God was there

Back in 1990 the movie Home Alone was released in theaters at the holiday season. It tells the adventures of a young boy, played by Macaulay Culkin, who is mistakenly left alone when the rest of his family goes on a Christmas vacation. With wit and cleverness, he manages to have an exciting time and learn a few things about himself.

But for many people, the thought of being home alone is not fanciful. It’s fearful—especially during the holidays, when many people anticipate gathering with loved ones. One big reason is simple loneliness. Isolation. A basic yearning all people have is to feel loved and cared about. And what loneliness amounts to is the empty feeling of being unloved, forgotten, even rejected. Of course, these feelings can drop over any of us like a dark blanket at any season, but they seem more common when the general expectation for companionship is especially high.

Though people find solutions for these situations, it’s never possible to guarantee you’ll always have someone around who cares. Most of us know this from experience. There are some of us who don’t have close relatives anymore, or whose friends and loved ones live far away. And like the little boy in Home Alone, even loved relatives can fall through society’s cracks.

One January some years ago a meek and elderly aunt said quietly to me, “I had hoped you could come see me during the holidays.” It was a gentle but painful rebuke. Sometimes we neglect those who need us most, because of busy schedules. Or we simply forget. Or, worse yet, we invent some way to rationalize callous indifference. Other times, dear relatives—out of fear of becoming a burden or making us feel obliged to help them—can sink into a sad, stubborn refusal to let themselves be loved.

The sad fact is that there are occasions when even the most compassionately intended human solutions don’t reach a person’s need.

But it has been my modest experience that spiritual solutions hold much greater promise. That’s because they derive from God, to whom not a single person on earth is forsaken, forgotten, or alone. To be alone is to believe we are separate; whereas, the tender fact is we never can be separate from God, who is infinite good.

Jesus pointed the way out of loneliness for all humanity when he said, “I and my Father are one.” To me, he was saying that he thought about everything as inseparable from God—or, to put it another way, as existing in complete unison with the Creator. But Jesus didn’t mean he and God were one and the same thing, or that he was God. In this very passage he refers to God as his Father, his source and Creator. Jesus couldn’t be the source of himself. But he could be, and was, inseparable from his divine source.

Perhaps most reassuring to us is that we, too, in our real being, which is spiritual, are just as inseparable from, and beloved in the eyes of, our heavenly Father-Mother. The fact is that it is as impossible for us to be alone and separate from God as it is for a drop of water in a pond to be apart from the pond, or for a sunbeam to be separated from the sun.

It is as right for us to think of ourselves in these terms as it is right for us to believe 3x3=9, and it is as wrong for us to think of ourselves as alone, or lonely, as it is for us to believe 3x3=10. It is simply, fundamentally true that each of us is one with God—and is therefore beloved, adored, cared for. Not one of God’s ideas is ever forsaken.

These spiritual truths and many others like them can be found in the principal work of Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. I find that book feeds my hungering spiritual sense the way fresh water nourishes the sometimes drooping plant in my office. In simple terms any unbiased thinker can understand, it explains that none of us is ever alone or rejected.

As any of us, in any situation, holds to these compelling divine truths, they transform the way we think and bring us into harmony with ourselves and others. Today, it’s increasingly accepted that thought controls not only our bodies and health, but our entire life. As our thought is transformed by Christ—the universal truth coming to us from God—we live God’s glory through humility, honesty, affection.

We are a credit to God. We steadily become better people, and our whole experience is bettered as a result. This is no mystery, but it is a marvel, a wondrous expression of expectable good. And it’s as surely a law that this spiritual transformation will happen as it is a law that water in a pot over a campfire will boil.

Once I was sent on a business trip to Miami, a huge city where I knew no one. During my free time, I was tempted to feel lonely. But I resisted those thoughts by consciously holding to my spiritual identity. One Saturday afternoon I went to a Christian Science Reading Room, where I read, and reasoned with, spiritual ideas that made me feel literally embraced by my Father-Mother God.

Accepting that I wasn’t lonely was a mental tussle for a while, but gradually I gained control over the emptiness. Then, much to my surprise, I spontaneously thought of someone I knew in Miami and how to contact him. He was pleased to hear from me; and with him and his friends, I ended up having a delightful stay.

Of course, the sequence of these events was important: First was the spiritual resolve to use prayer as a way to become aware of my connection to my divine source. Then came the focus on God that lifted my thoughts, followed by the conviction of being one with Him. That ended the feeling of isolation.

Finally, a solution appeared that confirmed the spiritual insight. And it’s interesting that after all these years, while I clearly remember the spiritual reasoning process and resulting inspiration, I don’t recall a single thing we did that weekend. Jesus said so wisely and yet so tenderly, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

None of us is ever alone. You, dear reader, are not alone. If you seem to be, resist that thought. You cannot be alone. It’s impossible. God is always with you. His comfort and protection embrace you. Jesus said this unmistakably when he told his disciples, “The hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye 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.”

We all have the ability to understand this truth, to feel it, and to watch it make us genuinely happy.

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