The
First Week of Lent:
The Essence of the
Desert
Monday
The desert is a challenge, an invitation to a contest: whether or not we can come to terms with the bare and undiminished facts of reality -- the reality of our deluded and denatured selves, our devastated and dehumanized world, and the reality of God. We are not expected to master the elements of the desert, but if we would cope with them, we had better master ourselves. The candor and honesty of the desert tend inexorably to break through our masks, illusions, and deceits.
Tuesday
We need to stand in the desert under the noonday sun and see things as they really are: not managed, dominated, packaged; but wild, uncontrollable, free. We need this confrontation with the wild, untamed forces of nature. We have trifled too long in the genteel tradition. We have not dug deeply enough. We have slipped too easily into a spinsterish concern for the pretty instead of the beautiful, for happiness instead of fullness and truth. We have come to think of the natural world as a condition instead of a great force, and we are content to experience it only superficially -- a far cry from life as an "experience of the inexhaustible."
Wednesday
By managing nature we may to some extent discipline it. We may also, in the process of becoming human, shift somewhat the emphases in its complex of impulses and powers. But we cannot dispense with the wilderness without becoming near-machines and therefore less, not more, than the animal we try to transcend. And so our human-centered humanism backfires and dehumanizes us
Thursday
The desert is a place where an egotistic and complacent humanism will not do. It will undo us. We must come to terms actively with the evil forces within ourselves. The Word of God calls us to take the initiative against our own evil; we must accept that responsibility. For "original sin" is not just an isolated difficulty or an occasional failure: it means that our whole life was once organized for disaster, destruction, and death.
Friday
The Israelites' first sin was a desire to gratify their evil inclinations. St. Paul did not seem as concerned about any particular form of sin or disorder as he was about the essence of sin, humanity's sinful nature, life determined by the flesh (Gal. 5:17). That is our basic sin: a general, pervasive disorientation, rather than a specific act. Our central human thrust is subtly but decisively misdirected.
Saturday
Our whole life is based on the principles and alternatives of the old world to which Christ, the New Man, has already laid the axe. To persist in this stubborn effort to stuff God into the religious projections of this unreal but factual and intricate world of the flesh is to compound the complexities and absurdities of the world. The cure, ceremoniously, is baptism; existentially, the desert experience. In response to the Spirit we must take the initiative in reforming our life in Christ. This is what God has in mind for us when he calls us into the desert.