Only Hope

            There’s a song that’s inside of my soul

            It’s the one that I’ve tried to write over and over again.

This week, I have been discovering the depths of my pack-rattedness while I do a post-graduation clean out my room.  My collection of classical recital programs and ballroom dance club membership cards shall make some historian 500 years from now extremely happy (students shall think that my life is typical!  It shall be God’s practical joke on turn of the millennium American pop “culture.)  While cleaning the shrine to dead—erm—immortal arts that is my room, I found one of my favorite songs I’ve accompanied: “Only Hope,” made famous by Mandy Moore in the movie A Walk to Remember.  

            I’m awake in the infinite cold,

            But You sing to me over and over again.

Summers after each year of Duke have been marked by the same thing: loneliness.  Sure, I’m remarkably close with my High School friends—but they’re not always around.  And if I’m totally honest, even when surrounded by the love of the friendships I’ve made at Duke, or when I see my Chicago friends who are like a second family to me, I can still feel alone.  As thankless and undeserving as it makes me feel, there are times that even my closest friends somehow just aren’t enough.

            So I lay my head back down,
            And I lift my hands and pray

“Lord, ‘It is not good that man be alone.’   My God, please let me have a  boyfriend—or even just a date.”

            To be only Yours, I pray

            To be only Yours.

“Don’t You see it, my Lord?  If I could just have a guy to call my own, it would fix everything—loneliness, self-esteem. All I need is a boyfriend; then, I’d be happy.”

            I know now You’re my only hope. 

Shortly after that prayer, I would go to some Catholic event and see Fr. Mike in his habit, and I couldn’t fight the shame that would come.  After all, a boyfriend doesn’t fix loneliness.  My campus minister once told me how people, even after they are happily married, still feel loneliness.

            Sing to me the song of the stars,

            Of Your galaxy dancing and laughing and laughing again.

And He will raise you up on eagles' wings.

See, this song didn’t start out as a romantic ballad, as Mandy Moore’s cover would have it appear. It started out as a Switchfoot song—a love song, yes, but a love song to the God who made the Earth to the chorus of the song of the stars (Job 38:7). A responsorial that overflows to the God who inspires joy, dancing, and laughter in the galaxy of His creation.  In the words of G. K. Chesterton, “A characteristic of the great saints is their levity.  Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.”

            When it feels like my dreams are so far,

            Sing to me of the plans that You have for me over again.

           

When we turn towards ourselves, how can we see anything but the beauty and love that it took to create us?  Isn’t all we need to complete us God alone? Or are we so blinded by our own griefs and desires that we do not see the hand that holds us?  Or have we learned to hate ourselves so much that when we are held in the palm of His hands, we see sinners in the hands of an angry God, moving swiftly towards the fires of Hell?  If God is merely a promise of Hell, no wonder we seek refuge in other people.  We may be fallen and broken, but being fallen and broken doesn’t stop His love for us—why should it stop our own?  Even when we strike out alone from the path he created for us, He finds His lost sheep, and guides us another way that will lead to the gates of heaven. 

           

            And I lay my head back down,

            And I lift my hands and pray

“How, oh Lord, how can we be lonely when You wrote Yourself into every one of Your creations?  How can we feel unloved when You have given us everything.”

            To be only Yours, I pray

            To be only Yours.

“Lord, whenever I blind myself to the truth and start to feel lonely, reveal Your face in everything around me—Your hand guiding every move I make.”

            I know now You’re my only hope.

Loneliness requires both an acute awareness of the self and a feeling of separation of that self from its surroundings.  But that “I” only exists through the incessant tending of God, and He knows me more perfectly than I know myself.  Perhaps loneliness comes from forgetting Plato’s immortal instruction: “Know thyself.” After all, God is in me, so if I know myself well enough, I must know Him. 

            I give you my apathy,

            I’m giving You all of me.

Loneliness might be distinct from apathy; loneliness is reaching for someone who’s not there, while apathy is never bothering to reach in the first place.  But both result in a void.  Sometimes, that void drives us to reach for God—and that’s good.  But still, though I may have misused it in my first prayer earlier, it is still written, “It is not good that man be alone.”  And what we need, God provides, if not always in the way we ask.

            I want Your symphony.

            Singing in all that I am. 

God is never alone—He is the perfect union of Father and Son from which proceeds the Holy Spirit—if we have one, we have all three.  But more than that, Christ is the head of an entire Body.  That the Eucharist is the Body of Christ has the dual meaning of it being the flesh of Christ and the communion of saints.  Being in Communion means we are never alone: each Mass is a play-date with Christ. Each Mass is a play-date with every Catholic who has ever lived.  Perhaps I didn’t see you today, but if you went to Mass and received the Eucharist, I did something better—I saw you in the Eucharist.

            At the top of my lungs,

            I’m giving it back

And, as Gaudium et Spes says, we are only complete “through a sincere gift of self” (25).  No wonder at Duke I felt least lonely, and most a member of the Body of Christ, when giving back.   It is lack of service that makes me feel incomplete—not lack of a particular person.

            And I lay my head back down,

            And I lift my hands and pray 

“My God, thank you for the precious gift of your Body and the community of the faithful.  However far we all may be, I am with people I never even new existed.

            

           To be only Yours, I pray 
           to be only Yours. 

“True loneliness, I know, would only be separation from You, for

           I know now You're my only hope."