Article April 6, 1987 Issue

Loneliness overcome

Crowds of people may not ease the pain of feeling alone, but understanding that we are inseparable from our creator, God, can actually heal loneliness.

Chester C. Muth

In his book Love and Conflict, the prominent clergyman and educator Gibson Winter speaks of the excessive loneliness that is created by the sort of society in which many people live today, a society largely of the city. He writes: "... It is one thing to be alone in order to be quiet and recollect oneself. This is creative aloneness. ... On the other hand, there is a kind of loneliness which comes from being isolated. ... It is the estrangement of the isolated person who moves anonymously in the midst of crowds." ^{Love and Conflict: New Patterns in Family Life (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1958), p. 180 .} This question of loneliness, the pangs of separation from others, of being cut off from friends and family, needs to be addressed from a spiritual perspective. It's important to approach the subject with the compassion and spiritual understanding that can actually lift individual lives out of these sad states of isolation and estrangement.

Most of us are probably inclined to identify loneliness in our personal lives as simply the case of being separated from other persons. But the very fact that it is sometimes most keenly felt right in the midst of groups or crowds, and that it has often been resolved quite independently of personal companionship, shows that the challenge is not so simple. Essentially, loneliness can be attributed to the underlying view that man is mortal—that he is separated from God and from God's purpose for him.

When an individual feels lonely or homesick, what that person is really longing for has its origin, its source, in God. Happiness, satisfaction, security, quietness of heart—each of these qualities is fundamentally a gift of God, to be expressed in individual lives as evidence of the presence and goodness of God. This is a profound insight that appears in both the Old and New Testaments. It was this very point that the Psalmist was expressing when he wrote to describe God's action, "He satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness." ^{Ps. 107:9.}

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