The gospels emphasize that what Jesus suffered most deeply in his crucifixion was not the pain of being scourged and having nails driven through his hands, but a deep loneliness of soul that dwarfs even the most intense physical pain. Jesus wasn’t a physical athlete, but a moral one, doing battle in the arena with soul.
In the writings of Robert Coles, he suggests that inside each of us there’s a deep place, a virginal center, where all that’s tender, sacred, cherished, and precious is held and guarded. It’s there that we are most genuinely ourselves, most genuinely sincere, most genuinely innocent. It’s where we unconsciously remember that once, long before consciousness, we were caressed by hands far gentler than our own. It’s where we still sense the primordial kiss of God.
In this place, more than any other, we fear harshness, disrespect, being shamed, ridiculed, violated, lied to. In this place we are deeply vulnerable and so we are scrupulously careful as to whom we admit into this space, even as our deepest longing is precisely for someone to share that place with us. More than we yearn for someone to sleep with sexually, we yearn for someone to sleep with there, morally, a soulmate. Our deepest yearning is for moral consummation.
But this isn’t easy to find. Rare is the perfect moral partner, even inside of a good marriage or friendship. And so we perennially face a double temptation: Resolve the tension by settling for certain compensations, tonics, that help us make it through the night or, perhaps worse, because the pain is too much to live with, giving ourselves over to bitterness, anger, and cynicism, thus denigrating the great dream. Either way, we sell ourselves short and settle for second best.
What’s to be learned from Jesus’ struggle with moral loneliness? This: he refused both the road of compensatory tonics and that of soul-hardening cynicism. He stayed the course and carried the tension to term.
Our own moral loneliness can be tyrannical. However, that’s not a license or invitation to begin jettisoning commitments, responsibilities, morals, and whatever else it takes to try to find that elusive soulmate for whom we yearn so deeply. What Jesus (and persons like Therese of Lisieux and Simone Weil) model is how to carry that tension ideally, how to carry our solitude at a high level, and how to resist, no matter the pain, calling second-best by any other name than second-best.[Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Coping with our own Souls” July 2022]