Notes from a Sojourn
March 23, 2020
DESERT
In the hands of great storytellers, settings – as much as people – are used as ‘characters’ in their own right: Kansas in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; the ocean in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea; Gotham City in DC’s Batman comics. These settings have as many personality traits as the characters within them.
In our story – the story of the People of God – the desert plays a character role. It’s a place of radical dependence, honesty, and vulnerability. Whenever the desert (or wilderness) appears in the stories we tell, it is a signal that something important is about to take place. Be it Hagar, Moses, Elijah, or Jesus, that ‘something’ is an encounter with God.
One of my favourite authors and spiritual guides, Luke Timothy Johnson, asks, “Why does the Lord choose the desert so often as the place where he will whisper the words of his love, speak to the heart of his people?…Because it is the place where God’s Word can be heard” (i).
In the stories of the characters above, the desert is an unwanted and unwelcome destination. Hagar and Ishmael are exiled to it (Gen 21.1-8-21); Moses and Elijah are forced to flee into it because their lives are in danger (Ex 2.11-15; 1 Kgs 19.1-18). In the Gospel of Mark, it says the Spirit “drove” Jesus into the wilderness (Mk 1.12). Yet it is here that they all encounter the Word of God spoken for them – a word that provides for their physical and spiritual needs. The desert, it turns out, is a place of exile and return, of lostness and foundness. It is that radically dependent, honest, and vulnerable place where we all confront the will of God for our lives. As it turns out, all these characters leave the desert with a clearer understanding of what it is their faith in God is asking of them.
While these weeks ahead of us are an unwanted and unwelcome place of exile (social distance, pandemic self-isolation, and life-threatening illness), the stories of our faith remind me that God is not absent or even far from here but, perhaps, closer than I've dared to hope. Can this desert time be for you and me a place of “receptivity, an emptiness within ourselves, an openness to receive God’s Word” for us? (ii)
Colin+
i. Luke Timothy Johnson, "Some Hard Blessings: Meditations on the Beatitudes in Matthew" (Allen, TX: Argus Communications, 1981), 4.
ii. Johnson, "Some Hard Blessings," 5.
