Sunday, March 1, First Sunday of Lent

Mark 1:12-15

12 After Jesus was baptized the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness, 13 and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.
14 After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. 15 "The time is fulfilled," he said. "The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!"



I hereby declare myself the Martha Stewart of the Spiritual Desert:

“It’s a good thing.”

The last thing we think about in being in a spiritual desert is that it is a ‘good thing’. What usually comes to mind is, “This must be my fault. I must have screwed up somewhere.” When one is in a vast wilderness where God seems so far away that it’s hard to recall when he ever felt near, it is natural to blame oneself.

“Perhaps if I prayed harder or more often…maybe if I wasn’t so selfish…maybe if I was able to get to Mass during the week. It must be something I’m doing or not doing. God must be teaching me a lesson, but I don’t know what it is!”

Your heart is cracked and dry, scripture is lifeless and boring, prayer feels like you’ve been chewing gum for too long, all your prayers seem to be a variation on a theme of “Please help me…please give me…” and it feels like all your prayers hit a brick wall and fall to the ground as lifeless words. But you hide these thoughts away because you are absolutely sure you are the only one who feels so isolated from the fruitful abundance of being a child of God. Everybody else seems O.K., so you act as if you’re O.K. too.

The great tragedy of most Christian teaching is that we are not trained to understand the value of the desert and so when it comes, or when we find ourselves there more often than not, it is a huge shock to the spiritual system. Mothers are especially vulnerable to this shock. Young unmarried women are taught that to be a mother is a high and beautiful calling (which it is). Women are led to believe that in becoming wives and mothers there will be great spiritual and emotional fulfillment. And is it not a bit terrifying to discover that marriage and motherhood, rather than leading you to this mountain top of spirituality, has actually led you into a spiritual desert like you’ve never experienced before?

“I must be incredibly deficient if I’m not finding all of my fulfillment, spiritually, intellectually and emotionally, in my role as a wife and mother. What’s making me feel so dissatisfied? What is stopping me from feeling any kind of fullness of heart?”

The Father is.

What a surprise, huh? Why would the Father keep you from experiencing great spiritual satisfaction when you have answered his call and entered into such a wonderful vocation?

It’s because before you were a mother, before you were a wife and before you were a child, you were God’s own daughter, a Being he created to be in relationship with him. Of course it blesses him tremendously when you answer his call to enter into special vocations such as marriage and motherhood (or Dedicated Single or a Religious) but our vocations and the people we serve within our vocations aren’t meant to fill up the last aching abyss of our hearts. Only God can fill that spot. There’s a place within you that is big enough for only two: you and the Lord. It’s a place that’s meant for you as you, not for you as Wife or you as Mother or you as whatever you are in your calling. These areas of calling are illuminated and blessed by your intimate relationship with the Lord. They are not your fulfillment. Certainly there will be fulfilling moments and times but it is impossible for the vocation to which you have been called to fill you up inside. You were made for more.

And so, the Father calls you to the desert where nothing fills, nothing comforts, nothing edifies. It is a place of simplification. A place of stripping – because none of us know how much we have come to depend on roles and head knowledge to define our relationship with the Lord. The desert is not a place of punishment; it is a place of great grace because the Lord knows how easy it is for ideas and perceptions to subtly take the place of a real intimacy with him. The desert comes into our lives not because God is so jealous but because he knows we will never be happy without our one on one relationship with him. He loves us too much to allow us to skirt around the desert.

Take heart! All is well. You are beloved of God, his daughter in whom he is well pleased. The very first place the Father wants you to find fulfillment is in him before everything else. In the desert it is just you... and the Lord. Not you and your spouse. Not you and your children. Not you and your vocation. Just you and the Lord.

Just like it was with Jesus…just him and his Father in the wilderness.

Consider this: Jesus was called, baptized and then heard his Father speak excruciatingly beautiful words of love and approval to him. Then…he was driven into the desert! The desert was as necessary for him as it is for us.

This is the first Sunday of Lent, a time of meditating on our spiritual life and a time when most people choose some sort of act of self-denial or spiritual discipline to reconnect themselves with the Lord. If you are presently experiencing a spiritual desert in your life, may I suggest that your focus of spiritual discipline for this Lent be one of complete acceptance and one of walking with Jesus into the wilderness? Allow yourself to accept that the desert is a valid and valuable place to be and allow yourself to walk through that desert with Jesus for a while. It was a time of temptation for him; do you think that he was faced with the temptation to feel God had forgotten him or to feel that the words he had heard, “You are my beloved son…” were simply a product of his imagination? Perhaps he felt keenly a sense of abandonment coming so soon after committing himself to his vocation, after humbling himself to receive a baptism he didn’t need, after hearing his Father speak so clearly and lovingly to him.

Jesus knows exactly what it’s like to be where you are.

*****

If you would like to receive a short article I wrote on the beauty and necessity of the desert to help give you a focus for your Lenten journey, send me an email (j_allenbanana@hotmail.com) and ask for the Desert Document. I will send it to you as a Word attachment.