That Lonely Grinch

Over the weekend, I took my boys to watch the new Grinch movie. This adaption follows in the vein of the 2000 live action one by filling out some of the character's backstories and giving some insight into the Grinch's psychology. (Spoiler Alert for a story from 1957, in case you've been living next door to the Grinch).The titular character is shown to be so mean and surly because, at his core, he is lonely. This got me to thinking about how we as humans experience loneliness.

Loneliness is most often defined as sadness due to the lack of friends or company. Certainly, this is the definition that the writers had in mind in the screenplay for this recent Grinch adaptation. The movie (and sadness) are resolved when the Grinch joins the residents of Whoville for Christmas dinner. However, I wonder had the story continued, if the Grinch's loneliness was truly resolved. What if, after the ham was consumed, the punch was drunk and the merriment finished, the Grinch discovered that in spite of his newfound friendships, he still felt fundamentally alone. After all, the Grinch seems to be the one in Whoville with that avocado-green complexion, he seems to have no family to speak of, and he has spent the majority of his life in isolation. What could he have in common with the people around him?

Beyond the common notion of the term, I think there is a type of loneliness that has nothing to do with the company one keeps or lack thereof. This type of loneliness affects not only the lone wolf types but, to a certain degree, it is a common ailment of all humanity. I think that the novelist Thomas Wolfe had his finger on the pulse of the human experience when he wrote:

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people -- not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul…we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.¹

There is a sense in which this type of existential loneliness reflects our reality. We are limited by language and can never fully express our internal mental states. Even simple things like our experience of color could be unique to us and others would never know it. Imagine a girl named Susie who has the phenomenal experience of the wavelength of light that everyone else calls blue. By phenomenal experience, I mean what we would commonly call "seeing" a color in our mind. However, when everyone else experiences blue, Susie actually experiences what all others would call red. Susie learns the colors like we all do, and calls her experience of red "blue" because that is what she was taught to do. Yet no one will ever know that her experience is different because Susie has no way of communicating what the actual experience of a color is like to her. It's amazing that such a basic thing like our experience of colors, smells, tastes may never truly be expressed to or understood by others.

This illustration suggests that at some fundamental level, we are alone in at least some of our mental life. In fact, our ability to communicate anything is a marvel. We form thoughts and have emotions which we then translate into words and then perform the mechanical actions to convert those words in our minds to intelligible sounds. These sounds are propagated through the air as vibrations, perceived by the auditory system of another, converted into signals the brain can interpret, experienced in our minds as sounds and finally interpreted into ideas and thoughts that can produce emotions. It is a miracle we are able to understand each other at all! If I am right about this then we can never be fully known and we can never fully know another. Furthermore, I believe it is this lack of robust interpersonal knowledge that is at the source of existential loneliness. Thus, even those we hold most dear, and who love us in turn, can only be known to us in a partial and imperfect way.

I have had personal struggles with the feeling of existential loneliness. However, my battle with loneliness should not reflect poorly on those nearest and dearest to me. My friends and family have always been there for me. Nevertheless, it is I who have often found it difficult to open up and allow people in. I have been like the Grinch but perhaps in a worse way—I have been around people all along yet many times been quite distant from them. I think this distance has often been the result of my inability to express myself in emotionally charged situations. I am grateful for their continued patience and love as I learn to be more open and bridge the gaps that I've created between myself and others.

In the Christian worldview, this loneliness is expected and it finds its ultimate solution. Our sin separates us from the only one who knows us fully. Even the most emotionally healthy individuals could never fully expressed all that is within their heart. Often there are depths of our own emotions that are hidden from us. Thus, while we live in this broken sinful world, loneliness will always be a part of our existence. However, it is amazing that the Creator of the universe, the Holy One who knows us even better than we know ourselves, loves us with an everlasting love. His knowledge of those thoughts and feelings that perhaps we are afraid to express to others out of shame or fear of judgment will never diminish His love for us. Furthermore, He gives us the great promise that one day "I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known"², so even if we can't escape loneliness in this life, a day will come when loneliness will be no more.  Then, even those of us with hearts three sizes too small will have our small hearts grow three sizes that day. ἔρχου κύριε Ἰησοῦ (Come, Lord Jesus)

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¹ Wolfe, Thomas, The Hills Beyond. New York: Harper Brothers, 1941
² 1 Corinthians 13:12, ESV