Alone

Alone

Eileen Renders

This subject has touched all of us to some degree, or another in our lives, and more often for some of us. We have heard others saying, “I dislike being alone”, “I will be alone now”, or “I feel so alone.” It is agreed that the idea of feeling alone is definitely emotional to some degree. For example, One can feel all alone amid people all around, and another can, be alone and yet feel comfortable, at peace, and with joy. Therefore, this emotional feeling is a state of mind in how one perceives their presence, their being.

This is the famous passage from St. Augustine’s Confessions in which Saint Augustine states “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

   Throughout our life, we may find that while we are enjoying the path we have chosen and experiencing no repercussions of negativity for the choices we are making, we may still feel an inner dissatisfaction of discontentment, and unsure why we are feeling this way. This can happen when we are living a life of making choices that are contrary to what we have been taught as children, and what we profess to believe. In other words, the Holy Spirit is unable to reach us, and we are not feeling God’s presence in our lives.

   This is the most alone feeling that a soul can ever feel, the absence of God in our life! God made us this way so that we would pursue Him as He pursues us. He wants to be with us, and we have shut Him out through sin and avoidance of the Sacraments. We have shut Him out through avoiding how we have hurt and offended Him.

   The type of “alone” that is created through sinfulness, avoidance of God and the Sacraments is meant to shake us, to wake us up because it is only a sample of the desperate feeling of aloneness we might feel should we die in sinfulness and experience the full depression of being alone without God’s love, be it temporary in Purgatory, and especially if it be permanently in hell.

   It is a good lesson for all of us to say what we believe, and live what we believe, lest we fall into that feeling of aloneness that darkens our very soul because of the absence of felling God in our lives. Prayer, Mass, the Sacraments, and living a life of service to God through love, mercy, charity is not advised because of God’s ability to punish us, but because God cannot provide us all the gifts, graces and blessings He truly wants to give to each of us when we follow selfish desires, whims and temptations that come to us through the Evil One.