The Beatles surprised the world in the 1960s and took the United States by storm, introducing a new era in popular music. And many of us were pleasantly surprised by the deep insights expressed in rather direct and poignant lyrics. In "Eleanor Rigby," for example, they sing of a woman picking up rice at a church where a wedding has been. Holding the rice, peering through a window, living in a dream she someday will wed, death comes instead. As she lived alone, so she died alone. And so the Beatles lament,

All the lonely people,
where do they all come from?

So sang the Beatles in the '60s. And so they sang again in the television Beatles' Anthology, reminding us of how they expressed a mood, introduced a revolution, and shaped an era. With almost simple innocence the Beatles expressed a universal mood of the centuries. They tapped into a mood deeper than a lonely spinster waiting and waiting for a Prince Charming who never came to rescue her from a childless life and lonely grave. With an easy melody they expressed a melancholy deeper than that of a preacher writing a sermon which few came to hear.

All the lonely people,
where do they all come from?

"There is nothing more alone in the universe than man," says anthropologist and humanist Loren Eiseley. "He has entered into the strange world of history, of social and intellectual change, while his brothers of the field and forest remain subject to the invisible laws of biological evolution ... Man, by contrast, is alone with the knowledge of his history until the day of his death" (The Star Thrower, p. 37). So it is, Eiseley would suggest, that we have been thrust out of the self-contained and self-imprisoning worlds of impulse and instinct into the worlds of thought and self-transcendence. We are of the world -- out of the dust and minerals of the earth -- earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And yet we are not of the world -- we are a mind reflective and a spirit roving and free, and a heart looking and longing, like Eleanor Rigby, for fulfillment in another heart. We are mind and spirit seeking earnest responses in other minds and spirits like Reverend McKenzie, who preached a sermon for no one who came.

If after the aeons of geologic time we humans become godlike in our dominion over the other evolutionary creatures, within the confines of historic time we have that longing for something more, that deep inward sense that we are destined for another world, that innate hunger for a reality that cannot be satisfied by sensual experience alone. It will not do for us to sum up human history as did one ancient sage who said bluntly of humans: "They were born; they were wretched; they died." If after the long, creative evolutionary process we humans popped up into the realms of self-transcendence and history- making, we have subsequently sensed the need for an overarching meaning, an underlying purpose, and an interior empowerment. However, there have been those times when we have wanted to say with poet A. E. Housman:

And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.

The answer to the long loneliness of "strangers afraid in a world they never made" is to be found in Advent, in the coming of God into human history. If humans are the crowning glory of the universe's evolutionary birth process, the Bible tells us again and again that we have been emerging not into an infinite, silent void, but into the ethereal mind and spirit world of the Creator himself. The long loneliness comes to an end within time and beyond time.

I

Let's consider first the matter of ending the long loneliness within time. Probably one of the most persistently nagging questions of human existence is: "Is anyone out there? Does anyone care?" Ancient humans built their altars on mountaintops in an effort to get close to the gods up there, just beyond the solid arch of heaven, behind the blue firmament. The Tower of Babel was only one of the ziggurats pyramiding above the desert sky to probe the domain of the deities. If the gods wouldn't come down to us, we would climb up to them, because we were tired of this long loneliness of the human race. We longed for divine companionship.

In more recent times, expressing an almost equal naivete, the early Russian cosmonauts announced to a curious and waiting world that there were no gods up there in the space orbit. There was only emptiness and the infinite reaches of space. Were we alone after all? Not so, said the prophets of old. You cosmonauts are looking in the wrong place. You should look to history -- to historical events and people. Isaiah reminded his fellow Judean exiles in Babylonia that the very God who created the brilliant stars and named them also created the Judeans as a people. God had come to them. They did not have to "climb up" to heaven to secure the companionship of God. If God talked with Adam and Eve and covenanted with Noah and Abraham, he also wrestled with Jacob and blessed him and then gave his sacred law to Moses on Mount Sinai. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the very God who knows all the stars by name. How then could he forget you? asks the prophet Isaiah.

The long loneliness of the Judean exiles was ended in their liberation from captivity when Cyrus allowed them to return to their homeland. God came to them in an international event through a Persian, of all people, someone whom they did not know, someone not their own, who became for them the sign of God's presence and signaled an end to their forsakenness and sense of abandonment. God, say the prophets, is interested in people, in their history, and in historical events. And God is not too particular whom he works through, whether it be the enemy Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar or Cyrus, or whether it be through Moses or David or even Yasir Arafat or Itzhak Rabin. Could not God be working through Warren Christopher and Richard Holbrooke in negotiating the Bosnian peace accord, or through President Bill Clinton endorsing and encouraging peace in Northern Ireland? Does God leave us alone and afraid in a world we never made at the end of a long, evolutionary spiral? No, we are not abandoned into a cold, rational void of senseless and self- transcendent wondering. Not that, says the Bible in this Advent season.

Instead, we have at an intersection of the long human process a new man, a new Adam, a new model human being, who, like us, has come out of the mind and heart of God to be with us, to comfort us, and to assure us we are not alone in the world. "Don't be afraid," he tells us, "I have overcome the world" -- overcome the world with its powers of loneliness and dread and despair. "And I am with you always."

