The Loneliness Epidemic
One year ago, the United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a warning that our nation is suffering gravely from a new epidemic. Not opioids. Not vaping. Not a particular substance or behavior. Something less visible and therefore all the more insidious: loneliness.
He tells the story of a patient who won the lottery. This man “had worked for years in the food industry with a modest salary and humble lifestyle. Then he won the lottery. Overnight, his life changed. He quit his job and moved into a large house in a gated community.”
But as he sat across from his doctor, “he sadly declared, ‘Winning the lottery was one of the worst things that ever happened to me.’ Wealthy but alone, this once vivacious, social man no longer knew his neighbors and had lost touch with his former co-workers. He soon developed high blood pressure and diabetes.”
I imagine this man as having become the king of a lonely kingdom, surrounded by every comfort and convenience, plugged into an array of virtual entertainment networks, having food delivered at the click of a button. Maybe that’s an exaggeration of what actually happened, but I imagine it captures the nature of his experience. Richer materially but poorer relationally. Connected to devices but disconnected from reality. Afforded every pleasure, but sick to the soul.
Of course very few of us will ever win the lottery. The loneliness epidemic is not a matter of suddenly coming into money but rather a gradual distortion that has permeated our society. Prophets have been warning us for years. Nearly four decades ago, Neil Postman published his book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), a prescient analysis of how the television was turning politics and religion into show business, transforming our social discourse into a matter of personal entertainment, where the concern is not what makes us well but me happy. Fifteen years later, Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone struck a chord with many readers. Putnam’s research revealed a steady decline in community life. Whether we were bowling or dining or working, we were doing it—more and more—alone.
It is difficult to identify a single culprit responsible for our loneliness epidemic. Is it an unrelenting working culture, where relationships are sacrificed for advancement? Is it materialism, that is, a spirit of greed that misidentifies happiness with having things instead of being in relationship? Is it technology and the lure of control, the ability to point and click on a screen and get whatever we want, so that we all become little emperors of our own lonely empires?
Original Connection
“If you want to know where you’re going, you’ve got to know where you’ve come from.” So an old saying goes. To understand our loneliness epidemic and how we might live well in its midst, it may help to remember first wherever we’ve come from.
According to the creation story of Genesis 2, we are kin. Kin to the earth. Kin to other creatures. Kin to one another. Kin to God. This is perhaps more evident in the Hebrew. The first human, adam, is formed from the earth, adamah. Thus, a more faithful translation for “human” would be “earthling.” We are made from the earth. And we are made for the earth. God puts the human in the garden “to till it and keep it,” or more literally “to serve it and protect it” (Gen 2:15). The earth is not a resource to be used and discarded, but a close relation to be cared for, even as it cares already for us.
Similarly there is a linguistic link between humanity and the animal world. Both are referred to by the same Hebrew expression, nephesh chayyah, “living being” (Gen 2:7, 19). (Interestingly, most English translation make an artificial distinction between humans and animals by translating this one phrase as “living being” for human but “living creature” for animals.)
Man and woman are ish and ishah. (You can hear the connection.) While traditional interpretation holds that man came first (and some readers have taken this interpretation further to reflect man’s superiority), the ancient rabbis point out that the specific word for man, ish, only appears after the rib has been removed from the adam. In other words, at first there is a genderless adam, and only after the divine surgery do we get ish and ishah, “man” and “woman.” (And to put to rest the other argument for man’s superiority, namely that woman is created as a “helper” and is therefore somehow secondary, one need only look elsewhere in scripture to see that the same word for “helper” is also applied to God. In this light, the word “helper” would suggest, if anything, woman’s superiority.)
Of all humanity’s connections, our kinship to God may be the most neglected, the most forgotten. When we read in the gospels that Jesus hears a voice on the banks of the Jordan, declaring, “You are my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased,” our reflex is to think that this is a proclamation that sets him apart, when in fact it is part of the very gospel, the very good news, that he has come to proclaim. We are each and every one of us beloved sons and daughters of God, his breath within us, his favor upon us.
Genesis tells us that God’s creation is good. Every day, God looks upon God’s work and sees that it is good (cf. Gen 1). But there is one thing that is not good in God’s eyes. “It is not good,” the Lord God said, “that the man should be alone” (Gen 2:18). Even though this pronouncement is pointed toward the lack of a particular connection, namely that between two flesh-and-soul bonded persons, it suggests a basic principle of God’s creation. Isolation, or disconnection, is not good. We are deprived of life to the extent that we are disconnected. Whether from God, one another, our fellow animals, or the earth.
