[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] friends any certain city a politician was running for office and the advertised for volunteer workers there were so many young women appeared for the job as volunteers but there was a near riot were they interested in politics no the first question they asked was how many men have appeared they were part of the lonely young women of this great city and then i know of an old woman who stays up every night until 12 o'clock to hear the announcer say we are now signing off good night and have a good sleep
that relieves over loneliness there was really and truly a woman wrote to me and told me that my program was the only one to which her cat ever listened so our subject and i has to do to some extent with loneliness it affects all ages children are lonely five million of them belong to divorced parents in this country boys get lonely that's why they join gangs because they get power which they do not individually have young girls are lonely when they get a pimple on the nose older girls are more lonely still when the boy
treats them as a glass throws the glass aside after he has taken the drink they find then that they're just a replaceable part and the great erotic ibm machine their loneliness increases and there's the loneliness of leadership being the top man in the totem pole there's the loneliness of being the bottom at the bottom of the totem pole because you're just one of the masses you're apt to lose your personality the loneliness sometimes of of marriage where all the jokes have been told there's no new event to narrate and it's the terrible solitude of being
alone together and then even when it does remain fine and noble and rich even in moments of greatest unity there is a feeling of apartness after such an ecstasy one hopes to completely submerge oneself and yet one finds oneself back again the hypochondriacs of course are lonely and so we were asked to talk on this program about this subject of loneliness and i'm going to give after these facts which we've just narrated i'm going to give first the causes and then i'm going to suggest some remedies now i didn't know whether to use the blackboard
or not my angel is here and i cannot think of any diagram that i could use just write causes on the board so i'm afraid i will not be able to use my angel but just before i came on the program he wanted to know if i would play a game of golf with him tomorrow and i told him that i was not old enough for golf because i play tennis twice a week when i get old i am going to play golf and i'm going to have a wagon too to take me around from
hold the hole and uh but uh he was telling me that the other day he was he was playing golf and he drove off 225 yard whole it was and the ball went right into the cup and he looked up to heaven and he said dear lord let me do this by myself he's not a lonely angel as you see now what are the causes of loneliness well one of the causes of loneliness has to do first of all with the lonely people themselves and another reason why they are lonely is because of people who
are not lonely first of all on the count of the lonely themselves they want to be loved too much they want to love to be loved now there's nothing wrong about wanting to be loved because we're all stradivarius violins without bows i didn't mean that pun we are one of the difficulties of an unprepared unscripted play and uh we're cups without saucers we we we are to be complimented but the deep loneliness of which we are speaking comes from an excessive desire to be loved the more i want to be loved the less i am
loved the less i'm loved the less lovable i become the less lovable i become the less i am capable of loving others and that's how by a desire to seek only oneself and to please oneself one gets caught like a bird in a fowler's net and the more one struggles to get out of this loneliness the more one is captured by it just take some concrete examples of this desire to be loved i know of a mother whose daughter was away at college and she used to call up the daughter every night would keep the
daughter on the phone for an hour and protested to the daughter that she was not appreciated as she should be and because other girls in this college wanted to use the phone said to her mother mother i'm forbidden to use the phone anymore one day the superintendent had sent for her and she was unable to answer the phone and she told her mother sent someone to answer the phone for the mother said this is the end and she refused to see her daughter again thus by wanting too much to be loved without loving one loses
even the love that one seeks and then there was a fiancee she used to i wonder if any of you young women in the audience ever do that do you know what she would do she would write down in a book every time the boyfriend called how long he spoke she also wrote down how often he wrote and how many words he wrote in each letter she felt that she wasn't loved enough so she began writing herself anonymous letters threatening her and she said that these letters came from a well-known author in the city and
finally she was exposed by this man whom she blamed and eventually the marriage was broken off she just loved too much loved to be loved then there was the the the wife who felt that her husband was paying no attention to her insisted that he stay away from work he wanted to go to a picnic wanted to go to the beach and he found excuses many times and finally lost his job the marriage broke up so one of the principal reasons of loneliness therefore is this egotism which seeks only oneself you can already see the
the cure anticipated but the mere fact that we mention this cause but then there's another cause of loneliness and that's the part on the part of the people who are not lonely they do not bring any love to these people do you know what we should do we should really concentrate a great deal on certain types of people we should concentrate on on the unfortunate on the poor on the socially disinherited on the unloved particularly the unloved and on the ugly and we we bring love to them we put love into them then they become
lovable now for example you were very lovable to god did you know that you say well what is there in me to love nothing but he put his love into you that's why you're lovable and that's what we have to do with other people and so the loneliness of these people is increased also because the rest of us will not listen to them listening is a therapeutic there was a psychologist who formulated a marriage case that involved uh sexual financial social and legal complications he went to 100 clergymen and 100 priests to present the story
and he carried the stopwatch with him do you know how long they listened the average was two and a half minutes then off the cuff answer they refused to listen they refuse to care george bernard shaw has something rather good on that subject in his place on saint joan king charles says to joan why do not the voices come to me i am the king joan answers they do come to you but you do not hear them you have not sat in the field in the evening listening for them you prayed from the bottom of