II

If Advent tells us God overcomes the long loneliness within time, its message assures us God intends to overcome the long loneliness beyond time. As Paul puts it: "Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed: the night is far gone, the day is at hand" (Romans 13:11-12). No doubt many of us would tend to agree with Shakespeare's Macbeth when he declares: "(Life) is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing" (Macbeth, V, iv. 19). And again where he says: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." So Shakespeare tells us in As You Like It (II, vii, 139). We go through our seven roles from infant, to schoolboy, to lover, to soldier, to magistrate, to elder statesman, to drooping, dawdling second childhood, and then to death. And Hamlet wonders for all of us: "To be, or not to be: that is the question...." But then he muses: ... To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country from whose bourn No traveler returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others we know not of? -- Hamlet, III, i. 56, 77-83

Is Shakespeare correct in this pessimism? Is the biblical writer of Ecclesiastes correct when he affirms that all is vanity, a chasing after the wind? Is everything futility, a brief, vaporous existence at the top of the evolutionary spiral, only to evaporate into the eternal silences of the infinite void? Not so, says Paul in his letter to the Roman Christians. The whole universe has been groaning in travail, as if pregnant, ready to give birth to a new age. The long evolutionary process ends not with a whimper or a sigh or a bang, but with the triumph of the sons and daughters of God who are brought into glorious reunion not only with those loved long since and lost a while, but with the very Origin of their beings, with God himself. A physical and historical and materialistic and temporal interpretation will not quite give us all the answers we need. We need to look to the spiritual aspirations of humanity and then affirm with the prophets and with the early Christians that we are dealing with a God who confronts us personally within history and assures us of life and communion and fellowship beyond history. "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will," says Shakespeare, in a more helpful mood (Hamlet, V, ii. 10).

Are we alone and afraid in a world we never made? Not so, says the Bible. Not only has the Christ of God come to us, he has also given us his Spirit to empower us and to encourage us toward the end of time and beyond time. Through the Spirit we come to know God person to person, as it were. Through the agency of the Spirit, God is at work in each of our lives as an artist at work on a fresh canvas. We are a vital part of that far-off divine event toward which the whole creation moves. If our life is a grand work of art or a gigantic symphony, it will come to climax in the Second Coming, the Second Advent of the Christ. Just as the First Advent gave us assurance and hope, so the promise of the Second Advent should infuse us with confidence and a sense of purpose.

True, as we get older we do have a tendency to "collapse into our genes," into our genetic stream, and to gain a "furniture figure" where our chest drops into our drawers! Or as we lose hope and succumb to despair we resort to the age-old nostrums of sensual stimulations, such as drunkenness or drugs or adulteries. Reveling and debauchery or the accumulation of riches and fame through ruthless greed will do little to help. But the Church will, for we are the community of faith and hope and love where God reaches out to touch his people. And poets will help, as will musicians and artists, authors and thinkers who speak to us personally as though it was God's word, person to person. And worship will help, and prayer and study and ethics and Communion. For communion is the feast of expectation, the communal meal between the already and not yet, the holy banquet of friendliness suspended between earth and heaven, between time and beyond time. It reminds me of Salvadore Dali's painting Christ of St. John of the Cross, suspended as a sacrifice between heaven and earth, in time and beyond time. So it is that Communion is the foretaste of the heavenly banquet of the Lamb of God. It is the triumphant end of the long loneliness.

Prayer

Almighty God, heavenly Father, who holds the far reaches of whatever universes there may be within the power of your Being, and whose presence encompasses all the void of infinite space and time beyond time, we adore and worship you. By your exalted majesty you call us out of our small selves to tremble in your holy presence, and by your tender mercies, you draw us to yourself as children to a wise and loving father. How can we but stand in awe of your power, and how can we but come to you as lovers as your soul speaks to our soul, more deeply than we speak to ourselves? We thank you. Yet it is for us to confess that we are often blinded to your glory by trivial concerns and we frequently become indifferent to your mercy within a brutal and violent world. Save us, O God, from succumbing to the age-old numbness which makes us insensitive to you. And break up these calcified hearts and arthritic souls, that we might be open and vital with your Mind and Spirit.

In this Advent season we lift up before you all the lonely people of the world. We think of mothers bereft of sons and wives bereft of husbands in the Bosnian-Serb conflict. We call to mind little girls in Northern Ireland who have known the grief of fathers murdered before their very eyes, and we bring before you the anguish of little Palestinian and Israeli boys whose fathers or brothers lie silent in the tomb. And for the victims of violent crime in this country, their parents and spouses, children and loved ones, who know the long days of grief and the endless nights of tears -- for these, O God, and thousands more, we pray your healing balm of Gilead.

But perhaps closer at hand and nearer to our own selves we bring before you the loneliness of our own hearts -- the soul seeking the soulmate, the widow left fibrillating alone without her defining partner, the divorcee struggling with regret, relief, and a new hope for a new and fulfilling future, the child who has never felt understood, so alone, and tempted toward alcohol or drugs for solace, the couple in a tired marriage where neither is really there for the other, the unemployed rejected now and again in the search for affirmation and gain, the persons of the almost and not-quite-yet who wonder if they ever will fulfill their dreams -- for all these and more, O God, we make our supplications to you. In your divine wisdom and mercy, be pleased to grant our requests.

And thank you, God -- thank you for a many-splendored world, the miraculous and marvelous in all living things, and for the Christ who speaks to us of your very mind and heart. We praise you in his name. Amen.