Loneliness. It’s something I face on a daily basis, even though I have a partner, friends, and others who love me. It’s not something that comes from depression nor is it something that comes from any behavior I’m doing or not doing. Instead, I truly believe the loneliness I feel is wanting to be home with God, wherever that is.
My vision of God’s home or whatever comes after this life is always the same. It’s a place of peace, where no worry exists, and where one feels connected with love to everything. I have experienced something close to this just once or twice in this lifetime. It happened over a decade ago during two separate meditative periods of my life. Somehow a shift happened within me, like a veil dropped from my eyes, allowing me to see and feel on a totally different plane of existence. One that I can only describe as a mere taste of what God’s home must feel like. Unfortunately, those blissful periods only lasted each time for a few months or so and left me feeling such a strong amount of loneliness afterward. Sadly, I have found the world to be a lonely place more than not ever since.
For awhile there, that was because of my own doing with all the addictions and craziness I allowed myself to succumb to. It was my attempt to avoid that loneliness, except it never worked. Instead, it only enhanced it. Thankfully, over the past four years, I have moved away from all that and done everything I know to do to draw closer to God again. But so far I haven’t experienced any of that bliss again. Rather I’ve mostly experienced something else…pain and a lot of it. And going through all this pain has only seemed to enhance my feeling of loneliness, even when I’m out there helping others and doing kind actions.
It’s hard for me to really describe what exactly I felt all those years ago when I perceived this veil to drop for those brief moments. I guess what I can say is that during them, I felt like everything was going to be ok and I felt beauty in everything and everyone around me. There has never been any drug or medicine that has been able to recreate this for me. Neither did any of the highs from my addictions ever even come close to feeling like I did during those moments. On some level, I think that’s why I’ve had such a drive in my life towards God and spirituality, because I ultimately want to experience that again. That mere glimpse was enough to propel me for the past ten years to where I’m at now. But that doesn’t change the fact that I can still vaguely remember how connected I felt to God during that period and I think that’s why I feel so lonely today.
If you’ve ever fallen for someone and made love to them for the first time, can you remember that feeling? If so, multiply it by a thousand and that’s probably not even close to how I felt during those blissful, but brief periods of my life.
Nevertheless, I do my best to remain faithful to the path I’m on, trusting that one day I will feel far closer to God than I do as of late. But as I reflect on all this, I begin to wonder if maybe what all of us are missing when we say we’re lonely is not a partner, it’s a deeper connection to our Higher Power.
I don’t know if there’s any truth to that or not. What I do know though is that I’ve never discovered anything on this planet to curb this loneliness. I just pray that one day my Higher Power will drop the veil again for me, allowing me to have another glimpse of something that is beyond understanding and something where I know loneliness doesn’t exist…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson