The only remedy against loneliness is communication.
The only remedy against loneliness is communication.
It is quite easy, you know, if you really love people. But you have to love your brothers and sisters and love them as they are, not expecting from them some performance or something extraordinary.
You have to take them as they are — the people on the street, friends, family, even your enemies.
Yes, one of the ways of dealing with loneliness, and of dealing it a hard blow, is the acceptance of people as they are. Then friendliness toward my brother and sister is normal and natural, and I can communicate with them on the level at which they are.
This is the natural way of dealing with loneliness.
But when we enter the field of communication, we also enter into the field of sanctity. Communication incarnates the words of Christ that we should love one another as he loved us. When we enter the field of communication, we enter a deep and profound mystery.
One cannot truly communicate with the other without the help of God. And so, one must pray to the Holy Spirit, and, strangely enough, to the woman who was wrapped in silence — Mary.
She did not communicate orally, but her benedictions and her way of communicating were miraculous because her love was almost infinite.
Of course, if people put up walls between the Holy Spirit, or Mary, and themselves, then there is no communication.
But I want to make this quite clear: true communication can only happen with prayer — powerful prayer. This means that one loves the person with whom he or she communicates, and this love comes from God.
The Triune God can lift us to the immense heights required to love another as he has loved us. No fear should be attached to this act, this state of loving.
Communication, fundamentally, is prayer; this is difficult for people to understand. To span the distance between the casual greeting and the realm of deep, earnest, and loving prayer to him who is Love is not very easy, but it has to be done. For we cannot really communicate unless we love.
Also, in order to communicate, one must hope as well as love, and one must sit under the tree of faith. Otherwise, all communication will ring falsely in the ears of him or her with whom we try to communicate, and they will not respond.
If communication is really to move the heart of the other, there must be complete simplicity.
Then something happens to that other person. Suddenly, strange as it might seem, they look at us, and in our humble features they see the face of him who died for love of them.
And because they catch a glimpse of something, their heart opens, and we can communicate with them.
Now the fulfillment of the new commandment that Christ gave us, that we love one another and love our enemies, comes to full fruition , and the world is renewed once more because the Lord truly smiles upon it.
Adapted from Doubts, Loneliness, Rejection, (1993), pp. 55-56, out-of-print. However a newer book by Catherine Doherty, In the Footprints of Loneliness, (2003), is available from MH Publications
[Photo: Catherine Doherty teaches at Madonna House summer school.]
