A Thirst for Communion

 
“The story is told of a priest who, shortly after apostatizing, said to a visitor who was about to congratulate him:

‘From now onward I am no more than a philosopher – in other words, a man alone.’

It must have been a bitter reflection, but it was true. He had left the home outside which there will never be anything save exile and solitude. Many people aren’t aware of it, because they live in the passing moment, alienated from themselves, “rooted in this world like seaweed on the rocks.” The preoccupations of daily life absorb them; “the golden mist of appearances” forms a veil of illusion around them. Sometimes they look in a hundred and one different places for some substitute for the Church, as if to deceive their own longings. Yet the man who hears in the depths of his being the call which has stimulated his thirst for communion – indeed, the man who does no more than sense it – grasps that neither friendship nor love, let alone any of the social groupings that underlie his own life, can satisfy it.”

Henri de Lubac