Overcoming isolation within the self
A personal note on my Catholic faith
I am Catholic and I have been my entire life. There’s really no escaping it. In the past, I might have wanted to. There have been years where I didn’t go to mass or pray, and they were, by far, my most miserable. I have a hard time seeing this as a coincidence.
At certain points throughout my life, to avoid the inevitable judgments of my peers, I would say that I was “raised Catholic,” but every bone in my body knew this was a lie by omission. I was certainly raised Catholic—the eldest in a large, Irish-American family who went to mass every Sunday and said grace before every meal. I am Catholic now, too. If you think that makes me (and therefore, other religious people) cringe or stupid or something else, so be it. I’ve thought about these issues a lot over the years, and I keep returning to God. Nothing has helped me more in my life than my relationship with God and striving for closeness with him.
In 2019, my life as an achievement robot was feeling desperately hollow. I had a major depressive episode and was unable to work. I went on medical leave and began going to therapy. It was a good start. I learned a lot about myself, what I want, and how I get in my own way. I’m not sure I’d be pursuing my creative interests if it weren’t for therapy, and I’m grateful for the insights it gave me.
But when I started looking beyond myself and my issues, as we all eventually should, therapy didn’t help. It couldn’t. When I asked my therapist existential questions, we kept returning to me, to myself, to how I feel. (The benefit of therapy is that it’s all about you, and the detriment of therapy is that it’s all about you.)
I spent session after session with my therapist going over the same issues I had with the same people. Might I have been better off praying for them? For the strength and grace to forgive them and move on? To express gratitude for their many loving kindnesses to me, rather than focusing on their faults? To examine my own conscience and the ways I may have hurt them? Probably. I realize now that I was talking to my therapist when I should have been talking to God. I was thinking about myself when I should have been thinking about others.
But at that time in my life, I was completely isolated within myself.
Eventually, through losing faith in therapy and slowly rediscovering my faith in God, I had this blunt realization that I don’t matter that much. I was viscerally reminded of this on Ash Wednesday a few weeks ago: “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This might sound kind of sad or uncomfortable, but it’s not. It’s a relief. There are far more important things than the self, namely: family, friends, love, community, beauty, art, forgiveness, gratitude, mystery, sacrifice, and the truth. I have found these things to be some of the most beautiful parts of life, and the most beautiful parts of the Catholic faith, which holds them as sacred.
In The Wisdom of the Desert, Thomas Merton gathers the sayings of the Desert Fathers, fourth century Christian hermits, who abandoned the cities of the pagan world in a quest for salvation.
In the introduction, he writes:
“Isolation in the self, inability to go out of oneself to others, would mean incapacity for any form of self-transcendence. To be thus the prisoner of one’s own selfhood is, in fact, to be in hell: a truth that Sartre, though professing himself an atheist, has expressed in the most arresting fashion in his play No Exit (Huis Clos). All through the Verba Seniorum we find a repeated insistence on the primacy of love over everything else in the spiritual life.
[…]
It is hard to really love others if love is to be taken in the full sense of the word. Love demands a complete inner transformation — for without this we cannot possibly come to identify ourselves with our brother. We have to become, in some sense, the person we love. And this involves a kind of death of our own being, our own self. No matter how hard we try, we resist this death: we fight back with anger, with recriminations, with demands, with ultimatums. We seek any convenient excuse to break off and give up on the difficult task.”
We are encouraged by nearly everything in modern life to pursue a life of self-satisfaction and pleasure. We’re told our happiness is the path to happiness, but by pursuing this life, we only become more and more isolated within ourselves. By living only for ourselves, we shrink into ourselves and wither.
Paradoxically, the Catholic faith teaches that the path to true fulfillment is through a “self-emptying,” or self-giving. We pour ourselves out, through love, for others. It is really hard to live this way. But we’ve known for thousands of years that it is worthwhile.
During that same depressive episode in 2019, I was overcome with the desire to go to mass. It had been a few years since I had last gone. I put on a nice dress and walked across Manhattan on a very hot August morning. Once inside, I found my seat, and during the first song I started weeping uncontrollably. I wanted to stop because I was so embarrassed. But I couldn’t. It felt so good to be there again. I felt like I was so alone in my depression, in such a dark room, and all of a sudden a window opened up, light poured in, and someone grabbed my hand. I didn’t feel alone. It was one of three truly profound religious experiences I’ve had in my life. I told my therapist about this, through tears of joy, and he said, “That’s nice. I’m really glad you had that experience. Let’s talk more about your loneliness.”
If you are Catholic, or are interested in Catholicism, and would like further reading or to talk about the Catholic faith, please feel free to DM me on Instagram. Not many people share this perspective, and I’d like to connect more with people who do. Thank you as always for reading.