How to Deal with Loneliness as a Christian — Augustine on the Solitary Soul
⏱ 14 min read
What if the loneliness you have been trying to dispel for years is not the absence it has felt like — but a low, persistent ache the older tradition would gently rename, calling it instead the restlessness of a heart made for a Person it has not yet learned to rest in? You have done the things. You have joined the small group. You have texted the friend back. You have stayed after the service. You have arranged the coffee. And the loneliness, in spite of all of it, has not lifted in the way you expected it would lift, because it is not the loneliness of being under-companioned. It is a different kind — older, deeper, more particular — and the modern Christian vocabulary for it tends to mistake the symptom for the cause.
This essay walks three slow passages from Augustine’s Confessions — the most famous diagnosis of the solitary soul in the Christian tradition — and reads them carefully enough that the question of how to deal with loneliness as a Christian opens into a quieter, more honest room than the support-group answer alone can provide. The Everspring Christian Healing Journal is the slow daily companion for the season this article describes — for the soul whose loneliness has not yielded to busier company. For now, read slowly. (If the heaviness of the long season is the wider context, self-care ideas for Christian women in hard seasons is the letter for exactly that ground; if a daughter at home is sitting with her own version of it, Christian journal prompts for teen girls walks the teen-shaped variant of the slow honesty; and if the loneliness is sharp in the cracks of mothering small children, the Christian mom devotional was written for that specific kind of tired.)
Augustine wrote the Confessions in his early forties, looking back across the lonely young decades of his life — the years of being widely admired and inwardly unmet, the years of beautiful friendships and unsatisfying nights, the years of orbiting the One he had not yet recognised was the actual content of what he had been missing. He was not writing a self-help book on social connection. He was writing the record of a soul that had been lonely in plain sight of an entire empire of intelligent men, and had finally understood, near forty, what that loneliness had always been about. His diagnosis is unsentimental and tender at the same time. It will not flatter the busy life. It will also not shame the solitary one. It will name what the older tradition has named for sixteen centuries: that the deepest human loneliness is a homesickness for God, and that no amount of human company will substitute for the One the heart was actually made for.
The first passage: the heart that is restless until it rests in Thee
“Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”
— Augustine, Confessions
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly. The sentence has been quoted into wallpaper, and the over-quotation has worn the corners off it. Read it as if you have never seen it.
Augustine is making a claim about your design. Thou madest us for Thyself. The human heart is not a general-purpose receptacle that can be filled by any sufficiently large quantity of the right things. It is a particular shape, made for a particular Person, and the loneliness it carries through the long un-rested years is the ache of a shape that has been trying to be filled by everything except the One it was made for.
Notice the verb. The heart is restless. Not empty, not failing, not broken — restless. The word names a continuous low motion in the soul, a turning over of the inner ground, a not-settled-ness that does not yield to the obvious remedies because the obvious remedies are not the actual remedy. You have likely felt this restlessness without naming it. The good evening with friends ends and the loneliness is still there an hour later. The full week of company closes on Sunday night and the soul is still un-quieted underneath it. The marriage is real, the children are real, the friendship circle is real, and the restlessness is still there — quiet, low, persistent — at three in the morning when you wake without knowing why.
That restlessness is not evidence of a failure of relationships. It is, in Augustine’s reading, evidence of the design. Our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee. The repose is what the restlessness has been seeking. The repose is a particular kind of stillness, given by a particular kind of presence, and no amount of substitute company can produce it because the design will not accept the substitute. The heart knows what it was made for. The restlessness is, paradoxically, the heart’s faithfulness to its own design.
This is the first thing the older tradition does for the lonely Christian. It removes the diagnosis of personal failure. You are not lonely because you have insufficient friends. You are not lonely because something is wrong with you. You are lonely because you were made for a Person whose presence you have been receiving in small daily portions and have not yet learned to receive in the deeper way the design is asking for. The restlessness is the design speaking. The repose is what the design has been pointing toward the entire time.
For the modern Christian woman whose loneliness has not been solved by every social arrangement she has tried, Augustine’s first passage is the gentlest possible naming. The loneliness is not a problem to fix. The loneliness is a homesickness to honour. The question of how to deal with loneliness as a Christian begins, in Augustine’s reading, with the recognition that the homesickness has been pointing the whole time toward a particular doorway — and that the doorway has been there, in plain sight, every morning of every year you have been lonely.
