When I was twenty, would I have been able to fight human loneliness: to remain alone, as I dare do today? . . . I was a victim of all those illusions to which youth is always a prey . . . all the qualities which make us want to hurl ourselves into someone else’s arms to soothe the wounds of loneliness, the yearning for a single human presence! Today, in the evening of my life, I know the final answer. It is Jesus Christ alone who quiets the radical anguish that is in us-an anguish which is so consubstantial with the human condition that it is cruelly manifest from childhood to the grave.
The torment of loneliness, the vacillating shadows of those we love as they leave us in the horrible mysteries of death, the secret and permanent thirst we have for the limitless gratification of our ego . . . Our hearts remain full of unseen idols until we are stretched on the wood of the Cross with Christ-until we cease trying to nourish ourselves and our desires, and give ourselves completely to the poor, to the needy, to the suffering members of Christ’s body throughout the world . . . in the presence of God-become-man-stripped and naked, scourged and covered with spittle, dying unto death for love-and man seeking to become like God, raised above his ugliness and misery through love, finding in This Man all his joy, all his love, all the meaning of life and history.
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Source: Francois Mauriac, Anguish and Joy of the Christian Life (1931),
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