Editorial August 16, 1919 Issue

Being Alone Without Loneliness

William P. McKenzie

In the story of Jesus' work we find that at times he withdrew from the crowd, taking his disciples to a desert place apart. We find a definition of the word wilderness in our textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," (p. 597) giving us two meanings or aspects: "Loneliness; doubt; darkness," and then it is spoken of as "spontaneity of thought and idea; the vestibule in which a material sense of things disappears, and spiritual sense unfolds the great facts of existence." When the disciples were taken away from embarrassing crowds into the quiet of the desert place, it was that they might be instructed in spiritual things and gain an understanding of that which prevented our Master from experiencing their loneliness or doubt.

The true remedy for loneliness requires avoidance of one characteristic of the wicked. If we have been making frequent complaint about lonesomeness as if we are much to be pitied, this fact just stated should make us think from a new standpoint. It is said of the wicked, "The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God: God is not in all his thoughts." A man has found the remedy for loneliness when God is in all his thoughts. He has begun to understand what Christ Jesus meant when he said, at the time his followers were soon to be scattered, "Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me."

The human belief of loneliness is the basis for much error, mesmerism, and trouble. A man will complain of loneliness when for some reason, some moral or physical restraint, he cannot keep companionship with his chosen group of associates. This desire seems to be one of the characteristics of those morally undeveloped, of whom it is said: "Though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not be unpunished." A man dependent on the influence of misleading association, when left upon his own resources finds himself lonely. Quite evidently his remedy must be to find new resources, and the right way to do this is in association with divine Mind. The promise is given in Jeremiah, "They shall ask the way to Zion with their faces thitherward, saying, Come, and let us join ourselves to the Lord in a perpetual covenant that shall not be forgotten." Many a man in prison has had the way to a new realm of thinking opened to him by The Christian Science Monitor, for example, which brought new hope into his life, like the tiny shrub described in "Picciola," or the ray of light which for one moment in each day gleamed upon another prisoner.

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