The second passage: the wandering, the proud dejectedness, the restless weariness
“Thou then heldest Thy peace, and I wandered further and further from Thee, into more and more fruitless seed-plots of sorrows, with a proud dejectedness, and a restless weariness.”
— Augustine, Confessions
Read it twice. The passage is small but the work it does on the lonely soul is exact.
Augustine is naming, in one breath, the particular shape his loneliness took during the long un-converted decades. Wandered further and further from Thee. The wandering is movement, not stillness. The lonely soul is rarely still; the lonely soul is, in Augustine’s account, restlessly active — fruitless seed-plots of sorrows — sowing in ground that will not produce what the soul actually needs. The activity is the symptom. The wandering is the symptom. The seed-plots are the symptom. The actual condition is named in the two phrases that close the sentence.
Proud dejectedness. Hold that one for a moment. Augustine is doing something the modern vocabulary rarely lets the lonely soul do. He is calling the dejectedness proud. He is not shaming the dejection. He is saying — with great precision and very little harshness — that the dejection has, underneath it, a kind of refusal. The proud part is the part that has been refusing the doorway that has been standing open the whole time. The dejected part is the consequence of the refusal. The dejection and the refusal are bound together. The soul is dejected because it is refusing what would relieve the dejection.
This is the part that requires gentleness to hear. The proud dejectedness is not a moral charge against the lonely Christian. It is a diagnosis the lonely Christian is allowed to receive without contempt for herself. The proud part is small and quiet and operates underneath conscious choice. It is the part that has been preferring the wandering, the activity, the seed-plots, to the slow uncomfortable repose Augustine has been describing. The preference is not wickedness. The preference is habit — the long-established way the soul has been managing its own restlessness by movement, by company, by usefulness, by the next thing.
Restless weariness. Augustine puts the two words next to each other because the lonely soul knows that the two go together. The restlessness produces a movement that produces a weariness that does not actually rest, because the rest the weariness needs is not the rest the movement can provide. The lonely soul is tired in a particular way — not the tiredness of a long day’s work, which sleeps off. A deeper tiredness that does not sleep off, because the rest it needs is a different kind of rest than sleep can give. You have likely been carrying this tiredness for years. The vocabulary for it has not been available in the modern self-help room. Augustine has been holding the vocabulary, on the shelf, for sixteen centuries, waiting for you to pick the book up.
What does this mean for how to deal with loneliness as a Christian?
It means the cure is not more movement. The cure is the slow, daily, un-prideful return to the doorway. The proud dejectedness yields, very gradually, to the small humble act of sitting down — in the chair, in the morning, with the soul brought before Him in its actual unrested state, and asking Him to be the rest the activity has been substituting for. I have been wandering for years and the wandering has made me tired in a way nothing will mend except You. That sentence — said quietly, said once, said again on the next morning — is what begins to undo the proud dejectedness Augustine has named. The proud part softens, slowly, in the act of returning. The dejected part lifts, slowly, in the act of being received. The restless weariness eases, slowly, in the act of being met by the Person the restlessness has been pointing toward the whole time.
(If your week has been the week of trying to outwork the loneliness, Christian devotionals on anxiety that don’t pretend it goes away walks the daily reading the tired soul will recognise; if you are mid-bitterness about the people who were not there, the sibling article how to overcome bitterness — Murray on the root that defiles is the slow read for that ground.)
A note about the journal
If the small daily practice of bringing the unrested heart to the doorway is the work you want to walk into, the Christian Healing Journal is built around precisely this. One short page each evening, room for the honest sentence — today I was lonely in the late afternoon, and the company did not reach the place that was lonely — and a verse anchored in the Father’s posture of being the actual answer the restlessness has been pointing to. The journal is not the cure for the loneliness. He is. The journal is the small daily place the soul keeps showing up to learn how to be received.
The somatic that goes with the solitary soul
Pause here.
Loneliness lives in the body more than the modern Christian usually lets herself notice. There is a particular held quality the lonely body carries — a slight contraction in the chest, a habitual shallow breath, a small ongoing brace that does not relax even in company. The brace has been the body’s way of carrying the restlessness Augustine has been describing. It is not a moral failure. It is a long-established physical habit that has been faithful to the design’s ache without naming it.
