Sunday: The Mastery of Loneliness
WEEK 50
SUNDAY
THE MASTERY OF LONELINESS
1 Kings 19:9-12
We come now to see another mastery—the mastery of loneliness.
This is a much-needed mastery; for while life today is apparently thrown together by modern communications, yet there remains a central loneliness in modern humanity. Thrown in with everybody, people feel they don’t belong to anybody. All the news of the world is poured into people’s minds; they see the scenes of the world on television, yet for all that they feel alone. As Heindricks, an eminent Canadian sociologist, says: “The machine has created loneliness in the modern world. The loneliness of the modern man has been aggravated by the soullessness of the machine.”*
These people are lonely: the old man who has lost his partner, the immigrant who has not been made to feel at home in her adopted country, the adolescent with acne, the shy person, the traveling salesperson, the unemployed, the new person moving into a community, the guilty. Loneliness is now a social phenomenon. One recent book is entitled The Lonely Crowd. Being thrown with people doesn’t necessarily take away loneliness.
Heindricks says: “My chief memory is drunken men and women from Friday night through Sunday in lumber camps.”* Alcoholics Anonymous is helping the person who has become so anonymous that the person turns to drink. An African American secretary showers love on a horse she has bought because she is lonely. It is the shy, timid persons who fill our hospital beds.
I, a stranger and afraid,
In a world I never made.**
Is there an answer to this basic loneliness? The early Christians seem to have found the answer. There is not a line that expresses loneliness in the Acts. Long periods of isolation, long imprisonments, ostracisms aplenty; yet there is a basic sense of being not alone. They found the secret of being at home anywhere and of being with Christ everywhere.
O Jesus, I thank you that with you I need never, never feel lonely or afraid. You remove that basic sense of loneliness and make me feel I’m wanted and loved. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I am at home everywhere, for I am at home in God, and God is everywhere.
* No published source was located for these quotations.
** A. E. Housman, The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1965), 111.