By Reverend Laurie DeMott

“A breeze of about seven knots per hour,” I thought as I glanced at the flag hanging from its post in the yard. “Maybe 7 knots per hour from the southwest,” I estimated. In other words, a pretty good day for sailing.

I’m not a meteorological genius but I have learned a few important indicators helpful for the beginning sailor. If the flag in the front yard at my family’s cottage is hanging perfectly still, it means there is no wind. And that means it probably won’t be very good sailing. If, on the hand, the flag is flapping at a 90 degree angle to the ground, it means there is way too much wind, and anyone who attempts sailing will undoubtedly end up swimming instead. On that particular morning, the flag was waving at a 45 degree angle holding pretty steady. The sun was out, the waves were shallow, the wind was onshore, steady, and not too strong: all indicators looked good for a sail. In fact, there was only one problem that day: I was all by myself. Now normally, I don’t mind this at all. A few days of interrupted quiet away from email, phone calls, and my nieces’ chatter gives me time to catch up on the stack of books that piles up the rest of the year, but sitting in my cottage reading all by myself is one thing. Heading out onto Lake Ontario in a 9 foot sailboat with no guarantee that the wind won’t suddenly strengthen or catch the boom in an accidental jibe and capsize me unceremoniously into the brink all by myself is another thing altogether. I didn’t want to forego my few chances to sail this summer just because I was alone and yet I felt reluctant to venture out without the assurance of another watchful eye back on shore. What to do?

Well, this is what I came up with:

I rigged my boat very carefully; I tightened my life jacket securely; I tied some extra paddles to the deck; I stowed a cell phone in a waterproof floating dry bag in the boat; and then, right before launching, I called my son John.... 130 miles away in Rochester.

“Hey, John,” I said into his voice mail. “It’s 9:00 am and I’m leaving you this message to tell you I’m going sailing. I’ll call you when I get back. If you don’t hear from me by tonight, you’ll want to check up on me and if I did drown while I was out, don’t forget Zack is up here and will need to be fed.”

And then I went sailing.

I didn’t capsize and I didn’t drown. And I know that leaving a voice mail with someone 3 and a half hours away would not have saved me if I had capsized but at least it made me feel like there was someone out there in the world who would notice if I suddenly disappeared. My phone call, while not really of much practical use, psychologically reinforced my sense of connectedness with my community of caring and reminded me that I am not alone in the world no matter how it may have felt at that moment.

Psychologists point out that loneliness is not the absence of people around you; loneliness is the absence of a feeling of connection to others. Loneliness is the sense that there is no one out there watching over you, no one out there who cares about you, no one to even miss you if you are gone. We have heard the sad stories of elderly men or women who died alone in their homes and were not discovered for weeks because there was no one to check on them but we also know – and have sometimes experienced ourselves – that you can be lonely even in the midst of a hundred personal interactions every day. Spouses going through rocky times can feel profoundly lonely as they struggle with the sense that their own husband or wife has become a stranger to them. The single woman trying to raise children on a meager salary can be so consumed with childcare and work that she longs for just one sympathetic adult voice in her life. Every time I watch the news footage of flood or hurricane refugees, I realize that it is the socially isolated who suffer the most in tragedy because they have no ties to family, friends, church, or community to assure them that they are not alone in their struggle. If a hurricane blew down my house, I at least know that I have a wealth of family, friends, neighbors, and church members who will house me and help me rebuild my life. So even when I am by myself at my cottage, I know that there are people to call, people out there who care about me – I know my connections remain strong. Loneliness is the feeling that you belong to no one.

Thousands of years ago, the Biblical writers proclaimed that human beings were created to be in relationship with others. In the story of Adam and Eve, after God makes Adam, God says, “It is not good for this man to be alone, ” and so God populates Eden with a diversity of animals and finally creates another human being – Eve – to sit with Adam after a long day tending the garden sharing together the trivia of their lives. What the Biblical writers described in their stories, scientists today are describing in the words of neurobiology and psychology. John Cacioppo, a researcher at the University of Chicago, has been studying loneliness for over two decades and has concluded that, to put it succinctly, loneliness is bad for you. In his investigations, he discovered that if you go to bed feeling lonely, you will wake up the next morning with elevated cortisol levels – in other words, your body will be flooded with stress hormones because you went to bed feeling lonely the night before, and chronic loneliness, he found, leads to increased blood pressure, a suppressed immune system, higher anxiety levels, and greater risk of depression. Physically and psychologically, the feeling that no one cares about you will wreck havoc on your body.

