What does it mean to be alone? To be lonely and alone may go together but not necessarily. How does one manage? Why does God appear to put large meaning on the matter of being alone? Included in our fleeting discussion of the matter, we include those who feel they are alone even when there are persons in close proximity. The elderly person may never feel quite so alone as being in a room full of friends and relatives but shorn of part of physical acuities, like hearing, or removed from the involved members of the circle, he or she is present but alone, perhaps lonely.
Early in the Biblical narrative we read that God saw that it was not good for the male to be alone so He created the female. By this marriage He bridged the stream of loneliness (a major matter) for both, and created family. From there the nations and races formed all kinds of difficulty in getting along with each other even though persons in society were given for the love (fellowship), good and service of the other. What was provided in Divine context to offer opportunity for the practice of virtue was turned into cause for disagreement, tension, separation – even warfare.
Our interest here is focused on the lone individual. That is what the controlled person can manage. We sometimes have, and some persons often have, that feeling of aloneness in our hearts. We know children feel it, especially after harsh discipline or some great disappointment. Tears become relief. We may feel aloneness increased when we grow old and separated from the world of commerce, with its forced preoccupation with children, job and duties of forming a society. Masses of persons live daily with aloneness. Soren Kierkegaard wrote to his cousin, Hans Peter, about inwardness. Hans Peter was crippled from birth, and lived a solitary life. Kierkegaard wrote him for the purpose of encouraging him in the life of being left to forage within the self. The counsel to Hans was magnificent. He should not see himself as superfluous to God. He was as valued as anyone, so he should love himself. He was reminded that the busy people may become so busy that they lose themselves. They were the ones indicted as, busy, busier, busiest haste of busyness – busy with wasting time and losing oneself. If the analysis is true, Hans had opportunity to gain a comforting and useful option.
The Scriptures return often enough to this issue that we need to be aware of it both to nourish our souls and to help others through their aloneness. One is taken with the aloneness of many leading saints of the Bible, including the Apostle Paul. Even Jesus is featured, and dismisses his mother at the Cross so that he may be alone in the midst of soldiers, rabble masses and malefactors. His cry to the Father on the turning of his face seizes upon our lonely imaginations. Jesus is saying something to those who feel forsaken (abandoned). No matter what happens, he is with us. In actuality we are never alone, unless we dismiss him from our lives. My wife, dear to me and to our children, died some years ago. After 57 years with her, it has taken something to bridge the human loss to me. I have learned that I can have a whole day with no human contact, no oral word spoken (except with my prayer partner), and feel the presence of God that day, but also that there are my children out there to lift the aloneness. My duty is to prayer, to make this the most useful period of my life. I have become a better person in that learning. There is a mysterious sense in which the Christian feels that all creation has been muted, and one feels as though there is an island where God and I are present – not alone. That becomes a fellowship of grace that cannot be improved upon. The individual has fully become God’s child on earth. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020