Life Together—and the Soundtrack of Loneliness

Re-imagining our public and private loves

There is something strange about me that you should know: I don’t listen to music. It’s not that I never listen to music. It’s certainly not that I don’t like music. It’s just that I didn’t develop the habit of listening to music years ago, and now the music-verse feels too big, too overwhelming to begin deciding what I like and don’t like. I had it in my mind to ask family and friends to make me playlists of their favorite music for my 50^th birthday, but like the big birthday bash we wanted to plan, this has also been postponed.

I don’t listen to music, but I am interested to see how large a role music plays in the life of my children. Their lives have a soundtrack. Their days are accompanied. Last night, as we ate dinner on the back deck, our 16-year-old twin boys shared the songs they chose for a class project at their Christian high school. The purpose of the project is to choose songs that are “secular” but yet suggest something of our longing for God. One of the boys chose Rod Wave’s “Never Mind”:

Didn’t want to add you to that list, no

Of lost, broken love

And now the weather’s startin’ to change

Leaves starting to fall

Summer’s here, I’m still all alone.

The other chose Hippo Campus’s “Slipping Away”:

Slipping away, slipping away

stalled out, think we got, no

gas in the tank, gas in the tank

Someone fill me up.

We listened to the songs last night, and though I prodded the boys both with questions, they weren’t all that forthcoming about their reasons for choosing these songs. But I could guess at them, especially to remember a day we drove home from school last year and listened to Justin Bieber’s “Lonely”:

What if you had it all

But nobody to call?

Maybe then you’d know me

‘Cause I’ve had everything

But no one’s listening

And that’s just lonely.

Theirs is a lonely generation. In fact, we are all lonely people. And loneliness, at its very core, suggests that we are made for companionship—for life together, as Bonhoeffer put it. To be clear, loneliness is not the state of being alone. No, as I watch my mother and those around her growing old, I see that to age well requires capacity for being alone. I am in conversation with God about the growing “lonesomeness” in my season of life, as our children leave home and the days grow quieter. God, can you give me joy, even when I am alone? In fact, can you become my source of exceeding joy?

The loneliness I’m identifying in these songs is not lonesomeness. It is not being alone. Rather, it is estrangement from others. It’s disconnection from the life together for which we have been made. To read the Bible is to understand that we are made for a relationship with God and with our neighbor. To read the Bible is also to see our self-sabotage, to see that while we are most deeply satisfied in relationship, we choose isolation—even when we don’t think we are choosing it.

It’s no small secret that loneliness is a public health crisis. For one, I think many of us lack the understanding of how to do life together, with all the complications of misunderstanding, conflict, desire, disappointment, sin. To live well together, there is much to learn—and isn’t it good to be reminded that learning is required in the realm of relationships? Misunderstanding this, sometimes we choose loneliness in choosing distance from the emotional work that all relationships require. I see this more and more, and it saddens me. People refusing the burdens of marriage, of parenting. People estranging themselves from members of their family rather than engaging the messy work of confession and repair. There are many of us who want relationships like we want our ramen: microwavable, with only a plastic bowl and spoon to dispose of afterwards. If you want instant-hot relationships without clean-up, you’ll have loneliness instead.

But evading the work of relationship is only way of choosing loneliness. In reading Willie James Jennings's commentary on Acts this last week, I saw two other ways we as humans misdirect our heart’s yearning for relationship with God and with others. Although Jennings is more theologically progressive than I am, drawing some conclusions I can’t support, there were nevertheless two important questions I saw him posing that I hadn’t previously considered.

First: What, in the formation of this new community by the Spirit of God, were the repercussions for nationalism—and the longing for patriotic community under a flag?

Second: What, in the formation of this new community by the Spirit of God, were the repercussions for marriage—and the longing for private community as a couple?

It’s impossible to miss the theme of life together in the first chapters of Acts, as the church is born to bear living witness to the reality of the Jesus who has died and been buried, who is now resurrected and ascended. God’s people are gathered together; they are worshipping together, praying together, and giving radically of their resources to eliminate material need within the community. This isn’t simple the conversion of persons but of a people.

