At Lent retreats, I used to ask participants if they had ever been to the desert. But after moving to Connecticut, I finally stopped. Everyone said no. Except a few who would ask, “Does Las Vegas count?”
No, Las Vegas does not count.
Have you ever been to the desert?
I have. I understand what the desert is all about. It is quiet, still, empty, beautiful, harsh, and dangerous. In the desert, you are always one false move away from needing something desperately. Like water or shade or an antidote for a snake or spider bite. Yes, my desert had tarantulas.
In the desert you face your own fragility and the fragility of those around you. All it takes is that mercilessly hot West Texas sun to remind you that your place in the universe is small and precarious. Survival is not a given.
Jesus spent forty days in the desert. Israel spent forty years. Days and years of precarious living. Days and years of facing one’s own weakness, accepting that survival is not a given, looking beyond oneself or one’s environment for certainty.
Leaning heavily upon God alone, Jesus and Israel emerged from their deserts. Israel settled in a new land and embarked upon an enormous task, to live faithfully as God’s people. Jesus was strengthened and resolved for mission, to tell God’s story to the human race and to love his own to the end.
We speak of Lent as our desert time. In this desert, do we recognize how fragile we are, how precarious life is, how the structures and things we depend on for security are one false move away from falling around us like a house of cards?
Precarious living is actually Gospel living. It recognizes that total dependence on God is where true strength is found. The trials of the desert are where we meet God and live only by what God offers—living water, the shadow of God’s wing, and the antidote of divine love.
From Lent, from life, from desert, we may not emerge unscathed. But we can emerge as God’s own, strengthened, emboldened for mission, and “filled with the power of the Spirit” (Luke 4:14).