your heart and listened to the thrilling of the bells and the trilling of them after they had stopped ringing you would hear the voices just as i do in other words listening is a therapeutic a cure for lonely people we do the same thing with our prayers we wouldn't do to a to a doctor what we do to god we would we go into a doctor and rumble mumble off all of our symptoms and then say bye doctor not listen so listening on our part refusal to listen is one of the causes that intensifies this
forsakeness now what is the cure well there are cures and we will just have time to mention uh one that is very important namely caring for other people when we're lonely go out and serve then loneliness goes out through our fingertips our heart opens the chinese have a proverb if you're without shoes go out and find a man without any feet caring for others i remember when i first went to went to europe to study to do my university work as a young priest the first christmas i was lonely i was really lonesome i think
it was the only time in my life i was lonesome what would i do so i went to someone in the city of louvain and asked for a list of the worthy poor and i went to this particular alley it was the wrong address actually i got into rat alley when the door opened their earthen floor was a blind father to stove ten children barefooted around the stove ladder leading up to the second floor one bed upstairs bed downstairs the children slept crosswise i asked the family what they had this was christmas eve what they
had for for dinner she opened a bag of straw children had no sabbats no wooden shoes i took care of them for four years while i was studying at the university got them jobs rehabilitated them i felt at times perhaps they were drawing on me do you know that the day that i went up for my examination as a professor at that university i went in at nine o'clock to face 200 professors i saw the whole family coming down the street i asked them where they had been they said for the last two days we've
been at a shrine praying for you that you would pass the examination we walked all the way back i was never lonesome again that's the cure helping the neighbor but here's something to remember too we think we should not be lonely in this age of psychiatry there are two or three conclusions that our world is drawn which are false one is that we should never have attention certainly we have tensions we must have them we've got body and spirit and they go in opposite directions they have two different landing fields certain tensions are normal if
we didn't have them we would be abnormal and then we're lonesome sure there's a metaphysical loneliness perfection is not here this is not our home i've got something that i want in my heart that nothing on this earth can satisfy and nothing can satisfy you either and we know it very well so what's this what's the cause of this loneliness what are we looking for well we say we're looking for god yes but then i know what you will answer what does god know about loneliness now that's a good question that's a good question what
does he know about loneliness does he know anything about the loneliness for example of a babe in afghanistan who has no better home than just straw does god know anything about the loneliness of a mother who has to gather up a child in order to escape a dictator and fly halfway across africa does god know anything about the loneliness of a man that spawned on the wrong side of the tracks who's isolated socially from people simply because his hands are calloused with common labor and there's denied decent society sure does god know anything about that
kind of loneliness for example in which one is expelled from a city disowned by one's own people does he know anything about the loneliness of being deserted by friends does he even know anything about the loneliness feeling doubts doubts even about religion doubts even which one cries out why a thou abandoned me does god know anything about these things yes those are good questions now suppose that there was a figure that came into all of this loneliness and so immersed himself in it that he would not immunize himself from it would not cut himself off
from it would you for example be the only one on the battlefield that was whole and not help any of the wounded and so if there was a figure that came into this world of ours and refused to isolate himself from loneliness and felt it so much that blood poured out from his body felt loneliness so much that as if all the robberies of the world were thrust into his hands as if he himself were guilty that felt all those some carnality so much that his flesh was hanging from him like purple rags supposed someone
came into this world and went into all of this loneliness took it all and was not overcome by it but conquered it all then walked then i may be lonely every now and then but i'll not be overcome by it then i have a captain kind of a captain who did presses not a button in heaven from a celestial command but i have a captain who stumbled to a throne bishop sheen will return in a moment uh did that uh telecast seem a little short to you actually i was just informed that we were one
minute short now i have a clock before me over there and i keep my eyes on it but this clock here was right i finished three seconds before the time but up in the control room that celestial command that i just talked about they figured it wrong by one minute so they asked me if i could instead of coming out for a very brief closing closing come on and talk to you for a minute and a half now you were put to the test if that telecast seemed very short you were enjoying it we would
say time passed like anything if you were not enjoying it it seemed very very long as a matter of fact this minute and a half will seem interminable to you now i want to tell you i want to tell you my good people that i have to leave you now are you a bit lonely i am i'm lonely too bye now and god love you [Applause] fulton j sheen is indeed a man for all seasons he walked a paced beat allowing us to glimpse his nature and ponder its worth and to enjoy its presence bishop
sheen authored over 90 books he broadcast countless radio and television programs and ministered in many parts of the world to people of every belief as he said many times it is not a unity of religion we plead for but a unity of religious people we may not be able to meet in the same pew but we can meet on our knees the bishop wrote 94 books recorded countless radio shows and appeared on hundreds of network and syndicated television programs his legacy is a treasure of joy that transcends time and helps us to believe that truly
life is worth living you
