Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Power of One

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
February 26, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

Readings

I was a born ideologue: I thrived on having a position. Now I had one To live alone is to face down loneliness. It became a litany that in the bad times strengthened me, gave me stamina and self-control. No need to review its contents. All I had to do was keep repeating the mantra….

[Years later,] I looked around … at my life, and I saw that I had not learned to live alone at all. What I had learned to do was strategize; lie down until the pain passed; evade; get by. I wasn’t drowning, but I wasn't swimming either. I was floating on my back, far from shore, waiting to be saved.

Vivian Gornick, “On Living Alone”
(from the Beacon Press anthology Here Lies My Heart)

 

[Y]oung people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is—: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent—?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in herself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on each of them, something that chooses them and calls them to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves, may young people use the love that is given to them.

…. Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (adapted)

Sermon

Our culture sends very mixed messages about solitude, being single, and marriage.

We believe strongly that each person must be able to stand alone. In my packet of suggested wedding readings I have that passage from Rilke’s letters. A selection from Kahlil Gibran, counseling partners to allow spaces in their togetherness, “for the oak and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow,” as he says, is another popular choice among couples putting together their marriage ceremony. So is the blessing that reminds the couple that marriage should not so much fill their emptiness as help them to know their fullness. Too much dependence on another, even a marriage partner, especially a marriage partner, is seen as codependence: a disorder, a failure to be as independent as each soul ought to be.

Rilke himself valued solitude so highly that after his marriage, he frequently retreated for long periods of almost monastic seclusion, and he and his wife essentially lived as a divorced couple for most of the rest of their lives. “I belong to solitude,” he wrote. “I must not need anyone . . . all my strength is born from this detachment” (Rilke and Benvenuta: an Intimate Correspondence). Solitude offers an opportunity to practice a kind of integrity of self. Most of us, however, aren’t delighted when singleness offers us this golden gift.

And no wonder. It isn’t easy to be single in this culture, especially around Valentine’s Day, but all around the year as well. There are so many social pressures to do things as a couple; there are still people who look askance at anyone who dines alone or goes to the movies alone. You’re likely to get a look of pity, or, if you profess a desire to do these things alone, disbelief. Our children hear a lot of stories that instruct them that marriage is the key to happiness, and very few that suggest that someone can be just as happy single. The companionship of friends, parents, children and housemates, we dismiss as a poor substitute. As for actually living alone? — surely no one would prefer that for more than a short time!

When I knew that I would be speaking on this subject, I wrote to a friend who has been single for a long time, single in her late thirties, and unhappily so. She has often spoken about how things are frequently organized for couples and with the expectation of couplehood; how, when people get married, they start to socialize with other married couples instead of with the singles who have been their friends. So I asked her whether she had any resources to suggest, perhaps a book that summed up her thoughts on being single in this culture. What she offered was instead this thought: she said, “Maybe you should ask somebody who is happy being single.”

That really gave me pause. I wondered whether I knew anyone who was single and wanted to be single. Many single people I know are happier than people in unhappy marriages, certainly, and seem as happy as those in happy marriages. And yet most of them, I reflected, seem to want a partner. Or was this just my own assumption, my successful brainwashing by the pro-marriage propaganda that we see all around us?

Being single has its advantages. Even the long- and happily-partnered may sometimes wish for the simplicity of making a major life decision without consulting with anyone else’s needs, or for the freedom of staying out late without calling home, or choosing activities without negotiation and compromise over the slightest thing like what movie you’re going to see. To have a shared life is, in the words of the writer Lynn Darling, “to be blended, smoothed, to pare down the sharp ends of [one’s] personality to fit into the too-small allowances made for them.” It isn’t easy, and it is at odds with the fundamentally individualistic ethos urged on us by this culture.

But to be voluntarily single, as my friend suggested some might be? To happily embrace that state as the best one for you? We seldom see this phenomenon, or appreciate it when we do. We are more likely to call it sour grapes, or, if we grudgingly acknowledge that the person is genuinely content, we still imagine that really, the poor, lonely single will gratefully abandon that state of being when the right person comes along. We shake our heads at priests and monastics, who chose a life without partners, and are suspicious of those who claim to be happy being single.