Sit somewhere quiet. Both feet on the floor. Put one hand lightly on the centre of your chest, between the collarbones. Let the hand rest there. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the shoulders drop by an inch — not by trying to relax them, but by stopping the small ongoing effort that has been holding them. Take a second slow inhale. On the exhale, let the chest soften by a fraction under the hand. Take a third slow inhale. On the exhale, let one phrase settle in the chest: Thou madest me for Thyself. The phrase is for the body, not just the mind. The body that has been bracing in loneliness for years will not believe the doctrine until the body has had a chance to receive it under the hand.
Stay with the hand on the chest for sixty seconds, by a clock if you need to. Then let it rest in your lap. The single minute is the practice. Repeated daily, it begins to teach the body that the design Augustine has named is true at the level of the chest, not only at the level of the page. The restlessness will not vanish in a minute. It will, over weeks of repeated sixty-second returns, begin to know the doorway by feel, not only by argument.
The third passage: nothing unwonted or sudden separates from Thee what Thou lovest
“Fear startles at things unwonted and sudden, which endangers things beloved, and takes forethought for their safety; but to Thee what unwonted or sudden, or who separateth from Thee what Thou lovest?”
— Augustine, Confessions
Read it once at speed. Then read it again, slowly, and let the question land.
Augustine is doing something quietly enormous in this small passage. He is addressing the part of loneliness the support group cannot reach — the fear that lives underneath the loneliness, the fear that the lonely soul has been, in some deep and unsayable way, separable from the love it most needs. Who separateth from Thee what Thou lovest? The question is asked into the loneliness like a hand on the shoulder. The answer the question expects is no one. Nothing. The lonely soul has been carrying, alongside the loneliness, a small ongoing fear of separation. Augustine names the fear, asks the question, and lets the answer do the unbracing work the lonely soul has needed it to do for years.
This is the third movement in how to deal with loneliness as a Christian, and it is the gentlest. The loneliness Augustine has been diagnosing is not a state of actual separation. The lonely Christian is not separated from the love of the Father. The lonely Christian is in the felt experience of incomplete repose — the restless ache of a heart made for a Person it has not yet learned to rest in — and the felt experience is real, and the loneliness is real, but the underlying claim is not separation. The claim is love continues, while the soul learns to rest in it. The love does not depend on the resting. The resting is what the soul is being slowly invited into. The love has been the field the lonely soul has been wandering across the whole time.
This changes the work of the lonely evening. The work is not to manufacture a feeling of being un-lonely. The work is to sit, in the actual loneliness, and let the answer to Augustine’s question be the small ongoing furniture of the inner room. Who separateth from Thee what Thou lovest? No one. Then the loneliness I am carrying tonight is not the loneliness of being un-loved. The loneliness is the loneliness of a design that has not yet finished resting. The two are different. The first would devastate the soul. The second is a slow, almost tender, invitation to the doorway Augustine has been pointing toward from the opening sentence of his Confessions.
For the modern Christian woman whose loneliness has carried, underneath it, a quiet ongoing fear of being on the outside of the love she has been told is hers — Augustine’s third passage is the older tradition’s gentle correction. You have not been outside it. You have been inside it, lonely. The two states are not the same. The love has been the room. The loneliness has been the restless walking around inside the room. The repose is the slow learning to sit down in the room that has been holding you the entire time.
The line worth keeping near the page
If you take only one sentence from Augustine into this week, take the first one. Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee. Carry it on a small piece of paper. Put it inside your journal. The sentence is the whole diagnosis and the whole remedy in a single breath. The loneliness is the design speaking. The repose is what the design has been pointing toward. You have not been failing at company. You have been faithful to a deeper homesickness — and the doorway has been open the whole time.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Christian Healing Journal. Each evening, a short page that lets the restlessness be brought without performance, and a verse anchored in the Father’s presence — the small daily home for the soul slowly learning to sit down inside the room that has been holding it the whole time.
Your sister-articles in this contemplative-fathers cluster are how to overcome bitterness — Murray on the root that defiles and how to forgive someone who hurt you — De Sales on hard forgiveness. Read the three together if you can; they were written across different centuries but they are speaking, in their different vocabularies, about the same slow homeward turn.
The Everspring Christian Healing Journal carries Augustine’s slow vocabulary — the restless heart, the proud dejectedness, the love that does not separate — into a daily companion built for the woman whose loneliness has not yielded to busier company, and who is ready, at last, to sit down inside the room that has been holding her the whole time.
