“It’s not good for man to be alone,” we read in Genesis. We are social animals. In other words, we are meant to be around other people. Perhaps this is why when we feel lonely, we can feel a sense of failure. We think that we have failed because we don’t have enough friends or think we have failed because we didn’t see the moment of loneliness ahead of time. We wonder why we weren’t included or if there is something wrong with us.
Loneliness is different from being alone. We all need to be alone sometimes in order to rest, recharge, and prepare to tackle the work of another day. Loneliness is different. Loneliness can strike even when you are surrounded by other people. One might choose to be alone by removing himself from the company of other people. But one does not choose loneliness where we feel that nobody sees us, wants us, or loves us. What are we to do when we experience this? We might not know when this feeling will end, but we can be comforted by knowing that loneliness has always been a normal part of life. Read the book of Psalms. The Psalms are filled with references to feeling abandoned, rejected, and alone. Some examples include Psalm 25 and Psalm 31. These beautiful works of poetry articulate the human condition but they also prefigure the life, suffering, and death of Jesus Christ.
There is also something inherently Christian about loneliness. It unites us with the loneliness that Jesus suffered during his Passion. There is an element of this in each of the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. The Agony in the Garden of Gethesemane, the Scourging at the Pillar, the Crowning with Thorns, Carrying the Cross, and finally his Crucifixion and Death. All of these things Christ suffered on his own. The Blessed Mother and Saint John remained by his side, but they could not suffer in the same way in his place. This loneliness which Christ experienced was the cause of his plea from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46). Christ did not exempt himself from this loneliness. Rather, he embraced it. Loneliness characterizes what Christ referred to as “his hour,” the most important moment of Christ’s earthly life. When we experience loneliness, we are being invited into, even conformed, to Christ’s Passion.
The aim of every Christian life is to imitate Christ, even in his loneliness. The group of people who have done this in a particularly exemplary way are the martyrs—that noble band of men and women who witnessed to Christ by the shedding of their blood. These witnesses include names familiar to us like Stephen, Cecilia, Thomas Becket, and Joan of Arc. Surely, there are hundreds, even thousands, of other martyrs unknown to the popular mind, but nonetheless gloriously reigning alongside Christ in heaven. A look at any martyrdom would reveal loneliness. Imagine the early Christians, such as Perpetua and Felicity, who were led out into a crowded coliseum and were fed to wild animals for public entertainment. Think of men like Thomas More, who lost his career and distinguished office, whose family was made destitute by his arrest. He was subjected to solitary confinement and was eventually tried and found guilty by his colleagues. Think of Maximilan Kolbe who, with one step out of a line of prisoners offered himself as a replacement to die for another man. He was sent to the starvation block with other prisoners but outlasted all of them, and was eventually killed by lethal injection.
Through their loneliness, the martyrs were conformed more closely to Christ on the Cross. They were not abandoned by God, but were sustained by his grace. God did not abandon his Son on the Cross, nor will he abandon us. Saint Paul echoes this when he writes “who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword?” (Rom 8:35). We are not promised that we will never be lonely, but that whatever anguish we suffer, it will not be enough to separate us from the love of God.
The martyrs have come from every walk of life, from every corner of the globe, from every vocation. All Christians are called to imitate Christ, who embraced the loneliness of his Passion, even to the point of death. All Christians, therefore, are called to some form of martyrdom through embracing the occasional loneliness of life here on earth. We may not need to give witness to Christ through the shedding of our blood, but we can witness by consecrating our day-to-day loneliness as a sacrifice to God. Just as the martyrs, through God’s grace, united themselves to Christ in his suffering in order to overcome the fear of death, we too can overcome loneliness by seeing how Christ brings us close in his loneliness.
Offer your loneliness to God for his glory, ask for and rely on his grace. Do not be overcome by the intimidation of the difficulty, but remember the words of Jesus to the disciples at the Last Supper “take courage, I have conquered the world.”
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Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash
