Missing Community: Bonhoeffer on Facing Loneliness
Written by Vince Oliveri
Last week I wrote an article on discovering community during this crisis. This week I want to offer a few thoughts about facing the absence of community—and I want to draw these thoughts from one of the most formative books in my life, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. While this little book is a practical and theological primer on how to live in community, it also offers some rich insights into facing loneliness. Bonhoeffer reminds us that loneliness can lead us into greater fellowship with Christ, shatter our unrealistic and idealistic expectations of community, and teach us how to better cultivate our spiritual life.
Sharing in the Loneliness of Christ
Bonhoeffer begins Life Together with the reminder that community is a grace that we shouldn’t expect or take for granted. We are people who belong to and follow Jesus Christ, who lived in the midst of enemies, was betrayed and abandoned by his closest friends, and faced the pain and terror of the cross in sheer, utter loneliness. As the people of Christ in the world, Christians should expect loneliness.
When we encounter isolation and loneliness, as we likely are during this Covid-19 pandemic, we can remember that Christ has not only gone before us in bearing the greatest loneliness imaginable on the cross, but we can take heart knowing that our great High Priest shares in our exile and bears our loneliness with us. Indeed, the present loneliness of Christians can be seen as a participation in the cruciform divine life of Christ, who was abandoned and cast out so that we might experience his kindness toward us and presence with us.
Shattering our Wish Dreams
Our loneliness can be profitable in many ways. Not only can we better know and experience the presence and work of Christ in our lives, but loneliness can also teach us how to return to community with gratitude and realism. God can use our loneliness to teach us that community found in and through Jesus Christ is a gift of grace that we don’t deserve: “It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with fellow Christians.”
God can also use our loneliness to shatter our wish dreams about Christian community. It is easy for us to construct idealistic wish dreams about how our communities should look and operate, and it is easy for us to then hold our actual communities to these unrealistic standards and expectations. Yet these very wish dreams rarely help and often hinder our experience of the actual Christian community God has given us.
So, it is good news that God can graciously use our time of separation and loneliness to teach us to love and long for our real Christian communities of real people with real struggles—rather than desiring figments of our own broken imaginations.
Discovering the Goodness of the Day Alone
Redeeming our loneliness can show us how to better be with Christ and others, and it can lead us into a better way of being alone. In the third chapter of Life Together, Bonhoeffer shows why spending time alone plays an essential role in our spiritual formation. Of the many spiritual habits we can practice alone to grow in Christ, Bonhoeffer identifies three in particular: “Scripture meditation, prayer, and intercession.”
First is Scripture meditation. Bonhoeffer writes, “The time of meditation does not let us down into the void and abyss of loneliness; it lets us be alone with the Word. And in doing so it gives us solid ground on which to stand and clear directions as to the steps we must take… we read God’s Word as God’s Word for us.” According to Bonhoeffer, in meditation we spend time each day alone before a single, short passage of Scripture, actively waiting for God to reveal by his Spirit how the treasures of the gospel revealed in that passage might address us that day. For Bonhoeffer, this doesn’t need to feel special or extraordinary, but our time should be marked by simplicity and fidelity before God.
Second is prayer. Out of our meditation on Scripture, we should offer prayers guided by the words of the Scriptures: “In this way we shall not become the victims of our own emptiness.” Like a child learns to speak by mimicking the words of her parents, so we learn to pray by reciting God’s words back to him. We know that our prayers will be heard because they are a response to and are rooted in the promise of God’s Word, the gospel.
Third is intercession. Out of our praying of Scripture, we pray for one another, though we are apart, because, “a Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses.” Intercession for one another, rooted in the Word, must not be vague or abstract, but concrete: “a matter of definite persons and definite difficulties and therefore definite petitions.”
In our loneliness, through meditation, prayer, and intercession, we receive the grace of God, we experience union with others through faith, and we grow in Christ-likeness.
We weren’t ultimately made for exile or isolation, but as the people of Christ in a broken world, we will likely experience loneliness. And when we do, as many of us are in this season, may we take to heart this encouragement from Bonhoeffer to share in the loneliness of Christ, long for the grace of fellowship, and embrace the formative goodness of the day alone.