On Dwelling in the Desert

Mark 1:12-15

After Jesus was baptized the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.

After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. "The time is fulfilled," he said. "The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!"

If there's one thing any serious Christian is familiar with it's the spiritual desert and the last thing we think about when we're in a spiritual desert is that it's a good thing. It doesn't seem good at all. 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's 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. I should be reading more scripture. It must be something I’m doing or not doing. God must be teaching me a lesson, but I have no idea what it is!”

In the desert your heart is cracked and dry, scripture is lifeless and boring and 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 your petitions 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 all right so you act as if you’re all right too.

The great tragedy of a lot of spiritual teaching is that we are not trained to understand the immense value of the desert and so when it comes, it is a shock to the spiritual system. And, it needs to be said, those who have discerned their spiritual vocations and have entered into them, whether it's marriage, priesthood, the religious life or dedicated single, are the ones most vulnerable to the shock of finding themselves in the middle of a howling wilderness.

We are all taught the importance and beauty of our vocations. It is impressed upon us that within our vocation is great spiritual and emotional fulfillment. Therefore, it can be a little terrifying to discover that rather than leading you to a mountain top of spiritual gratification, your vocation has actually led you into a spiritual desert like you've never experienced before. Guilt ensues. “I must be incredibly deficient if I’m not finding all of my fulfillment, spiritually, intellectually and emotionally, in my role as a spouse, a parent or a member of a religious community. What’s making me feel so empty and dissatisfied? What is stopping me from feeling any kind of connection with God?”

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, no matter what that vocation may be?

It’s because before you were called to be married, be a parent or become a Religious etc., you were called to be a child of God, a being he created to be in relationship with him. Of course it blesses him tremendously when you answer his call to enter into a special vocation but your vocation and the people you serve within your vocation aren’t meant to fill up the last aching abyss of your heart. 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, husband, parent, priest, Brother or Sister or you as whatever you are in your calling or ministry. These areas of calling are illuminated and blessed by your intimate relationship with the Lord but they are not your total fulfillment. Certainly there will be fulfilling moments and times within your vocation but it is impossible for the role to which you have been called to fill you up inside or nurture you the way your innermost being needs nurturing.

And so, the Father calls you to the desert where nothing fills, nothing comforts and nothing edifies. It is a place of simplification. It is a place of stripping – because none of us know how much we have come to depend on roles, ministries, friendships, rituals 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 roles, actions, ideas and perceptions to subtly take the place of a real intimacy with him. He just wants us to get back to the beginning of everything, a place that may be relatively unfamiliar to us. It's a place where we're not following our parents' faith or our friends' faith or the faith of our favorite spiritual teachers. It's a place where all promises fall flat because we had the wrong idea of what was being promised.

Take heart! All is well. You are the beloved of God, his daughter or son 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 or ministry. Just you and the Lord.

Just like it was with Jesus: it was just he and his Father in the wilderness.

Consider this: Jesus was called, baptized and heard his Father speak excruciatingly beautiful words of love and approval to him. Then, instead of being pushed into the deep end of a fulfilling ministry, he was driven into the desert! The desert was as necessary for him as it is for us. When he came out he clearly knew his vocation but more importantly, he knew his Father more intimately than he ever had before. In Jesus' vocation and ministry, his relationship with God came first. It came first. It came first. It came first. It was just he and the Father out there in that wilderness. No crowds, no people to serve or minister to, no one to teach, no one to feed and no one to love him, follow him, challenge him or despise him. His one on one relationship with God came before everything else. It was foundational to everything that came after.

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, I suggest that your focus of spiritual discipline be one of complete acceptance and one of meditating on what it would have been like to have walked with Jesus, day by day, in the wilderness. Allow yourself to accept that the desert is an important, valid and valuable place to be. Pray for the grace to recognize and be able to let go of everything that you have been mistaking for the face of God. Pray to be healed of false expectation.

Jesus walked into that desert and committed himself to it fully. Therefore, you are also called to accept the desert and to be fully committed to it and to be open to the particular kind of healing it can bring you.

It can happen nowhere else.