Mother Teresa once spoke about poverty in the United States and she reminded her audience that poverty is not always just a lack of money. “Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted,” she said, “is the most terrible poverty.” Today in the United States, 27 million people live alone, and feelings of loneliness are becoming more pervasive in our society as we pursue lifestyles that increase our sense of isolation from one another. That same researcher John Cacioppo cites a survey that asked a large pool of Americans, “How many confidants do you have?” How would you answer that question? How many confidants do you have? How many guys are there with you in your foxhole? How many people are there with whom you can share coffee, your worries, and your dreams? When the survey was first administered in 1984, the most frequent response to that question was three. When the question was repeated in 2004, the most frequent response was zero. Zero – “there is no one out there.” Cacioppo explains the shocking change by pointing out that today “we have an aging population...., [higher] divorce rates, [and greater] work demands... We’ve changed our family interactions as well. When I was a child,” he says, “we had dinners together as a family. Now we individually go out and catch a quick meal at the fast food stores.”

“Being lonely,” he warns, “is a dangerous condition for a social animal.....”

“It is not good for human beings to be alone,” God said, and so God gave the first human being animal companions – dogs to love us, cats to purr in our laps, deer to graze in our fields and eat our hostas – and then God created a human confidant so that we would have someone to care for us, to share the mundane details of life with, and to give us the assurance that there is someone to whom we belong. But God was not finished. God then did an amazing thing: God reached through the gap between heaven and earth and gave the newly formed people God’s own friendship. The story tells us that God walked in the garden with Adam and Eve, and later when Moses stood by the burning bush, God told the lonely shepherd, “I am the God of your fathers and mothers and I am your God as well. Let me introduce myself – My name is ‘I am.’” And many centuries later, God would once again walk with the people in a man named Jesus and we would look upon the face of Christ and see Emmanuel – God with us.

Philosophers and theologians have argued since time began about the nature of our God. What is God? – Spirit? Metaphysical substance? The ground of all being? Is God omnipotent – Can God create a stone so heavy that even God cannot lift it? Can God know the future if the future has not happened?

These are the questions that have plagued the minds of freshmen philosophy students sweating over essay exams but these questions are swept aside by God on the mountaintop with Moses who comes instead right to the heart of the matter. “I am who I am,” God tells Moses. “Your human brain will never be able to grasp fully my nature but even if you will never completely understand me, understand this: I am with you. I am who I am and this is who I am – I am watching over you. I am caring about what happens to you. I am with you always.”

Though we may never be able to fully describe the metaphysics of what makes God God, we can be bold to make this claim: we were created to be in community with one another, with the rest of creation, and with the one that we know as God. God is not out there nor is God even isolated in the confines of a single human heart. God is in the connections between all of us, and to believe that – to take hold of that in faith and certainty – is to lift ourselves out of our loneliness and bring us into the wholeness for which we were intended.

What is proclaimed in scripture, John Cacioppo has confirmed in his research. He explains, “[Faith shows a positive effect on relieving loneliness.] ...Trying to connect to God, to the extent that one feels that connection, loneliness decreases.... It’s not the frequency of prayer per se; its this feeling of connection that may be achieved by going to church or ... through...prayer. It’s about connecting with a higher being...”

In a fragmented, increasingly isolated society, the church has a powerful antidote to what ails us. It is our call as faithful people to remind the world that we were not created to be alone. We are called to show the world by the way in which we invite every person into fellowship that here in the church there are people who care whether you exist and who will share your struggles and your joys. And we are reminded that in our own lives, we must seek the time and the place where we can reach out with our hearts in prayer to reaffirm our connection to the One who lives in the bonds between us, the One whose name is:

“I am who I am and this is who I am – I am watching over you. I am caring about what happens to you. I am with you always and I will never leave you alone.”