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 herds-men, but who can read his story and
the apostolic comment upon it without sensing instantly
that he was a man “whose soul was like 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.
’Tis midnight, and on Olive’s brow
The star is dimmed that lately shone;
’Tis midnight; in the garden now,
The suffering Savior prays alone.
’Tis midnight, and from all removed
The Savior wrestles lone with fears;
E’en the disciple whom He loved
Heeds not his Master’s grief and tears. - William B. Tappan
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.