With regard to nationalism: What’s clear is that the Spirit is building a trans-national, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic community, one that transgresses boundaries of nation and tongue and race. The implication is clear: that love for a nation will always be secondary to love for God’s church. If patriotism is a good (and Jennings does not think it so), it is always a secondary devotion. I am not entirely aligned with Jennings here, but I did find this an incredibly perceptive insight: “Nationalism remains a powerful way of imagining life together because it is a theological vision that mimics the desire of God for our full communion with each other. It is communion with God or God simply used as a slogan” (22).

Here's the point entirely relevant to our political moment: We are made for a life of belonging, but belonging can never be found in a political party or a national identity. Partisanship and patriotism mimic the communion we’re meant to find through Christ and in his church. They are substitutes, counterfeits, to the real good. To say it even more strongly, when we place our hopes in political outcomes and national allegiances, we are now in the realm of sin. Sin—please don’t forget—isn’t just doing the wrong or neglecting the good. Sin is misplacing our hopes and misdirecting our loves. It’s making ultimate what is only secondarily good.

If I can push this point just a little bit further, this is what makes me abhor some of the sensibilities of MAGA orthodoxy. To hear it from some, it’s not just that you must vote for Trump; you must laud him as Lord, as the only God-given solution to the crumbling world. Just look at the imagery, the iconography, the mythology surrounding the man whom God saved from an assassin’s bullet. Whom God practically raised to life again. It is not incidental that people stormed the Capitol with “Jesus Saves” banners. It was integral to the project of making religious the movement and messianic its leader. There may be reasons for voting for Trump (and reasons for voting for Harris), but Christians should go to the polls with clear-headed confidence in the real promise of life together—a promise that cannot be assailed by the outcome of the next presidential election.

With regard to marriage: As I read Acts 5, which tells the story of Ananias and Sapphira who withhold some of the proceeds from the sale of their land and are struck dead by God who sees and knows all, it was impossible not to see how their “togetherness” was a corrupted form of life together in the wider church community. “But a man named Ananias, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property, and with his wife’s knowledge he kept back for himself some of the proceeds,” (vv. 1, 2). Peter confronts Ananias, and he dies on the spot. Hours later, Sapphira comes in, and Peter questions her. When she lies, just as her husband did, he rebukes her: “How is it that you have agreed together to test the Spirit of the Lord?”( v. 9).

Suddenly, we’re meant to see a unity that is a faux-unity—a togetherness that is not a Spirit-togetherness. Jennings picks up on this, calling Ananias and Sapphira a “sovereign couple.” He writes, “The witness of the love of God for all creation and creatures is always at risk in the attention-stealing reality of modern coupling” (57). Marriage, in the modern imagination, often becomes an exclusionary project. Me and mine. Ours and our children. We do not see that couples exist within the church and for a wider kingdom purpose. “A couple,” Jennings writes, “can be a space of safety and freedom only as it participates in a space of safety and freedom for a gathering community. Only in a space of shared intimate life may a couple be spared from its own idolatry and its use as a destructive power,” (59).

If the church saves us from the idolatrous community of partisan loyalty, the church also saves us from the idolatrous community of the modern couple. Marriage is not primarily for the married, but primarily for the world. It is sign and symbol of a greater reality, of Christ’s love for his church. When we place all of our hopes for relational satisfaction and personal wholeness on our marriage, it is a weight too big, too cumbersome for the reality to sustain.

So here is the larger point: we are endowed with longings for communion, with God and others—and yet we are guaranteed to look for that love in all the wrong places. We must be attentive to the ways in which we chose self-protection rather than self-giving, and we must also be attentive to the ways in which we ask too much—of our institutions and of others—to save us from the loneliness that is part of the human condition in the now and not-yet.

I need you—and you need me. And most of all, as we see in Acts, we need God’s church.