To be lonely is to be aware of an emptiness which it takes more than people to fill. It is to sense that something is missing which you cannot name.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

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Being alone and being lonely are two very different things.

The worst kind of loneliness is what I think of as “Rudolphian” — as is Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. He isn’t accepted for who he is because he’s different. As such, they never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games. That’s the lonely-in-a-crowd loneliness. It’s very much a what’s-wrong-with-me loneliness.

At the same time, introverts recognize their own need for solitude. Being alone is a place to regroup and recharge. It’s a place to gather thoughts.

Thomas Merton said, “As soon as you are really alone, you are with God.”

Being lonely can come from being excluded, but being alone can lead to the place of recognizing how included we are in something far bigger than anything we can imagine.

It is impossible to think about it. It is impossible not to think about it. Nothing in history equals the horror of it. … Many were old men. Many were small children. Many were women. They were charged with nothing except being Jews. …

That many of the people who took part in the killings were professing Christians, not to mention many more who knew about the killings but did nothing to interfere, is a scandal which the Church of Christ perhaps does not deserve to survive.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

Moving on in this (un)happy week in American history, I read this by Buechner.

I have been haunted by the images from the El Salvadoran prison and the young mother whose husband is there. A clerical error. Oops. American Christians should be hanging their heads in shame. This is not what Jesus calls us to do.

I know, I know — I heard J.D. Vance called him a vicious gang member and human trafficker. Today, as I write this, the Supreme Court has ordered the US goverment to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego García, yet the DoJ can’t even say where he is. No one is doubling down on the vicious gang story anymore.

Also, no one in the government has apologized to my knowledge. Probably no one ever will.

Go on — look at the photos from the prison and tell me that it doesn’t turn your stomach. Okay — it’s not old men, women, and children, but’s it’s still wrong. This is what we as a country have done.

We need government to collect taxes, keep the roads in repair, maintain order in the streets, justice in the courts, etc., but we certainly don’t need this. They don’t pay us, we pay them, yet they’re the one who call the shots while the rest of us stand by with our knees knocking.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

Buechner wrote this book in 1988. I read this quote on Tuesday, April 8, 2025, when our government-country-world was in the throes of financial chaos. All because of the capriciousness of one man.

Here’s more of what Buechner said,

On both sides of the Iron Curtain, in Islam as well as in Christendom and the Third World, they have their conflicting political systems, ideologies, and holy causes to be sure, but by and large they give the strong impression of wanting little more than a chance to raise their children as best they can, keep the wolf from the door, have some fun when they’re through working at the end of the day, find some sort of security against old, and all such as that.

Their leaders, on the other hand, are continually delivering ultimatums to each other, plotting to confound each other any way they can manage it, spying on each other, vilifying each other, impugning each other’s motives, spending billions on weapons to destroy each other, and all such as that.

If at this most basic level, governments don’t reflect the dreams of the people they govern or serve their wills, you wonder what on earth governments are. … They seem to have a life and purpose of their own quite apart from the lives and purposes of anybody else. They are perpetually locked in desperate struggles with each other that have little if anything to do with the general human struggle to live and let live with as little fuss as possible. It’s we ourselves who have given them the power to pull the whol world down on all our heads, and yet we seem virtually powerless to stop them.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark