Alone in a crowd.
It is not good to feel alone when there are hundreds of people present in the same place with you.
It is not good to feel alone when there is someone in the seat right next to you.
Close together, yet far apart.
In his book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote about his experience of joy on a Louisville street.
"In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers."
It is always better to feel connected to others, to celebrate joyfully with them, to love the person seated next to you . . . especially at Mass.
