The Seven Great Pains of Sin: Part 5, Alone and Together in the Pit

Continuing our series about Julian of Norwich's vision of the seven "great pains" of sin.

According to Julian, the sixth great pain of sin is, in her estimation, "the most astonishing." As she surveys her vision of the fallen servant in the pit, she notices this:

"... he lay alone; I looked hard all around, and far and near, high and low, I could see no one to help him."

Sin has a way of isolating us from help. I expect most of us have experienced this from the outside. You look at someone you love who is struggling, and despair at your ineffectiveness and inability to help him or her. Try as you might, you cannot get inside the head of a loved one to make their choices for them. You can coach and you can cheerlead, but have to stand on the sideline. If the one you care for gets hurt in the game of life, yes, you can run out to provide medical attention. But even then, you're soon heading back to the sideline to watch. You can patch people up and attend to their injuries, but you cannot play the game in their place.

To be sure, there is a lot more presence and helping in my sports metaphor than in Julian's alone-in-a-pit metaphor. The similarity I'm drawing attention to is the gap that necessarily exists between our life and the life of another. Perhaps I see it this way because my view of personhood has been formed by the individualism of Western culture. But my hunch is that the mystery of human consciousness necessarily entails that we are, to some profound degree, mysteries to each other. Of course, collectivist cultures have deep social bonds of obligation and responsibility that shape the self, but the spark of consciousness burns as a solitary and inaccessible candle of subjectivity. What is it like to be you? Only you know. 

Beyond this existential isolation, there's also the fact that our sin causes us to hide from each other. And from God. We have our secrets. Sin creates loneliness.

Which brings us to another sad truth. We keep our secrets for very good reasons. We know that our confessions will cause pain, heartbreak, disappointment, and even catastrophe. A marriage might not recover. A job might be lost. An child might be banished from the home. A friendship might end. A crime might be uncovered. Tragically, our secret-keeping is a survival strategy. 

Basically, the helpers in my metaphor above also need help. We want to lean on each other, but we're unsteady partners. We don't love each other as we ought. The kids are unwell, and so are the parents. The husband is struggling, and so is the wife. The church members keep their secrets, and so do the pastors. Your friend is falling apart, and you can't keep yourself together.

Perhaps, then, the pit isn't so lonely after all. We're just all in the pit together.