The Saint Must Walk
Alone
A.W. Tozer
MOST OF THE WORLD'S
GREAT SOULS have been lonely. Loneliness seems to be one price the saint must
pay for his saintliness.
In the morning of the
world (or should we say, in that strange darkness that came soon after the dawn
of man's creation) that pious soul, Enoch, walked with God and was not, for God
took him; and while it is not stated in so many words, a fair inference is that
Enoch walked a path quite apart from his contemporaries.
Another lonely man was
Noah who, of all the antediluvians, found grace in the sight of God; and every
shred of evidence points to the aloneness of his life even while surrounded by
his people.
Again, Abraham had Sarah
and Lot, as well as many servants and herdmen, but
who can read his story and the apostolic comment upon it without sensing
instantly that he was a man "whose soul was alike a star and dwelt
apart"? As far as we know not one word did God ever speak to him in the
company of men. Face down he communed with his God,
and the innate dignity of the man forbade that he assume this posture in the
presence of others. How sweet and solemn was the scene that night of the
sacrifice when he saw the lamps of fire moving between the pieces of offering.
There alone with a horror of great darkness upon him he heard the voice of God
and knew that he was a man marked for divine favor.
Moses also was a man
apart. While yet attached to the court of Pharaoh he took long walks alone, and
during one of these walks while far removed from the crowds he saw an Egyptian
and a Hebrew fighting and came to the rescue of his countryman. After the
resultant break with Egypt he dwelt in almost complete seclusion in the desert.
There while he watched his sheep alone the wonder of the burning bush appeared
to him, and later on the peak of Sinai he crouched alone to gaze in fascinated
awe at the Presence, partly hidden, partly disclosed, within the cloud and
fire.
The prophets of
pre-Christian times differed widely from each other, but one mark they bore in
common was their enforced loneliness. They loved their people and gloried in
the religion of the fathers, but their loyalty to the God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob, and their zeal for the welfare of the nation of Israel drove them away
from the crowd and into long periods of heaviness. "I am become a stranger
unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother's children," cried one and
unwittingly spoke for all the rest.
Most revealing of all is
the sight of that One of whom Moses and all the prophets did write treading His
lonely way to the cross, His deep loneliness unrelieved by the presence of the
multitudes.
'Tis midnight, and on Olive's brow
The star is dimmed that lately shone;
'Tis midnight; in the garden now,
The suffering Saviour prays alone.
'Tis midnight, and from all removed
The Saviour wrestles lone with fears,
E'en the disciple whom He loved
Heeds not his Master's grief and tears.
-WILLIAM B. TAPPAN
He died alone in the
darkness hidden from the sight of mortal man and no one saw Him when He arose
triumphant and walked out of the tomb, though many saw Him afterward and bore
witness to what they saw.
There are some things
too sacred for any eye but God's to look upon. The curiosity, the clamor, the
well-meant but blundering effort to help can only hinder the waiting soul and
make unlikely if not impossible the communication of the secret message of God
to the worshiping heart.
Sometimes we react by a
kind of religious reflex and repeat dutifully the proper words and phrases even
though they fail to express our real feelings and lack the authenticity of
personal experience. Right now is such a time. A certain conventional loyalty
may lead some who hear this unfamiliar truth expressed for the first time to
say brightly, "Oh, I am never lonely. Christ said, `I will never leave you
nor forsake you,' and, `Lo, I am with you alway.' How
can I be lonely when Jesus is with me?"
Now I do not want to
reflect on the sincerity of any Christian soul, but this stock testimony is too
neat to be real. It is obviously what the speaker thinks should be true rather
than what he has proved to be true by the test of experience. This cheerful
denial of loneliness proves only that the speaker has never walked with God
without the support and encouragement afforded him by society. The sense of
companionship which he mistakenly attributes to the presence of Christ may and
probably does arise from the presence of friendly people. Always remember: you
cannot carry a cross in company. Though a man were
surrounded by a vast crowd, his cross is his alone and his carrying of it marks
him as a man apart. Society has turned against him; otherwise he would have no
cross. No one is a friend to the man with a cross. "They all forsook him,
and fled."
