The Cloaks We Wear
On connection as a discipline and a core value
I moved to Colorado less than a year before the Covid lockdown set in. I was fortunate to get a job pretty quickly at an incredible church with some incredible people. But a confluence of factors (the least of which was not the global pandemic descending on our pale blue dot) made it difficult for me to connect with a community of folks my age. I felt unmoored living in Denver far away from most of my friends and family, and this led me into a gnawing loneliness. I see it when I flip open my old journals from four and five years ago—loneliness compounded by shame, prayers that God would just fix things somehow, and a near-constant desire to avoid or dissociate from these feelings that felt too heavy to bear.
But even more noteworthy to me than my experience of loneliness in that time is the fact that I was developing an acute awareness of that loneliness. I was taking baby steps not to run away from it. This may have been the central gift of my experience of the pandemic: an understanding that these difficult feelings—loneliness, sadness, fear, anger—are not de facto bad feelings. Not only is the experience of these feelings survivable,1 they are in fact embedded with signposts that point me to what truly matters to me. My anger points me to what I am passionate about. My sadness enables me to grieve what I have loved and accept what is lost. And my loneliness points the way to my need for connection, for friendship, for community, for love.
I look back at my words both public and private in that time and see a nascent understanding of this gift. That the goal is not to avoid ever feeling lonely, as if this universal human experience could somehow be transcended. Rather, the goal is to listen to the signals in my body, mind, and spirit when loneliness rests on my shoulders like a heavy cloak, to seek the beautifully imperfect miracle of connection with other humans who wear that cloak too.
I got a new journal earlier this year, and as I started flipping through its pages, I noticed a page filled with twelve big circles red and blue. The page bore (and still bears) a small note in the top-left corner: "Values & Beliefs." Ok, I can get down with this, I thought to myself. My therapist and I had been doing a lot of work identifying my core values—those ideas and beliefs and lenses that form the foundation of how I live and move throughout the world. I jotted three down that night: learning, love, and hospitality.
I came back to that page this week and scribbled down two more related-but-distinct values, each in its own circle: first "curiosity," then "connection." And it's only recently that I've identified that last word—connection—as a core value in and of itself.
Frankly, it's almost too expansive of a value. I think I mean a lot of different things when I use the word "connection" and its derivatives. It's hard for me to construct an operative definition of the value without using the word itself. I think the best I can do is to say that connection is something like a grounding and felt awareness that I am related to, that I am with.
I experience connection when I am with the people I love. Not only physically with them,2 but with them in spirit as I pen a letter from afar to a friend. With them sensorily as I enjoy leftovers sent home to me after a lovely dinner. With them in mind when I remember a kind word spoken over me long ago that I could not accept at the time but can now metabolize.
I experience connection with place when I take my headphones out of my ears while I'm walking and pay attention to my multitudinous neighbors: the lilac bush whose smell is so arresting that it grabs me from ten yards away, the robin carrying a twig to what I presume is the nest she's preparing for her fledglings, the mothers and fathers helping their kiddos grow comfortable peddling with the training wheels taken off. When I simply slow down to notice, I experience the texture and richness each of these neighbors contributes to this place I love, and I feel myself woven into it.
I experience connection with myself as I allow myself to feel the broad spectrum of feelings that there are to feel, as I accept that they are simply datapoints to notice, not the totality of who I am. I experience connection when I realize that I cannot selectively anesthetize specific feelings that I had once predetermined to be "bad" feelings. When I recognize that numbing one feeling means numbing all feelings, I give myself permission to see that these feelings contain gifts, not poison. And I give myself grace when a feeling does grow overwhelming and I dysregulate. And I remember my therapist's voice encouraging me to find my way back to my "window of tolerance." And I smile and chuckle to myself, even as I still feel overwhelmed. And I take a deep breath, and I try my best to name that feeling.
This too is connection.
Perhaps most ironically to me, I experience connection in the mystery and uncertainty of my faith. At that time four years ago when I felt so disconnected and mired in loneliness, I found myself in a grad program at an evangelical seminary. There, I felt constant internal dissonance between the certainty I projected to my classmates about my knowledge of God's ways and the vortex of doubt swirling inside about my not-knowing of those very ways. These days, I find it sufficient on my most doubt-filled days to rest on the simple bedrock that God's essence is love.
I resonate with these words from K.J. Ramsey's recent piece wherein she tells the story of how she presently came to understand prayer after a serious chronic illness permanently altered her experience of life. What was once a category with explicit form and strictures ('you must pray to God in this way and ask for these things and should expect these sorts of answers') melted into something amorphous and ineffable yet embodied and substantial:3
Nearly two years ago I fell into a river where time bursts its banks. My body sank beneath the surface of water deep and dark, thrashed by a current stronger than self, churned in the confluence of the only river I knew and the one I hadn’t seen coming... What happened in that water unwrapped words themselves, giving me a glimpse of the with at their source. I came up humbled by that holy dark, irreversibly aware of two things:
how little we know of what we mean when we speak of the sacred
the inextricable connection and kinship between all that lives.
I fell into the water a self; I came up no longer separate.
This too—the with at the source of our words—is connection. It might actually be the essence of connection.
Because when I speak of connection as a core value, as an animating force of life, I mean that we have to actively cultivate our awareness of that "kinship between all that lives." I believe the Lakota (among countless other peoples) were right to identify that "we are all related." But it is easy enough to go on throughout life conveniently ignoring this fact. We can choose to believe that we are the master of our own destiny, and all types of collateral damage can be justified thereafter. Or we can choose to recognize the “inextricable connection” of our collective destinies. Robin Wall Kimmerer notes that when you feel your “membership in the web of reciprocity” (as the robin and the lilac do in their own ecosystem), “it makes you happy—and it makes you accountable.” Connection is joy and connection is responsibility. There’s a reason “we’re all in this together” is a well-worn cliche.
Maybe connection is simply the discipline of acting as if our collective interrelatedness were really true, not just a flowery image.
Maybe connection is the discipline of taking that cloak of loneliness we all put on from time to time in this age of isolation, stretching it out long and wide, and wrapping one another up in it like a hen wrap her chicks in her wings. In this space, we really see each with all our wonderful capacities and terrible limits, humans who cannot cure each other's loneliness once and for all, but humans who can say—if even just for a moment—"I feel less lonely with you here and now. Let's share these cloaks and keep each other warm."
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
-Teilhard de Chardin
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In a very real way, these feelings felt lethal to me at the time. Maybe not literally/biologically lethal, but like a part of my soul would perish if I allowed myself to feel them.
In fact, there are even times when I am physically with people and I don’t feel connected to them. That is, physical presence with another is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for connection.
As it so happens, Ramsey and I attended the same seminary, albeit at different times. Her articulation of the transformation of her own faith is so resonant to me—incisive, beautiful, capturing experiences that are best expressed in image and metaphor rather than explication and exposition.