“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1) Have you ever felt this lonely? I have. In chapter seven of our forth-coming book, A Mellow Heart, I recount a time when I was all alone on an island in the middle of the Caribbean Sea with a seemingly unsolvable problem on my hands. I felt totally alone and abandoned.
In this chapter I discuss an “existential loneliness” that has developed in our culture because of a “loss of community, a loss of faith, a separation from and exploitation of nature, and fragmentation.” I examine Psalm 55, which speaks to all of these elements, as an framework to help us deal with these loneliness-causing problems in ourselves and in our culture, and to develop a mellow heart.