The pain of loneliness
arises from the constitution of our nature. God made us for each other. The
desire for human companionship is completely natural and right. The loneliness
of the Christian results from his walk with God in an ungodly world, a walk
that must often take him away from the fellowship of good Christians as well as
from that of the unregenerate world. His Godgiven
instincts cry out for companionship with others of his kind, others who can
understand his longings, his aspirations, his absorption in the love of Christ;
and because within his circle of friends there are so few who share his inner
experiences he is forced to walk alone. The unsatisfied longings of the
prophets for human understanding caused them to cry out in their complaint, and
even our Lord Himself suffered in the same way.
The man who has passed
on into the divine Presence in actual inner experience will not find many who
understand him. A certain amount of social fellowship will of course be his as
he mingles with religious persons in the regular activities of the church, but
true spiritual fellowship will be hard to find. But he should not expect things
to be otherwise. After all, he is a stranger and a pilgrim, and the journey he
takes is not on his feet but in his heart. He walks with God in the garden of
his own souland who but God can walk there with him?
He is of another spirit from the multitudes that tread the courts of the Lord's
house. He has seen that of which they have only heard, and he walks among them
somewhat as Zacharias walked after his return from the altar when the people
whispered, "He has seen a vision."
The truly spiritual man
is indeed something of an oddity. He lives not for himself but to promote the
interests of Another. He seeks to persuade people to
give all to his Lord and asks no portion or share for himself. He delights not
to be honored but to see his Saviour glorified in the
eyes of men. His joy is to see his Lord promoted and himself
neglected. He finds few who care to talk about that which is the supreme object
of his interest, so he is often silent and preoccupied in the midst of noisy
religious shoptalk. For this he earns the reputation of being dull and overserious, so he is avoided and the gulf between him and
society widens. He searches for friends upon whose garments he can detect the
smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces, and finding few
or none he, like Mary of old, keeps these things in his heart.
It is this very
loneliness that throws him back upon God. "When my father and my mother
forsake me, then the Lord will take me up." His inability to find human
companionship drives him to seek in God what he can find nowhere else. He
learns in inner solitude what he could not have learned in the crowd that
Christ is All in All, that He is made unto us wisdom, righteousness,
sanctification and redemption, that in Him we have and possess life's summum bonum.
Two things remain to be
said. One, that the lonely man of whom we speak is not
a haughty man, nor is he the holier-than-thou, austere saint so bitterly
satirized in popular literature. He is likely to feel that he is the least of
all men and is sure to blame himself for his very loneliness. He wants to share
his feelings with others and to open his heart to some like-minded soul who will understand him, but the spiritual climate
around him does not encourage it, so he remains silent and tells his griefs to
God alone.
The second thing is that
the lonely saint is not the withdrawn man who hardens himself against human
suffering and spends his days contemplating the heavens. Just the opposite is
true. His loneliness makes him sympathetic to the approach of the broken-hearted
and the fallen and the sin-bruised. Because he is detached from the world he is
all the more able to help it. Meister Eckhart taught his followers that if they should find themselves in prayer as it were caught up
to the third heavens and happen to remember that a poor widow needed
food, they should break off the prayer instantly and go care for the widow.
"God will not suffer you to lose anything by it," he told them.
"You can take up again in prayer where you left off and the Lord will make
it up to you." This is typical of the great mystics and masters of the
interior life from Paul to the present day.
The weakness of so many
modern Christians is that they feel too much at home in the world. In their
effort to achieve restful "adjustment" to unregenerate society they
have lost their pilgrim character and become an essential part of the very
moral order against which they are sent to protest. The world recognizes them
and accepts them for what they are. And this is the saddest thing that can be
said about them. They are not lonely, but neither are they saints.