“Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find all
the barriers within yourself that
you have built against it.”Rumi

I used to call the dark feeling inside me the shadow of death, but now I prefer to call it the Long Loneliness that dwells deep in all of us. We need friends and community but at the end we are alone. Dying and seeing the face of God might just mean the disappearance of this long loneliness as we rise to see the face of God. I do not know and it is in this not knowing, this nothingness where the Long Loneliness dwells.

The attraction of the modern communications, cell phones, internet and TV for me is not Facebook, games, tweet sports or entertainment. The attraction of the internet is that in keeps me in touch with persons of like spirit. I can communicate with Catholic Workers in Vermont or Holland that have touched my life. I can get a call no matter where I am at from a friend in Milwaukee or Kentucky that just wants to talk. I can find news and information, most too much information, about world and human events on TV or via Internet that I would have never known about that helps me understand we are all one, brother and sisters.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said something to the effect that the busier he was the more he needed to take time for prayer and reflection. I believe these words of wisdom although do not always practice it.

The Long Loneliness puts me in solidarity with so many persons, family, friends and people all over the world I know or do not know.

Dorothy Day in her autobiography called The Long Loneliness gives us the only way out of this Long Loneliness “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”

In a word picture sent to me today there is a quote from Rumi, a 13th-century Persian Muslim, poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic. He says: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

So putting together advice from King, Day and Rumi on the Long Loneliness we need to take time in our busy life to reflect and learn to love all that is around us by removing the barriers to love within us.

Comments

(:commentboxchrono:)