Virtues of the Lonely Places
“This is a lonely place...” (Matt. 14:15)
In the past few weeks I have returned, repeatedly, to this simple phrase in Matthew’s Gospel spoken by an unnamed disciple.
Where, I wondered, are the truly lonely places? Desert caves? Dense jungles, or high mountains? They are all lonely, to be sure, but even in these places we may meet other people, and certainly we will find plant or animal life. No, in the truly lonely places, we find much more desolation than this.
The lonely places are the past and the future. Here, in our imagination, we must travel alone. We bring ourselves—and only ourselves—to a world of our own making. Far too often, we look upon the land we have built and behold nothing other than the monsters we have created: doubt and fear.
In the past, we are terrorized by doubt. In the landscape of our future, every evil rises up before us.
Let us make no mistake: there are real battles that must be fought in these lonely places against doubt and fear.
“This is a lonely place, and the day is now over; send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves” (Matt. 14:15).
Notice that Our Lord does not deny that it is a lonely place. Perhaps the disciples forgot what we ourselves often forget: even in the loneliest places, Our Lord is always present, and He will not leave us orphans. We are correct in our belief that we cannot bring anyone with us. But, there is One Who we need not bring with us, for He is already there, in His eternal present.
Our Lord does not send these people away in their time of need. Instead, He fulfills their need, reminding them, and us, that our “Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matt. 6:8).
The Past: Faith
We may ask then, what do we need when we consider the past? In the past, we are tempted to doubt. To doubt what especially? We find the answer a thousand times over in the Old Testament. We doubt God’s promises to us. We doubt His words to us. We doubt His revelation to us.
In that lonely place, God offers to us “the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one” (Eph. 6:16). The Catechism tells us that “Faith is the theological virtue by which we believe in God and believe all that he has said and revealed to us, and that Holy Church proposes for our belief, because he is truth itself.”
We have faith in things unseen. Paradoxically though, this faith which God freely offers to us as a gift, illuminates our path, “for we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7). This then is the only way to avoid falling into the chasms of doubt when we travel to the past; we carry with us the light of faith.
The Future: Hope
What though of the fears of our future? Do we once again carry with us the shield of faith? It would seem not, for in our past we doubt what has been, and in our future, we fear what might be. And what is it that we most fear? That, in the end, we will fail to reach the goodness and happiness that God has revealed to us. In its most severe form, we may even fall into despair.
In our lonely past, God grants us faith, but in our lonely future, he gives us hope.
Hope is the mortal enemy of despair, for the object of hope is eternal happiness. Yes, God Himself, who gives us this hope in Him. St. Francis de Sales tells us, “Do not fear what may happen tomorrow; the same everlasting Father who cares for you today will take care of you then and every day. He will either shield you from suffering, or give you unfailing strength to bear it. Be at peace, and put aside all anxious thoughts and imagination.”
“He will…give you unfailing strength to bear it.” What joy it is to realize that hope is itself a cause for further hope. For, God has given us exactly what we need in every lonely place to finally be united with Him: faith for our doubts, hope for our fears, in all the lonely places of space and time: peace. “Hope, O my soul, hope,” St. Teresa tells us, “You will rejoice one day with your Beloved, in a happiness and rapture that can never end.”
The Present: Charity
After the disciples tell Jesus that the crowd must leave the lonely place to buy food, He answers them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat” (Matt. 14:16). Sometimes, we do meet others in the lonely places in the world: the hungry, the thirsty, the sick, the homeless, the imprisoned. It is then, in their lonely present, that we come to them with our cultivated virtues of faith, and hope, to finally perform the proper virtue of the present: charity.
“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love,” (John 15:9) Jesus tells us. We are able to receive the virtue of charity from God only if we believe, with faith, the words He has spoken to us, and the hope to be united with Him. Yet, charity further perfects faith, and hope. As Aquinas so beautifully reminds us, “in the order of perfection, charity precedes faith and hope: because both faith and hope are quickened by charity, and receive from charity their full complement as virtues. For thus charity is the mother and the root of all the virtues, inasmuch as it is the form of them all…”
“Taking the five loaves and the two fish he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and broke and gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds” (Matt. 14:19).
Our Lord told the disciples to “give them something to eat.” And how do they do this? Only through the charity of Jesus. He allows his disciples, and all of us, to participate in His love. Christ could have fed the crowd with no help from the disciples. Instead, He allows us to become conduits of grace. We can travel with him to these lonely places, where “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall become straight, and the rough ways plain” (Is. 40:4).
“These Three”
Let us remember, then, that we are offered the perfect gift for every time and every place. “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three,” a virtue for our past, for our future, and our present.
These three.
With them, we need not fear the lonely places. For, we are told by Matthew that Jesus came to this place quite purposefully: “He withdrew from there in a boat to a lonely place” (Mt. 14:15). When we come to these places, we need only remember that Jesus waits for us there.
Yes, perhaps especially there. For what places on this earth were lonelier than a cave in winter, an empty garden with drops of sweated blood, a cross upon a hill, or a tomb within a rock?
And yet, in such places do we find Him—waiting for each of us.