Solitude and community

By Mia Pohlman

This past week I went to a Coldplay concert. I don't think I've ever experienced music that allows me to feel my own solitude and my sole existence within a larger community of people simultaneously like I did at this concert.

Before going into the stadium, each person was given a light-up wristband to wear during the show. The wristbands lit up during certain songs.

I was one light in a stadium of thousands -- and each of those lights was one human soul -- and together we made a light show.

It was both an awestruck and lonely feeling -- awe-struck that this oneness with others is what I'm created for, lonely that it hasn't been completed or fulfilled yet, that I am not yet known and don't yet know completely, that right now it is me with God in my solitude.

In "Theology of the Body," Pope John Paul II teaches solitude with God is a precondition for community with God and others.

In the Garden of Eden, Adam was alone with God before God created Eve, and Eve was alone with God while Adam was still asleep.

This solitude, this knowing who they are alone with God and who God is alone with them, leads to community with each other.

But the solitude with God comes first.

A lot of times, I expect other people to fulfill me.

The truth, though, is that nothing and no one -- not any job, place or activity, not any friend, family member, romantic partner or child -- can or will ever fulfill us.

My friend Michelle wrote that Father Bill taught her that "expectations are prepackaged resentment. You can't 'should' all over somebody."

It is God and God alone who is meant to fulfill us, and I think our experience of solitude teaches us that.

And yet, the paradox is that we need each other, that we are made for community with other people.

Mother Teresa said, "If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other." Like it or not, we are dependent creatures.

In our dependency, I also think it can be equally true that if we have no peace it is because we have tried to possess or be possessed by another.

We both do and don't belong to each other; we are given to each other to love and help each other know God and God's love for us, and yet ultimately we are his.

It is having this balance of loving each other deeply and selflessly while also holding the other person with open hands, allowing them to be who they are with their own free will, that I want to be better at.

In "The Voice of the Heart," Chip Dodd tells a story about his little boy wanting to go to a rainbow.

He writes, "When he found out that I couldn't take him there, he ached in his waiting for what he could not completely have, but what he knew he was made for."

Our desire for the fulfillment we're sometimes gifted with briefly by beautiful, profound experiences can lead us deeper into God, the only one who can give us fulfillment that lasts.

And it's a reciprocal relationship: Then we can go back into community and give this love to others.