You can tell a lot about a culture by what it deems worthy of a ritual. We have rituals for engagement, marriage, and childbearing, and for the loss of a partner through death, but when it comes to divorce, that conscious choice to become single, we have to invent them. As for the choice by a single person to remain single, we have no rituals to mark that momentous decision at all. It is as if we don’t recognize that it can be a conscious and willing choiceÑperhaps, as marriage often proves to be, not a permanent one, but still a deliberate one. I have read of two such rituals, but one was in another culture remote from mainstream America, and the other in jest, in the comics.

Mike Doonesbury of comics fame had a co-worker named Marcia who finally decided to declare herself “off the market” after years and years of doing the dating round. While not ruling out the possibility that she might marry one day, she was giving up the search for Mr. Right. The last straw, she said, was the strong dollar — she was tired of waiting for someone to go to Europe with. So she held a “singularity party” (in a bar, with the bartender standing in as clergy to solemnize the occasion), where her vows of happy singlehood were humorously undercut by a last-minute proposal: the bartender asked if there was anyone who objected, in “speak now or forever hold your peace” tradition, and when someone in the back said “Yes!” this feisty, independent, single woman said, “Thank God! Grab him!” (She didn’t end up with him, though. He was kind of a nebbish.)

More seriously, in Plain and Simple: A Woman’s Journey to the Amish, by Sue Bender, a young Amish woman described her own way of declaring the decision to remain single. ”Married women wear black aprons, and unmarried women wear white ones,” she explained, so “one Sunday, I woke up and decided to put on a black apron, and not a white one. When I got to church, I moved my seat from the section where the young, unmarried women sit to the section where married women sit.” Bender, who lives here in the urbane Bay Area, as far from Amish country and culture as one can get, was moved. She reflected, “How lucky she was to have a ritual, a ceremony that punctuated this rite of passage. Did any of my single friends who chose to remain single have any rituals to mark such a momentous decision?”

We do have other, subtler ways of signifying an intent to remain single, if not forever, then for the foreseeable future. Buying a house, or, especially, adopting a child, alone are ways of saying, “I am not going to suspend my life until that day when I may have a partner.” I have heard of a couple who financially helped each of their daughters set up a home upon her marriage, who, when one of their daughters told them she did not anticipate ever marrying, gave her the same gift of money and household goods that they would have given her if she had had a wedding. It was a lovely way to demonstrate that they respected her choice as much as their married children’s. But the truth is, we generally regard singlehood as a way of life that is to be pitied, and not accepted. If this weren’t the case, we would have more established ways to recognize and honor it.

And yet there is something amply available to singles that, for most of us, is vitally important to a rich inner life, something that is correspondingly rare inside partnered life: solitude. Every religious tradition I know puts a premium on solitude. Every tradition, whether it encourages marriage for all or has a celibate class such as nuns or priests, advocates some kind of serious time alone: for example, in meditation or prayer. Time alone, time in retreat, is important on a regular and preferably a daily basis.

Even when one is in a temple full of people, chanting en masse or singing hymns in harmony, meditation and prayer are oddly solitary activities. The Jewish service, which consists largely of group chants, has a silent prayer at its center, when each person stands and, as it were, faces God all alone, as in that tradition, every soul must one day face God after death. Even in the midst of community we are each in some sense alone, and that aloneness is precious. It deserves a spot at the center of worship.

Perhaps it was the same conviction that inspired the Muslim mystic Hafiz to write a paean to loneliness:

Don’t surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

And the great non-God-centered religion, Buddhism, values solitude perhaps most of all. Everyone is encouraged to spend some time as a monk or nun before marriage, immersed in the practice of meditation, or to take retreat in monasteries as a guest now and then throughout life. Only each one of us can attain wisdom and compassion for ourselves; it is not something any teacher, nor partner, nor community, nor even the Buddha himself can accomplish for us. Things emerge from the long, hard time face to face with nothing and no one but oneself that bring the great joy of awakening. And so the Buddha, in his last words to his disciples, urged them, “Be a light unto yourselves…. Look not for refuge to anyone besides yourselves.”

Or, as the old song in another tradition puts it,

You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley . . . by yourself.
Ain’t no one else can walk it for you —
You’ve got to walk it by yourself.

In our own tradition, where we affirm that spiritual truth is to be found in human experience, being alone is as essential to spirituality as being in community. If we surround ourselves always with faces and voices, we remain in hiding from ourselves, and it is in encounter with ourselves that so much insight comes. We need to meditate, read, think, walk the labyrinth, sit in the silent hall before anyone else comes in — find solitude to balance interaction.

