The
Second Week of Lent:
Desert Wisdom
Monday
The desert evokes our latent capacity for initiative, exploration, evaluation. It interrupts our ordinary patterns of life and our stultifying conventional routine piety. It disengages us from a regular round of respectable human activities. We learn to be still, alert, perceptive, and recollected so that issues become clear, reality becomes recognizable and unambiguous. We see real things, not mere shadows; experience events, not merely a succession of pseudo-events; know ourselves, not merely projected or statistically polled images of ourselves. We know God, not abstractions about God, not even the theology of God, but the much more mysterious God of theology -- the God of Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Peter, Paul, and John, of the Fathers and Mothers of the desert -- the God of saints and the God of sinners.
Tuesday
Desert spirituality means much more than getting out of the "rat race." Even the human Christ needed periods of solitary prayer, times set apart. Deep down in everyone is the ineluctable need to recognize and proclaim God's absolute sovereignty. We have a need, however hidden, to turn completely to God, a need for a suspension of our horizontal relation with other creatures. If we manage to go through life without this need ever rising above the threshold of consciousness, it simply proves how gutted and distorted our humanity is, how completely disordered our sense of values.
Wednesday
Even as natural men and women, we are not fully alive until we respond to the periodic need to turn from our passing human activities, to stand before God and belong exclusively to him. Our experienced need as children of God should be to turn habitually with loving trust to the Father and forget everything but him and his care for us. This is the wisdom of the desert.
But even this witness to God's claim upon us is not the deepest meaning of desert spirituality. The desert is, above all, the place where we encounter God, the place where God visits his people. This is why the tradition of the desert has persisted in the Church.
Thursday
The complexity of civilization vanishes in the desert. Life is reduced to a very few simple decisions, and a wrong decision may be fatal. Living, really living, is a full-time job. There is no other way to survive. The desert is no place for diversions, distractions, luxuries, or trivia.
Friday
The only way to God is the way of the real. The desert shatters our managerial complacency, our arrogant lethargy, our spiritual torpor, our barren, bloodless dalliance with the pretty poison of life, and forces us into conjunction with the real. This stark reality does not evoke aggressiveness or romanticism, but pure, unadulterated humanness.
Saturday
The central, pervading atmosphere of the desert is death. That is why it plays such a vastly important role in the Jewish and Christian traditions and in the monasticism of both East and West. But it is not all grim and bleak. The beauty of the desert is spectacular! The life you find there in tenacious trees, blooming cactuses, and wildflowers is as startling as the death you find in dry creek beds, sun-bleached bones, and blowing "dust devils.”
The desert experience is not all darkness and dread but light and joy in the Lord who is sheer delight. The manifestation of God's glory is an indispensable element in the desert experience of both the Old and New Testament. Yahweh didn't call his people out of Egypt and into the desert for nothing, nada, but for nothing but God, the All, to live fully and exuberantly in the divine milieu of the Promised Land. This is the recurrent biblical theme of the Passover, the Pascha Christi, reaching its climax with blazing clarity in the Gospels.