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Most of the world's great souls have been
lonely. Loneliness seems to be one price the saint
must pay for his saintliness.
In the morning of the world (or should
we say, in that strange darkness that came soon
after the dawn of man's creation), that pious
soul, Enoch, walked with God and was not, for God
took him; and while it is not stated in so many
words, a fair inference is that Enoch walked a path
quite apart from his contemporaries.
Another lonely man was Noah who, of all the
antediluvians, found grace in the sight of God; and
every shred of evidence points to the aloneness of
his life even while surrounded by his people.
Again, Abraham had Sarah and Lot, as well
as many servants and herdsmen, but who can read his
story and the apostolic comment upon it without
sensing instantly that he was a man "whose soul was
alike a star and dwelt apart"? As far as we know not
one word did God ever speak to him in the company of
men. Face down he communed with his God, and the
innate dignity of the man forbade that he assume
this posture in the presence of others. How sweet
and solemn was the scene that night of the sacrifice
when he saw the lamps of fire moving between the
pieces of offering. There, alone with a horror of
great darkness upon him, he heard the voice of God
and knew that he was a man marked for divine favor.
Moses also was a man apart. While yet
attached to the court of Pharaoh he took long walks
alone, and during one of these walks while far
removed from the crowds he saw an Egyptian and a
Hebrew fighting and came to the rescue of his
countryman. After the resultant break with Egypt he
dwelt in almost complete seclusion in the desert.
There, while he watched his sheep alone, the wonder
of the burning bush appeared to him, and later on
the peak of Sinai he crouched alone to gaze in
fascinated awe at the Presence, partly hidden,
partly disclosed, within the cloud and fire.
The prophets of pre-Christian times differed widely
from each other, but one mark they bore in common
was their enforced loneliness. They loved their
people and gloried in the religion of the fathers,
but their loyalty to the God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob, and their zeal for the welfare of the nation
of Israel drove them away from the crowd and into
long periods of heaviness. "I am become a stranger
unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother's
children," cried one and unwittingly spoke for all
the rest.
Most revealing of all is the sight of that
One of whom Moses and all the prophets did write,
treading His lonely way to the cross. His deep
loneliness was unrelieved by the presence of the
multitudes.
He died alone in the darkness hidden from
the sight of mortal man and no one saw Him when He
arose triumphant and walked out of the tomb, though
many saw Him afterward and bore witness to what they
saw. There are some things too sacred for any eye
but God's to look upon. The curiosity, the clamor,
the well-meant but blundering effort to help can
only hinder the waiting soul and make unlikely if
not impossible the communication of the secret
message of God to the worshiping heart.
Sometimes we react by a kind of religious
reflex and repeat dutifully the proper words and
phrases even though they fail to express our real
feelings and lack the authenticity of personal
experience. Right now is such a time. A certain
conventional loyalty may lead some who hear this
unfamiliar truth expressed for the first time to say
brightly, "Oh, I am never lonely. Christ said, `I
will never leave you nor forsake you,' and `Lo, I am
with you alway.' How can I be lonely when Jesus is
with me?"
Now I do not want to reflect on the
sincerity of any Christian soul, but this stock
testimony is too neat to be real. It is obviously
what the speaker thinks should be true rather than
what he has proved to be true by the test of
experience. This cheerful denial of loneliness
proves only that the speaker has never walked with
God without the support and encouragement afforded
him by society. The sense of companionship which he
mistakenly attributes to the presence of Christ may
and probably does arise from the presence of
friendly people. Always remember: you cannot carry a
cross in company. Though a man were surrounded by a
vast crowd, his cross is his alone and his carrying
of it marks him as a man apart. Society has turned
against him; otherwise he would have no cross. No
one is a friend to the man with a cross. "They all
forsook Him, and fled."
The pain of loneliness arises from the
constitution of our nature. God made us for each
other. The desire for human companionship is
completely natural and right. The loneliness of the
Christian results from his walk with God in an
ungodly world, a walk that must often take him away
from the fellowship of good Christians as well as
from that of the unregenerate world. His God-given
instincts cry out for companionship with others of
his kind, others who can understand his longings,
his aspirations, his absorption in the love of
Christ; and because within his circle of friends
there are so few who share inner experiences, he is
forced to walk alone. The unsatisfied longings of
the prophets for human understanding caused them to
cry out in their complaint, and even our Lord
Himself suffered in the same way.
The man who has passed on into the divine
Presence in actual inner experience will not find
many who understand him. A certain amount of social
fellowship will of course be his as he mingles with
religious persons in the regular activities of the
church, but true spiritual fellowship will be hard
to find. But he should not expect things to be
otherwise. After all he is a stranger and a pilgrim,
and the journey he takes is not on his feet but in
his heart. He walks with God in the garden of his
own soul - and who but God can walk there with him?
He is of another spirit from the multitudes that
tread the courts of the Lord's house. He has seen
that of which they have only heard, and he walks
among them somewhat as Zacharias walked after his
return from the altar when the people whispered, "He
has seen a vision."
The truly spiritual man is indeed something of an
oddity. He lives not for himself but to promote the
interests of Another. He seeks to persuade people to
give all to his Lord and asks no portion or share
for himself. He delights not to be honored but to
see his Savior glorified in the eyes of men. His joy
is to see his Lord promoted and himself neglected.
He finds few who care to talk about that which is
the supreme object of his interest, so he is often
silent and preoccupied in the midst of noisy
religious shoptalk. For this he earns the reputation
of being dull and overserious, so he is avoided and
the gulf between him and society widens. He searches
for friends upon whose garments he can detect the
smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory
palaces, and finding few or none, he, like Mary of
old, keeps these things in his heart.
It is this very loneliness that throws him
back upon God. "When my father and my mother forsake
me, then the Lord will take me up." His inability to
find human companionship drives him to seek in God
what he can find nowhere else. He learns in inner
solitude what he could not have learned in the crowd
- that Christ is All in All, that He is made unto us
wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and
redemption, that in Him we have and possess life's
summum bonum.
Two things remain to be said. One, that the lonely
man of whom we speak is not a haughty man, nor is he
the holier-than-thou, austere saint so bitterly
satirized in popular literature. He is likely to
feel that he is the least of all men and is sure to
blame himself for his very loneliness. He wants to
share his feelings with others and to open his heart
to some like-minded soul who will understand him,
but the spiritual climate around him does not
encourage it, so he remains silent and tells his
griefs to God alone.
The second thing is that the lonely saint
is not the withdrawn man who hardens himself against
human suffering and spends his days contemplating
the heavens. Just the opposite is true. His
loneliness makes him sympathetic to the approach of
the brokenhearted and the fallen and the
sin-bruised. Because he is detached from the world,
he is all the more able to help it. Meister Eckhart
taught his followers that if they should find
themselves in prayer and happen to remember that a
poor widow needed food, they should break off the
prayer instantly and go care for the widow. "God
will not suffer you to lose anything by it," he told
them. "You can take up again in prayer where you
left off and the Lord will make it up to you." This
is typical of the great mystics and masters of the
interior life from Paul to the present day.
The weakness of so many modern Christians is that
they feel too much at home in the world. In their
effort to achieve restful "adjustment" to
unregenerate society they have lost their pilgrim
character and become an essential part of the very
moral order against which they are sent to protest.
The world recognizes them and accepts them for what
they are. And this is the saddest thing that can be
said about them. They are not lonely, but neither
are they saints.
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