Of course, solitude isn’t just about being alone; as Gornick writes, we must learn to swim rather than merely floating. In her essay, she gently mocks the way she turned her forced state of solitude into a virtue in and of itself. She hated solitude and was overwhelmed by loneliness. So she wrote a diatribe against marriage, claiming it was just a desperate ploy for “emotional solace of a primitive sort” — therefore denying her own need for that solace. It was those people with partners who didn’t know how to be alone. She, the brave single, had faced her fear. Years later she attained the realization that we heard earlier: that she had not faced it, she had not learned to swim — she had been floating. Enduring, not embracing solitude.

As she acknowledged later, she was unfair to marriage. Of course it’s not true that we marry purely to escape loneliness, and purely to evade a face-to-face encounter with our inner selves. People in partnership can be brave about solitude and willing to face its challenges, just as single people, like Gornick herself, can at times be terrified by it, tolerating it only because they have found no solution. And besides, one can be desperately lonely even with a partner sitting right in the same living room, as many, many married folks can attest.

But just the same, there was a germ of truth in her polemic against marriage. She’s right: When we’re terrified of loneliness, we will rush into any relationship to save ourselves. “What comes with the solace,” she warned in her diatribe, “is insularity … and hard questions about the inner self that go unasked for years at a time.” And as Rilke advises his young poet friend, love itself requires a comfort with solitude. The strongest relationships are built of those who do ask those hard questions about their inner selves.

Gornick drew a useful distinction between loneliness and solitude. Loneliness was the terrifying pit that stood not only between her and others, but her and herself. She called it “the evaporation of inner life. Loneliness was me cut off from myself. Loneliness was the thing nothing out there could cure.” Loneliness, she found, was the enemy of an inner life, while solitude was its friend. Loneliness is the fear-drenched state of isolation from oneself. Solitude is being alone with oneself and becoming comfortable there. It is like a practice: something that takes effort and discipline; something that can be discouraging, even painful, but that met squarely, can also yield insight.

The singer and songwriter Suzanne Vega imagines Solitude as a person.

Solitude stands in the doorway
I’m struck once again by her black silhouette
By her long cool stare and her silence
I suddenly remember each time we’ve met
 
And she turns to me with her hand extended
Her palm is split with a flower with a flame

(“Solitude Standing,” from the album of the same name)

Solitude’s gift: a flower and a flame. Solitude can burn and it can offer beauty. In fact, it often does both at once. I do not mean to be glib about being alone, which, as Gornick describes it, can be as excruciating as a migraine. But if we always flee from its pain, if we pick up the phone too quickly, defer our loneliness with shallow and unsatisfying relationships, we deny ourselves solitude’s treasures.

To live alone is not necessarily to face down loneliness, but it can be an opportunity to learn to face it down — or, better, to learn to go with its ebbs and flows and not to fear it so greatly as most of us do. Those who spend all of their adulthood in one long-term partnership, or a series in quick succession, never having to spend much time in the deep end, may never go beyond treading water, or floating on our backs, waiting to be saved. It takes most of us some sustained solitude to, in Rilke’s words, “ripen, to become something in [ourselves], to become world, to become world in [ourselves],” and singleness provides a milieu for this practice, just as monastic life provides quiet and solitude in which the soul may encounter the divine. Those of us who are single may need to fight off the demon loneliness in order to ripen. Those of us who are partnered may need to be sure, as well, that we have not been picked too soon, that we don’t breathe a sigh of relief at not having to be alone with ourselves, and end up sitting unripened on the comfortable shelf. Just as it is possible to be lonely within marriage, it is possible to find a wholesome space of solitude within that cocoon.

Which brings us back to Rilke. He writes of love, and it is true that it is difficult to love well when one lives in constant fear of abandonment, when one’s love becomes a life preserver to which one must cling or drown. Desperation is not a strong foundation for any relationship. But it is not only love that requires an apprenticeship of solitude. Responsibility, self knowledge, joy, openness to the new, courage to face the unknown — all the various and beautiful forms of wisdom and happiness — are harvests that come most bountifully to those who have learned to be alone with themselves. We may go eagerly looking for solitude, or she may come to our doorway unbidden and unwanted. But all of us, whether we are happily or unhappily partnered, willingly or unwillingly single, have much to learn from welcoming solitude into our lives.