On September 1, 1939, the night after the onset of World War II, W. H. Auden sat in one of the dives on Fifty-second Street in New York and observed people trying to escape themselves and their world by drinking, dancing, keeping up conventions:
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
Is there not a hint of an almost universal experience here? At one time or another most people are troubled with loneliness. Psychologists say that they are “on the outside.” As Andre Gide suggests, so many of us suffer from the fear of finding ourselves alone that we do not find ourselves at all. Few, if any, fail to understand the language and emotion of the psalmist:
I am . . .Like an owl of the waste
Like a lonely bird on the housetop. Psalm 102:6-7
The loneliness that most of us know is not so much that of physical apartness as it is spiritual isolation. Personal crises arise when we are betrayed by a trusted friend, when some serious illness comes our way, when we are defeated in some cherished hope or enterprise or when death claims the life of a loved one. It is then that too many of us we feel utterly alone.
Is there any help for us? Are there guideposts to point the way to an abundant rather than as lonely life? There is!
We can be freed from this distressing devastation by learning to give ourselves in love to others. One of the deadliest obsessions that can assail a person is the idea that happiness comes from some pleasant oasis where all one has to do is sit and loaf, endlessly twiddling his thumbs. This obsession to be free from doing anything plays deadly havoc in the life of many. It dries up all springs of unselfishness.
It dams all streams of creative living. It muffles the music of empathy. We need to learn to give ourselves in love to others.
A kin to this is another principle which will assist us in fighting off the wild beast of loneliness. We need to identify ourselves with and become ‘active in a redemptive fellowship.’ In such a fellowship we know the liberating sense of oneness and harmony with people and with God.
This leads naturally to this exhilarating truth: Companionship with God is the ultimate conqueror of loneliness. This is the reason we make a distinction between “loneliness” and “aloneness.” We can be alone yet not in despair, for we can be alone with God.
Our lives are much the richer when we learn this. We need to be alone, alone with God. It is in such solitude that we discover inner resources and creative powers we have not known before.
So whether alone at “Hidden Haven” in the solitude of early morning or riding a wild subway at the rush hour of the day, we need to be alone—alone with God…. and this will shatter our loneliness.
When Helen Keller celebrated her eightieth birthday, she was interviewed by Ann Carnahan for This Week Magazine. One of the questions was, “Are you ever lonely?” Here was Miss Keller’s answer. “Sometimes a sense of isolation enfolds me like a mist. But I no longer feel I stand alone. I now need solitude to write and so much has been given me I have, no time to ponder over that which has been denied.”
She had learned the art of being alone—alone but not lonely. Alone with great thoughts, great dreams, great truths, great aspiration, alone with God
This is the ultimate conqueror of loneliness: companionship with God. Will you know that Companion and cultivate that friendship?