The School of Love
LONELINESS
[Continued from yesterday]
...Yet it is this very thing which God has chosen to be the school of training for His own. He has shown it without possibility of mistake. Look down the line of the Old Testament, and you will find it written everywhere. At this distance of time and space it is not easy for us to distinguish the details; we see in history the broad effects of lives, we do not always read between the lines and detect the causes which those effects imply.
But we have only to hold our gaze steady, to wait for the haze to lift, and this detail at least will grow upon us. Abraham - what was he but a model of loneliness? "In those days God said to Abraham: Leave thy country and thy father's house and come into a land which I shall show thee."
Moses, the saviour of his people, must first be brought up in an alien's house, and must then be made perfect in a wilderness.
David was a lonely man. No otherwise could he have known the depth of soul that cried out in his lament for the loss of Saul and Jonathan; no otherwise could he have learnt to endure and love on when friend and foe alike turned against him.
And the prophets, the giants of the latter age, Amos and Osee, Isaias and J eremias, Ezekiel and Daniel - what are they but gaunt lonely figures, standing out upon the distant sky-line, with the red light of a setting sun behind them?
Last of all comes the Baptist, the man of all men lonely, bestriding the gulf that separates two worlds, who because of his momentous mission must needs be alone from his childhood....
[Continued tomorrow]
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From The School of Love and Other Essays
by The Most Reverend Alban Goodier, S.J.
Burns, Oates, & Washburn, Ltd. 1918
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