Sin as Epidemic
If creation is good, and its goodness has to do with connection, then “the Fall” tells the tragic story of disconnection. It all starts with the craftiest of animals, the serpent, who suggests to the woman that she may eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the one tree from which God has forbidden the humans to eat. (And let it be noted that the woman’s husband is standing passively beside her, equally complicit in whatever follows.)
What exactly is the tree of knowledge of good and evil? Some readers think its fruit confers the ability to distinguish between good and evil. (To my thinking, this would be a bit odd, as it would seem to suggest the humans are otherwise incapable of making the distinction. How then could they be held responsible for doing wrong, for eating from the tree?) I find more compelling the suggestion that “knowledge of good and evil” is really just a way to say “knowledge of everything.” In other words, just as the biblical writers say “heaven and earth” to refer to the breadth of the universe (heaven and earth and everything between), so they might say “good and evil” to refer to the breadth of human experience. In this view, the tree would simply promise its eaters more knowledge. And as we like to say, knowledge is power. Thus the real lure of the tree is to be in control—or as the serpent says, “to be like God” (Gen 3:5). (As shrewd a manipulator as the serpent is, I have to wonder if he hasn’t already eaten from the tree himself.)
If the exact nature of the tree is in any doubt, the consequences of eating from it certainly aren’t. There is hiding and shame. There is finger-pointing and blame. The man accuses the woman, and the woman accuses the serpent. And then there are the consequences that God soberly outlines, not—I would suggest—as arbitrary punishments but as the natural consequences of their chosen behavior. Their shame and blaming now manifests as antagonism: between man and woman, human and creature, even humans and the earth from which they came. They are now, in a word, disconnected.
It is common today to think of sin as an individual stain on our soul, tragically inherited from our most ancient ancestors. But as it is depicted in today’s story and throughout much of the Bible, sin is not a defining mark against an individual but an event of disconnection that has a domino effect on all the world around. Sin disconnects. It is not a pollution of the soul so much as it is of the waters in which we all swim. We might call sin an epidemic.
God’s Project of Reconnection
“If you want to know where you’re going, you’ve got to know where you’ve come from.” There are endless ways we could summarize the story of where we’ve come from, which is the story of creation and “the Fall.” In the midst of our loneliness epidemic, here’s how I would summarize it. God made us intimately connected with all creation and with God as well. It is good to be connected. But our lust for control disconnected us from all the goodness of God’s creation.
And that story continues today. We ravage the earth for its limited resources. We fight others to get our way. We reach for the skies through our advancing technologies and forget the God whose breath dwells within us. When we prioritize control, we forfeit connection. What seems good to us, “a delight to the eyes” (Gen 3:6)—whether that’s money, power, or prestige, all of which promise control—ends up separating us from what is actually good. As the Surgeon General’s lonely patient lamented, “Winning the lottery was the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
Today marks the beginning of a year-long journey through the biblical story from creation to the kingdom of God, following the roadmap of the Narrative Lectionary. As we look back to where we’ve come from, we perhaps gain a clearer sense of where we’re going. Just as the story of the Fall is bigger than our individual soul, so too the story of salvation. If sin is indeed an epidemic of disconnection, then what else is salvation but a grand project of reconnection? Paul puts it like this: “Through [Christ] God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross” (Col 1:19-20). The salvation of Christ is the reconciliation—or reconnection—of all things. And we who are reconciled, who can appreciate this divine project of reconnection, we are invited to join in the work. God has given us, Paul says, “the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:18).
If the prospect of universal reconciliation seems daunting or unlikely to us, it is possible that we are looking at things through the faulty lens of control, thinking reconnection is a result that must be carefully engineered. But the good news that we see in Christ is the opposite. We are not in control. We are not meant to lord it over others. Instead, we are already in God’s care. All that we are invited to do is to extend that care to others. As we will see next week in Abraham, God’s way of reconciliation is not calculating or grandiose. It’s quite simple. It happens one person at a time.
Prayer
Tender God,
Whose reconciling embrace we know in Christ,
Calibrate our hearts to be like yours,
To value peace more than understanding,
Love more than knowledge,
Connection more than control.
Make us ambassadors of your reconciliation,
In Christ, who makes peace, bearing the cross instead of the sword: Amen.
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