Article January 9, 1915 Issue

Isolation

EVA S. W. WILLIAMS

There are many words which, before the study of Christian Science enabled us to read them aright, bore sinister and unfavorable meanings, but which we now know to have meanings of a wholly different character. One such word is "isolation." It is derived from the Latin insula, an island, and has often been thought of as implying something like desolation. But among chemical definitions of the verb to isolate, Webster gives "to make pure; to obtain in a free state," and Christian Scientists prove that this explanation is very applicable to their own experience. Probably there is no student who is not at some time tempted to feel himself isolated from friends, kindred, associates of whatever description, and to cry out in his loneliness.

The Christian Science practitioner is always isolated from the world; but later he comes to rejoice in this separateness from his surroundings, wherein he is appreciably nearer to divine Mind, the Principle animating his work, nearer to God. The honest Christian Scientist whose lot is cast among many people and in busy surroundings, often longs for more time to be alone, and where this may not be outwardly demonstrated, he comes to realize that wherever he may be he actually is alone with God. It may with equal probability come about that he is enabled to withdraw to a great extent from society or other thought-disturbing conditions and give himself up to the work of healing.

There are others whose experience is just the reverse. Placed by circumstances, possibly also by temperament, where they are often alone, or brought into contact with very few fellow men, it is theirs to work out in the very midst of so-called actual loneliness and isolation the glorious truth that one friend is ever beside them. "Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet," as Tennyson puts it, and from this aspect it may be immeasurably harder than where the multitude throngs; but the saving desire to touch Christ's robe brings the student at any moment into "the secret place." Isolation becomes, in fact, what is often called "a problem." It is a sense of separation, which needs to be met and overcome just as blindness, deafness, lameness need to be replaced by sight, hearing, strength, and activity of limb. We are told that as one "thinketh in his heart, so is he," and this is never more self-evidently true than in the case of a man hungering for human companionship and seeing it not. If he is wise, he will emphatically repudiate the illusion of loneliness, and declare resolutely the nearness of God, our Father and Mother, "man's only real relative on earth and in heaven" (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 151). His every need is met when he can accept this as all-sufficing, for he will no longer look in vain for even human affection and friendship.

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