"Loneliness is indubitably one of the basic roots from which man's encounter with God grew up.  Where man experiences his solitariness, he experiences at the same time how much his existence is a cry for the 'You' and how ill-adpated he is to be only an 'I' in himself.  This loneliness can become apparent to man on various levels.  To start with it can be comforted by the discovery of a human 'You'.  But then there is the paradox that, as Claudel says, every 'You' found by man finally turns out to be an unfulfilled and unfulfillable promise; that every 'You" is at bottom another disappointment and that there comes a point when no encounter can surmount the final loneliness: the very process of finding and having found thus becomes a pointer back to the loneliness, a call to the absolute 'You' that really descends into the depths of one's own 'I'.  But even here it remains true that it is not only the need born of loneliness, the experience that no sense of community fills up all our longing, which leads to the experience of God; it can just as well proceed from the joy of security.  The very fulfillment of love, of finding one another, can cause man to experience the gift of what he could neither call up nor create and make him recognize that in it he receives more than either of the two could contribute.  The brightness and joy of of finding one another can point to the proximity of absolute joy and of the simple fact of being found which stands behind every human encounter."

-- Ibid.