RADIO PROGRAM NO. 352 - Meeting the Challenge of Loneliness

[The Christian Science speaker is Jack Krieger. The questioner is Robert McKinnon.]

Questioner: Loneliness in today's crowded world continues to be a severe challenge for both young and old. No doubt many a lonely person wonders to what extent he would really be missed if he suddenly dropped out of sight. A song recorded by the Beatles a while back entitled "Eleanor Rigby" illustrates what loneliness means today. It speaks of "All the lonely people"—the nameless, faceless beings that don't appear to have any value to anyone, not even to themselves.
Speaker: Loneliness certainly is a challenge to people. But one thing that enables all of us to meet this challenge is to learn to value ourselves for what we really are.

We can begin to see that God actually expresses Himself through each one of us. This makes each of us in our true selfhood irreplaceable, always needed by God.

The God-given value of each individual is brought out in various ways throughout the Bible. Christ Jesus said (Luke 12:6 ), "Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God?" And he added (verse 7), "Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows."

Isaiah declared (43:12 ), "Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, that I am God." These verses point to the value of each individual as he bears witness to God's nature and His allness.
Questioner: Anyone suffering a feeling of loneliness would also be faced with the difficulty of trying to understand what God is. How can one possibly bear witness to that which he cannot understand?

Speaker: Many people do struggle with the thought of what God is. It has been helpful for me to think in terms of God as Love. From this I gain a desire to be loving to my fellowmen. To express God, I must love.

It's this view of man, related to God, that begins to free the individual from loneliness. As he sees his true value as God's expression, he'll know his value to himself and others. As an individual expresses Godlike qualities—such as kindness, consideration, thoughtfulness, genuine concern, and so on—he elicits a response from whomever he is with.

This points to the happiness and the inner joy that one has as he grows in an understanding of his relationship with others.

Take, for example, the science of numbers. Each number is individual, complete, an entity. But it is interrelated with the other numbers. They're important to each other. They're needed for the whole. This example merely hints at the deep interrelationship that exists in the fact that because God is the one Father, He must be the source of all identity. As divine Love He is expressed in purpose, value, and worth. So there's nothing ever meaningless, incomplete, unfulfilled, or unwanted about God's creation.

Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 70 ), "The divine Mind maintains all identities, from a blade of grass to a star, as distinct and eternal."

Man, the spiritual likeness of God, must be, is, perfect, complete, now and always. There aren't really any lonely people in God's creation. Each of us is needed by God and by each other to express the integrity and love of the Father.
Questioner: How can this be of value to a student, for example, who has just come to a very large university? He feels that he is just one of many without any particular value or worth of his own.
Speaker: I've talked about this very thing with university students. The basis for the feeling of belonging, of being a part of or of value to the whole, needs to be brought to bear in human experience by our expressing Godlike qualities toward others. As we begin to understand how it is that God needs us to express divine Truth and Love, we'll begin to feel complete within ourselves.
Questioner: Part of the lyric of the "Eleanor Rigby" song refers to a face "That she keeps in a jar by the door." So many of us have faces that we put on, and certainly these elicit response on a superficial level.
Speaker: What I'm talking about is the quality of Godlikeness expressed in dealing with others genuinely, not something we express on occasion but a quality within, a real, genuine expression of good or love for one's fellow-men.

Perhaps the lonely person might find some meaning in an experience I know of. At one point in his life a young man felt that things had become totally meaningless to him. He withdrew from his friends, loafed around the house, and existed in a state of lonely despair. His parents sent him to a distant city in the hope that a change in environment and the experience of being on his own would give him a sense of direction. He said that it's a terrifying thing to be in a city of millions of people knowing that you don't have a friend among them.

He was about ready to give up and go back home. On the way back to his hotel room he passed a Christian Science church. The evening service was about to begin, so he went in just to be with some people. The service brought out the idea of God as always loving and caring for the man of His creating wherever he is and whatever the circumstances. Well, my young friend began to realize that just being with people was not the answer to his loneliness, but that finding a sense of being with God was.

This was not his first contact with Christian Science, but this was, as he recounted, the experience that really led him to begin a consecrated study of the Bible and the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health, and to pray and work for an understanding of the power and presence of God in his life.

Up to this point he had been consumed with a purely selfish idea of being an unloved, unwanted, unhappy mortal. Now he was learning something of his real value, his true identity as created in the image and likeness of God, the real selfhood of everyone. By being loving, kind, thoughtful, attentive, and considerate—qualities which reflect and express God —wherever the opportunity occurred, he saw that he could be important to other people, that he could be concerned with them genuinely rather than just think of himself.

This changed his whole experience. He began to have a happy, free, and progressively more useful sense of existence both for himself and in his dealings and his relationship with others. He was no longer one of "the lonely people," for now he belonged, and knew where and why.

So the growing understanding of one's basic relationship to God and to one's fellowmen brings a realization of man's true identity, his purpose, his individuality. Loneliness is replaced by joy in God's creation, by a desire to bring its fullness more and more to light in human experience.