The School of Love, February 7

The School of Love

LONELINESS
[Continued from yesterday]

...Then, having "given us an example," hav­ing justified, as it were, our complainings by His own, He proceeds to soothe the bitter­ness for those who must needs undergo it. "My little children," He calls them, on the eve of the great Day of Loneliness.

"Let not your heart be troubled," He says, "nor 1et it be afraid....It is expedient for you that I go, for if I go not the Spirit will not come to you;" and He bribes them to go through with it because of all that is to fol­low.

Last of all, He assures them that it will not be all desertion: "I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you. Now indeed you have sorrow, but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice; and your joy no man shall take from you."

Then, as if to support Himself by the same argument by which He supports them, He concludes:
"Behold the hour cometh, and it is now come, that you 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."

Nowhere has Christ our Lord come nearer to us than in His loneliness and ours. Now here has He shown Himself more human. Nowhere has He more condoned the cry of pain, the appeal for some relief; nowhere has He done more, by example and by promise, to nerve us to endurance.

And the truth of His promise who that has tried does not know? St. Paul speaks for such as these, and they echo his words which have for them a meaning all their own: "I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor Angels, nor prin­cipalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor might, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shan be able to separate me from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
___________
From The School of Love and Other Essays
by The Most Reverend Alban Goodier, S.J.
Burns, Oates, & Washburn, Ltd. 1918