TO THE LONELY '

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 192, 15 August 1931, Page 13 (Supplement)

TO THE LONELY '

A MESSAGE FOR EVERYONE | (By H-G.G.) 1 Loneliness is part of the price we pay for individuality. Every man has his own viewpoint and his own reactions thereto. Every man must bear his own burden, shoulder his own cross, exjilore the way of his owu pilgrimage. The poet’s words are true: Each in his hidden sphere of joy or woe Our hermit spirits dwell and range apart. Yes! in the sea of life enisled With echoing straits between us thrown Dotting the shoreless watery’ wild We mortal millions live ALONE. Yet our loneliness generally falls into categories which demonstrate that we are not alone in our loneliness; we may be solitary, but there are others experiencing a similar solitariness. Some fur one reason or another are lonely because the closest ties of life are denied to them. Many who by nature and inclination would be ideal home-makers are deprived of that joy. How many women among us between the ages of thirty and fifty have been thus deprived because, during the years when they should have consummated the demands of their nature, a war was on? Others had made their choice, but even while dreaming 44 of the glow and glory of the distance, wonderful wooing and the grace of tears,” a violent death on the battle front shattered all. Others among us have denied their devoutest wish and turned their back upon happiness, because a stern call of duty demanded sacrifice. Have we never heard of men and women refusing marriage and living a life of voluntary celibacy because of the tragic history of mental and other diseases in their forbears? Again, there are homes into which children have never come. The loneliness of all such is accentuated and rendered more acute by the cruel sneers or cheap jokes of the uncharitable or the unthinking. Death may have snatched away child or children, and there is an empty place in the mother’s heart, a blank in the father’s life. Once more, there are I homes that once were filled with the laughter of little children, but these have grown up and gone out into the world, and the old home is left forlorn.

Moral and Spiritual Isolation. Now look from another angle. A , necessary clement in individuality is f moral and spiritual loneliness. But here we must distinguish between a solitariness that is heroic and one that is really diseased sensibility. As !•’. W. Robertson has pointed out in some forceful sentences: To feel solitary is no uncommon thing. To complain of being alone, without sympathy and mis- ' understood, is general enough. In every place, in many a family, tiiese victims of diseased sensibility are to be found, l and they might find a weakening satisfaction in observing a parallel be- ! tween their own feelings and those of ; Jesus. But before that parallel is as- ■ sumed, be sure that it is, as iu His case, ; the elevation of your character which ■ severs you from your species. The world • has small sympathy for Divine good- ■ ness: but it also has little for a great ; many other qualities which arc dis- : agreeable to it. You meet with no re- ■ spouse—you are passed by—find your- ; self unpopular— meet with little communion—Well? Is that because you are 4 ’above” the world, nobler, devising and executing grand plans which they cannot comprehend: vindicating the wronged, proclaiming and living on great principles: offending it by the t saintliness of your purity, and the unworldliness of your aspirations? Then . yours is the loneliness of Christ. Or is it. that you are wrapped up in self — t cold, disobliging, sentimental, indiffer- ' ent about the welfare of others, and '■ very much astonished that they arc not t deeply interested in you? You must , not use those words of Christ which speak of moral and spiritual isolation: 4 ’Behold, the hour cometh, yea is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every . man to his own, and shall leave Me i alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me.” The Loneliness of Sin f Many arc lonely because of their wrong-doing. Sin of any sort makes for loneliness; spreads enmity; divides. Look at the prodigal in the far country, feeding swine and with swine as ' his only companions. Earlier in his career of sin there had been friends ■ enough, but the hour of need finds no one at his side. Free from distraction he came to himself, and cried: “I will arise and go to my father.” It was in ■ part his unutterable loneliness that • forced the words from his lips. Or take ’ the moment in the Upper Room when Jesus could no longer endure the presi cnee of the betrayer. 4 ’That thou doest do quickly,’’ He said to Judas. “He I went out quickly; and it was night.” ■ No sentence in all literature conveys a ■ deeper sense of desolation and ioneli- > ness. The heaviest and most cruel isot lation comes from sin. Alone, Yet Not Alone. Now consider Jesus Christ. He came > unto His own and His own received ; Him not. There was some shadow of ; misunderstanding, if nothing more, between Him and His kinsfolk. He was , denied the closest and tenderest ties of . life. 4 4 Foxes have holes, birds of the L air have nests, but the Son of man hath ■ not where to lay His head.” There was moral and spiritual solitude and . solitariness. Even to the disciples He ’ w r as compelled to say: “O foolish men and slow of heart to believe!” We may even go further and say that Christ knew loneliness that conies from i sin—not His own sin—but the sin of t the world He bore upon His heart, and on the cross that sin seems to have blotted out the vision of God for a ? time: “My God. my God, why hast • Thou forsaken me?” Because He knows D all that loneliness can mean, and has 5 entered fully into our great need, Christ - can say: 44 Cast thy burden on the Lord s and He shall sustain thee.” i “Good morning, auntie, living all alone?” cried a horseman as he came

across an old negress in a clearing of some woods. Her house was a tumbledown old cabin and she was bent and wrinkled with age. But with glittering eyes and in a. shrill keyed-up voice, she replied, 44 Yes me ; n’ Jesus, massa.” A hush came over the whole place and there seemed a halo about the old shack. The man thought he could see someone standing by her side looking over her shoulder at him, and His form was 'ike that of the Son of God. With the keen insight into spiritual things so often found in such simplicity among her race, she had won the whole philosophy of life. Her world was changed and beautiful in the solitude of the woods by reason of her Master’s presence.