
Evan Rosa: Mm-hmm.
Miroslav Volf: I need to be freed from the noise, uh, and then engage in the process of self. Transformation. One. Transformation by the voice of God. My mother always, uh, was talking about when she prayed every morning. We all knew mom has to be left on her own, whether we are at home, summers, especially when we didn't go to school.
Eight o'clock, breakfast is finished everything hour of prayer. She's alone. We have very small. So there's a room. She should not be disturbed. Shouldn't be loud. She, she's there and she cherished this very much. And then she told me that she has learned how to hear God speak. And she said there were hours and months and I didn't hear a thing.
I didn't know anything. And it took me a while, almost like a Samuel. Hearing when God speaks, you hear and recognize God's voice. Right? That's how she thought about it. When the, the Samuel, the child had to be taught by what Eli is that, and Eli is, uh, mm-hmm. Uh, superior there. So my mother said, I, I, I need to, over the years, I need to, I needed to learn how to hear God speak to me.
And then she came to that point and could recognize, and then she would not leave. Before God. She had a sense. God spoke to her. To her. Those were precious times because she, in those encounters, she was, she was then back in a sense herself. She was there to face the day to face, uh, naughty teenagers. Uh, my, my sister was good.
I, I was a problem. And, uh, everything else. And my father was a minister and the minister's wife, uh, in a small community that we had this just terrible. Mm-hmm. Everybody was gossiping, everybody was trying to, expecting something, uh, that you should do. And so it, it was a very difficult situation. Wonderful.
He. Uh, rich in a sense, growing mm-hmm. Community, but that was an important part of being, for her, being alone. Now I can do a thing like that. I don't know. This is so beautiful to me, Uhhuh and so not me.
Macie Bridge: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. She, she learned how to listen to God in order to listen to you.
Miroslav Volf: I know. And I benefit from that.
And then, then I feel, why can't I do that? And, mm-hmm. Why am I so deaf? Why am I so unable? Unable to pray? Well. So, so that's, uh, so when I'm alone that, that, those are my questions. Why am I so clumsy? God, before you
Macie Bridge: av, thank you so much for your time on the podcast today. I'm grateful.
Miroslav Volf: I'm delighted. I think this topic is really. Important, and I'm glad you're taking time to do a whole series, mark.
Macie Bridge: I think a number of people will be touched by your thoughts, so thank you
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 Miroslav Volf, interview by 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.
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