There was this religious sister who one day received a phone call from her convent. She was told that they had to open her cell because they had to install an additional electrical socket in her room. She was very much alarmed by this news. When she received this phone call, she was with another religious sister, her spiritual director, who noticed her alarm upon hearing the news. Her spiritual director asked her why she felt so disturbed with the news. She then revealed to her how she always kept her room closed in the convent since she was afraid her fellow sisters might see all the clutter in her room. Her room was so cluttered because all through the years as a teacher she kept all the materials she used in her classes. All those materials have piled up in her room. She is a very good example of what is called a clutter addict. An addiction to keep on accumulating material possessions and yet at the same time having no bit of desire to part away with them. They never want to discard their material clutter because they are so afraid that when those things are taken away, they would lose their identity. They see their worth and identity as tied up with their material possessions. When they did further studies on why people become clutter addicts, what they discovered as the root cause of such addiction is inner loneliness. These people have been deprived of the affection of their parents in their childhood days. They grew up hungering for affection from other people and since the latter never lavished on them the love they were seeking they turn to material things to fill that inner vacuum, to heal that inner loneliness.

A contemporary spiritual author, Ron Rolheiser, came up with a book entitled “A Spirituality of Loneliness”and in it he reflects on the various reasons how loneliness can be most profitable for us in life, how it is necessary for us to experience loneliness and that loneliness is really a gem in our journey in this life.

• Jesus Himself experienced loneliness. When He wept over Jerusalem for not recognizing its Messiah. When he experienced agony in the garden of Gethsemani and had to ask Peter, “Can you not stay awake with me even for an hour?” The loneliness and desolation of the Cross. We can unite our loneliness with the loneliness of Jesus that our loneliness may become meritorious and salvific because the loneliness and pains of Jesus are salvific. Speaking of the loneliness of the Cross, it was St. John of the Cross who said that when disagreeable things are happening to us, when things are not going well as we planned them to be, let us look to Christ Crucified and learn to be silent! When we are tempted to murmur and complain about crosses and about our lot, let us reflect on the anguish of Christ Crucified and learn to silence our petty and trivial complaints and grumblings.

• Loneliness can bring out what is profound in the human spirit. Trials can bring out the best in each of us. There is a scrawl in the wall of a certain Nazi concentration camp which reads: I believe in the sun, even if it isn’t shining. I believe in live, even though I feel it not. I believe in God, even though He is silent. St Therese of the Child Jesus wrote to her sister, Sr. Marie of the Sacred Heart, that during her dark night she knew the sun was shining behind the clouds!

• Loneliness is an invitation to let go. The child held tightly by her mother or father will one day leave home to go to school, get married or find a job. Such moments of separation can be very difficult. But to love is to set people free. To love is let go of our loved ones that they may fulfil their mission in this life.

• Our experience of loneliness makes us empathize with all those who feel lonely and are in pain. It makes us compassionate of the travails and hardships of our neighbors.

• When all have left us or all have been taken away from us it makes us think of the transitoriness of things in this world, of how people can so easily come and go in our lives, or as Sta Teresa de Avila says, “Ëverything is passing away…God alone remains.”

• In our search for people and things to bring us inner fulfilment, St. Augustine reminds us that “our hearts are restless till they rest in God.”