I’d imagine few Americans are so lucky as to be unaware of our cultural afflictions. We know everything that’s wrong with us, don’t we? We see the headlines. We understand our fatal flaws. We’re addicted to our phones, scrolling away to our doom. We’re unable to maintain thriving social lives or strong work ethics, overall incapable of contributing to the “real world” in meaningful ways.
The marriage rate is down. The divorce rate is up. We don’t read anymore. We can’t navigate anywhere without Apple Maps. We’re obsessed with presenting a persona to the world while wholly unable to cultivate a compelling inner life. We’re anxious, we’re depressed, we’re burned out, and we’re all sick and tired of hearing about it.
Above all, we’re lonely, which is somehow both the source and the symptom of all this malaise. In his May 2023 “U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community,” Vivek Murthy called isolation an epidemic. His opening letter references research that “in recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness” and that this loneliness “harms both individual and societal health.” Murthy sees relationships as “an untapped resource—a source of healing hiding in plain sight” that “can help us live healthier, more productive, and more fulfilled lives.”
In the two years since he published that report, the loneliness conversation has continued apace. While many voices have proposed different approaches to our alienation, they often center around the same solution—more real, offline human connection, whether through parties or standing breakfast dates or recurring visits to libraries and parks or mushroom foraging and block parties.
On the one hand, making friends is often just a matter of putting yourself out there and reaping the rewards. As a recent college graduate who has moved to a new city and started attending a new church over the course of the past year, I’ve been learning how to make friends all over again. I’ve tried to take first steps by saying hello to the person sitting next to me at church and asking that person to coffee. Recently, I got sick while my roommates were out of town. Multiple new friends from the congregation were quick to offer to bring me anything I might need. Friendship really can be that simple.
And also—friendship is so hard. It’s easy to announce it as the quick-fix answer to our menagerie of societal problems. But that’s idealistic. Friendship, as any friend knows, also comes with suffering and sin. Sometimes—oftentimes—it would be easier to stay home alone. Our encouragements to friendship must be honest about that.
Put another way, the desire to belong is straightforward. But belonging takes work. Trust must be earned. Sometimes people have natural synergy; sometimes they don’t. Sometimes a friend is going through a hard season. Sometimes that season lasts for years, and that friend needs significant support. Sharing life means not just easy company and inside jokes but someone else’s hardships, trauma, and personality quirks. A friend comes asking for help moving or processing a breakup. Friends come needing grace after grace. They come, like me, sick and in need of Pedialyte.
When I’m navigating relational strain or having a hard time loving someone well, I often return to the Seamus Heaney poem “The Skylight” for spiritual encouragement.
In this poem, the speaker narrates a conflict between himself and his second-person audience, presumably his wife. She thinks it would be a good idea to cut a skylight into their roof. He likes their home as it is; he does not want to change. Despite his list of reasons why the house is perfectly cozy, no changes needed, he trusts her. They make the cut.
The outcome is wonder: “When the slates came off, extravagant sky entered and held surprise wide open.” The home opens to the heavens. The speaker references the familiar story from Mark 2, in which the friends of a man who has paralysis lower him through the roof of a house where Jesus is teaching. Jesus heals the man’s physical body and forgives him.
Interestingly, the speaker doesn’t identify himself with the man with paralysis or even his friends. Instead, he is “like an inhabitant / of that house” where this miracle occurred. He isn’t the main character, but as is the case in much of the New Testament, he finds himself marveling at what he has seen and changed as a result.
Why do I look to this poem for spiritual encouragement when I have a hard time in friendship? Heaney’s words remind me that I too am a creature of habit; I like what I like, and I get set in my ways. Sometimes I need to make space for my friends or roommates to think differently than I do; this sort of perspectival hospitality is a spiritual discipline. Creating space for people in the fullness of who God made them to be is a way of loving them. Like Heaney, I too have found these pains of accommodation often give way to great wonder. Relationships create opportunities for God to surprise me in ways I never thought possible.
All the voices I hear calling for us to make friends as the solution to the loneliness epidemic are dipping their toes into a much deeper sea. They are scraping the surface of a much deeper truth. Friendship is as easy as taking the first step to say hello, and it is as hard as forgiving someone who has hurt you. It is as simple as asking if someone wants to grab lunch after this, and it is as challenging as inviting someone into the mess of your own life. While the work and risk and sacrifice of friendship can (and inevitably will) cause pain, it is far surpassed by the joy of genuine love.
Kathryn Ryken works for the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, located in Washington, DC. She is a recent graduate of Wheaton College.
