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Friendship, loneliness, and prayer: One more way reflecting helps us

Lynne Baab • Tuesday October 17 2023

Two weeks ago, I opened a post with a story about a friend who was telling me about the funeral she attended. I asked you to imagine that I was watching her body language. Because she was drooping a bit and had a sad expression on her face, I imagined that I said to her, “You look really sad.” That’s a form of reflecting or reflection, a listening skill where we make a brief statement about what we’re observing in the person’s body language, tone of voice, or words. I said that my words were an invitation for her to talk...

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Friendship, loneliness, and prayer: Saying “thank you” to friends

Lynne Baab • Tuesday October 10 2023

I learned about polite, dutiful gratitude in childhood, and I’m grateful for those lessons. David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, taught me something new about expressing thanks in his book, Gratefulness: The Heart of Prayer. Brother Steindl-Rast emphasizes the relational component of thankfulness: “When I acknowledge a gift received, I acknowledge a bond that binds me to the giver. . . . The one who says ‘thank you’ to another really says, ‘We belong together.’ Giver and thanksgiver belong together” (pages 15-17).

A simple “thank you” tells the other person that I value what they have contributed to my life. I value my...

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Friendship, loneliness and prayer: A listening skill with two purposes

Lynne Baab • Tuesday October 3 2023

Imagine that a friend is telling me about a funeral she attended. I’m watching her body language, and I say, “You look really sad.” She continues by describing how much the person meant to her. Then she outlines the whole funeral service in detail, including the postlude, a Bach organ piece in a minor key that spoke to her in her sadness. I am getting pretty bored with all the funeral details, so I pick up on the one thing she said that interests me. I love Bach, especially on an organ, so I’m hoping she’ll give some more details about...

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Friendship, loneliness, and prayer: Praying about “learned loneliness”

Lynne Baab • Tuesday September 26 2023

“The most salient social feature of the pandemic was how it forced people into isolation; for those fortunate enough not to lose a loved one, the major trauma it created was loneliness. Instead of coming together, emerging evidence suggests that we are in the midst of a long-term crisis of habitual loneliness, in which relationships were severed and never reestablished.” —Arthur C. Brooks, “How We Learned to be Lonely,” The Atlantic, January 5, 2023

Arthur Brooks is a Harvard professor who teaches a popular class about happiness, drawing on sociological and psychological research. He believes that for many of us, the pandemic taught...

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