Who Can Understand?

Solitude remains, lurking in the dark just beyond the flickering light of our interaction. To reach beyond that, to truly understand, requires a commitment beyond human ken.

Editor’s Note: This essay also appears in The Line Issue 12.1 (January 2025); subscribe to The Line here.

Who can understand me?

Solitude. Sometimes, a welcome respite from the press of crowds. But, other times, the wave of overwhelming hopeless loneliness coming from the depths, experienced even, or perhaps most acutely, in the middle of an urban scene with people everywhere around.

It is expressed poignantly in the Ingmar Bergman film “Nattvardsgäster” (“The Communicants” or “Eucharistic Guests,” titled, irrelevantly, “Winter Light” in the English version), when the klockare, or sacristan, puts it, “To understand that no one understands,” as the depth of pain, in explaining the worst of Jesus’ suffering on the Cross. Solitude as a way of life is the ultimate despair, the punishment described by Jesus as being “cast into outer darkness,” the heart-rending cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

We try to articulate our yearning, telling it to friends, parents, children, spouses, confessors, psychiatrists, unto strangers sitting next to us on trains and planes. The attempts are clumsy, inarticulate, inadequate to encompass what we feel. The responses are sometimes of indifference, sometimes of generic sympathy, feeling bad for us without understanding, sometimes equally clumsy attempts to share in hopes of mutual understanding. Only rarely does the miracle occur that we do actually surmount the barriers around us and find understanding.

But who can truly understand who I am? Can I even understand myself who I am? Yet without understanding, there is no bridge across from your soul to mine, there is only at best toleration and a mutual sharing of the earthly space allotted to us. Without understanding, you cannot know me, our relationship can only be built on guesses, suppositions, half-truths, and, if we are lucky, acceptance of all in the other that we do not understand.

That relationship may be good enough to build an economy or society together, or even a family. But the solitude remains, lurking in the dark just beyond the flickering light of our interaction. To reach beyond that, to truly understand, requires a commitment beyond human ken.

Emerging from the intensities of childhood, many of us carry deep-seated fears, often unacknowledged. A common one shared by a lot of us is a primal fear of abandonment. We are, after all, created as social beings, not lone wolves. We want to belong, to be included, to be treasured not rejected, to be understood, not just patiently tolerated. One of the worst consequences of humanity’s Fall was, and still is, the loss of the totally transparent relationship between God and ourselves, as well as with each other. We are blocked from returning to the Garden, where all is known and no secrets are hid, in comfortable innocent nakedness of body and soul. As Jesus experiences the ultimate despair and solitude of what it means to be human in our present condition, it is to know he is forsaken, abandoned.

The Fall for us is an unsolvable problem. It is, to paraphrase the First Step in AA, to realize that we have a big problem which is completely beyond our ability to solve. We need help, but cannot access any help. Literally, only God has the power to save us from ourselves.

But why should God do that? To answer that, we dare not suggest our lovability. In the Fall, mankind reveals his ugliness: greed for power and riches, penchant for blaming others, disobedience and rebellion and all the other qualities which make man repulsive, not lovable, before a holy and sinless Divinity. Whatever God’s response is, it will have to come from within himself.

God is love, we are told by John (1 John 4:7-10). The Creation is thus motivated by love, including our planet and our species. If you are infinite and complete love, but have no outlet, no way to express that love, would you not want to bestow that perfect love on someone? You could make them a perfect paradise to frolic in, so that you could share it with them, enjoy seeing them happy in it and perhaps even returning your love as they live in perfect union with you and grasp what you have done for them. Even in our fallen world, parents (and perhaps pet owners) can sometimes get a glimpse of this emotion.

The Fall changes the equation. God’s love is rejected. We humans prefer “to do it my way,” to live in a world where power, greed, dominance, selfishness, hatred and exploitation replace love. God is left with the choice to simply scrap humanity and start over, or to construct a way home for us, to restore what was lost, should we care to respond. As we know from Scripture, salvation history, he chose the latter. It is a witness to love which does not fade, which is faithful when we are not, agape love.

The depth of that love is implemented in the birth of Christ, just as it is fulfilled in the death of Christ on the Cross. All love is by definition sacrificial, because it means a giving, an offering, of self. Perfect love means that it is a perfect sacrifice. We are incapable of achieving that perfection, but God is able.

It would have been possible to send angels with the message that we need to smarten up and do better, because God loves us. God already had sent prophets to convey his message, and Moses to explain what living according to God’s precepts meant. But ultimately those messages were unheard, imperfect. Jesus lays out history in parable form in the story of the rotten tenants in a vineyard who did violence to the landlord’s messengers and even the landlord’s son rather than pay the offering due the landlord Matt 21:33-41).

So, he has been sent, entering earthly history. You cannot understand people by sending messengers. The son came to partake fully in the human experience, in what God knew would be a sacrificial expression of love in the most complete and perfect form.

Are you poor, were you raised in poverty? He was born into serious poverty. Do you live in a land where political freedom does not exist, under a dictatorship, as billions do today, as throughout history? He was born in a land occupied by a foreign power and ruled primarily by a brutal tyrant.

When we look at refugees and asylum seekers, some are sympathetic, some are hostile. But he understands, since he with his parents had to flee and seek refugee asylum status in Egypt. Through all varieties of human experience, he now knows himself what it feels like; to be hungry, to be rejected, to be homeless, to be weary and tired, to be misunderstood, to be denounced, to be arrested and convicted and finally to be killed.

The Incarnation, taking on our flesh and form, is the sacrificial love of the God who is love. Only by doing the human journey can he fully understand the human condition, to enter into the messy, dirty, sinful world and to live the encounter all the way through. Some lofty theologians posit the necessity for a sinless womb, persuaded by ancient pagan Greek philosophers who saw this material world as of no godly value, only a place with scrap value, to be escaped from with one’s spirit as soon as possible. But they miss the point. Jesus is immersed in the squalor of human existence and sin, yet without himself being drawn into the vortex. He understands, but he doesn’t leave it at that. He is here to restore the love relationship which is so broken, to transform us, not abandon us, even as he experiences the ultimate loneliness of being forsaken, of the human brokenness, of being abandoned by his followers.

And in so doing, he carves a path for us out of our hopelessness, our solitude, our descent into death in all its manifestations.

He understands. He acts in love to restore and redeem. Joy has come into the world.