The Substance That Sustains Us
Traveling through the U.S. in the 1990s, Mother Teresa made an astute observation. The great American illness, she said, isn’t heart disease or cancer. It is loneliness.
Today our society is connected in ways largely unimagined when Mother Teresa made that comment. We have myriad forms of instantaneous communication, yet increasingly less connection.
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a report in 2023 citing what he called “an epidemic of loneliness and isolation” in the U.S., leading to increased risk of heart disease, stroke and dementia in older people.
The great Trappist monk and spiritual teacher Thomas Merton recognized our burgeoning dilemma decades ago. In words as resonant today as when he wrote them in 1968, Merton said, “The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words. It is beyond speech. It is beyond concepts.”
Merton added that we didn’t need to create a new unity. We needed to recognize an old unity, one as ancient as the utterings of the prophet Isaiah and as powerful as Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount.
“My dear brothers,” Merton told a gathering in Calcutta, “We are already one. But we imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be, is what we are.”
Just how disconnected we have become was on broad display this past week when one of the world’s richest men, Elon Musk, bragged on social media of shutting down the humanitarian agency, USAID. With the press of a computer key, Musk took food and clean water from the mouths of some of the world’s poorest people, deprived diseased children of necessary medicine, and much more.
Musk then lamented on the social media platform he owns that he had worked on a weeend to shut down USAID, when he could have been going to parties.
Think about it for a second. What kind of a person says something like that?
In many ways Musk’s comments were no less heartless than the President of the United States telling the famished, shell-shocked people of Gaza — who have seen their homes crushed, their children dismembered — that he would like to turn their shattered land into a real estate version of the French Riviera. One I’m sure he would welcome them to live in. You think?
This week our country celebrates Valentine’s Day, that emblem of romantic love. As important as romance is to our capacity to live and love, what we seem to need at this moment in our history is something more basic. What what we need is relationship, fundamental friendship — the spark that sustains us.
The 12th century English monk St. Aelred of Rivaulx saw friendship as sacramental, a tangible sign of God’s grace in the world. True friendship, he said, is “spiritual friendship.” It rests on two principles: bene voluntas and caritas. Mutual good will and caring.
In a beautiful turn of phrase, he said friends are to be “the guardians of each other’s souls
In true friendships, “you may entrust all the secrets of your heart,” Aelred wrote. “And what is more delightful than to unite spirit to spirit and so to make one out of two?”
I have been blessed with many “spiritual friendships,” built on mutual goodwill and caring. As someone who married later in life and often worked in cities where I had no relatives, my friends became the substance that held my life together. They celebrated my accomplishments, grieved my disappointments, and helped me feel less alone in the world.
The Vice President of the United States offered a twisted lesson in relationship-building this past week, attempting perhaps to show off his credentials as a convert to Catholicism. As usual, it’s quesionable what catechism he’s been reading. As in the past, Vance tortured the truth to fit his politcal perspective.
In the wake of the USAID shutdown, Vance cited a 5th century concept dating back to St. Augustine known ordo amoris. Vance claimed ordo amoris calls on us to love in a hierarchal order. At the top of the list is love for one’s family, then one’s neighbor, one’s communuty, one’s fellow countrymen, and finally — if anything is left over, I suppose — the rest of the world.
In reality, Augustine’s (and later St. Thomas Aquinas’) view of ordo amoris was far more nuanced. This, instead, is the gospel according to Vance. It isn’t the gospel of Jesus, who preached a radical love in which we care for not only those closest to us, but our perceived enemies as well. Jesus says be like the Samaritan man who stops to help a stranger, a member from an adversary tribe. Jesus says “blessed are the merciful.”
This week, in the wake of so much troubling news, my longtime friend Bob sent me this line from the novel “Middlemarch,” spoken by George Eliot’s heroine Dorothea Brooke: “What do we live for if it is not to make life less difficult to each another.”
As we exchange our valentines with those we love, let us also remember the friends who stopped to spend time with us, as the Samaritan did for a stranger on the road. Can we demand that our nation remain a caring one, even if our leaders aren’t? How can we we stop the scourge of loneliness?
A tall order for sure, but our lives depend on it.
