THE SAINT Must WALK ALONE

THE SAINT Must WALK ALONE

by 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

herdsmen, 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 was 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 Savior prays alone.

      'Tis midnight, and from all removed

      The Savior 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 always.'

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 God-given

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 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 soul - and 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

Savior 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

brokenhearted 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 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.

~(Tozer extract from his book: 'The Dwelling Place of God').