March 14, 2019

The invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred.”
—John 5:7

I find in the man by the pool of Bethesda what I call city loneliness.43 For thirty-eight years he had been crippled—and now he had no friend in the whole city. There is a loneliness of the moor and of the glen, where there is never a whisper except of the sighing wind. But there is a loneliness that is far worse than that: it is the loneliness of a great and crowded city. There may be someone who in our thronging streets is far more lonely than any Highland cottager; the man by the pool of Bethesda was like that. Round him was all the traffic of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem was a very busy city. And at the heart of all that stir and activity, without one single person to give a hand to him, there lay that lonely sufferer by the water. Where life is richest and relationships most varied and where pleasures flaunt themselves at every corner, it is possible to be more exquisitely lonely than in the solitary shelter of the glen.
I had a friend who went to America six years ago, and I will never forget what he once wrote me. He had spent a year or two in the far west of Canada and then had gone south and settled in the States. And he wrote me that the vast and silent prairie stretching away, endless, from his threshold, never so overwhelmed him with a sense of loneliness as did the tumultuous crowding of New York City. In the city where everyone was hurrying, and no one seemed to care a jot for him, he realized he was a lonely man. It may be that passing you tonight out in the lighted streets, and you so happy, there is someone who is heart weary for a friend.
—George H. Morrison