It’s that time of year.
Lent. That word usually precipitates a groan. For many it’s a time of sacrifice, a chance to kick that bad habit, if not once and for all, at least for forty days. For the more ascetic it’s an endurance test, an opportunity to give up things that you enjoy whether they’re bad for you or not. For many more (maybe even the greater majority!) the giving up is only a means to taking up a deeper intimacy, a happier and humbler walk, with God. For somewhere at the heart of it, somewhere at its genesis, this thing called Lent has something to do with a journey, a long road through the desert marked by the footprints of an ancient rabbi. Everyone knows the story. For forty days Jesus walked the Judean wilderness being tested and tried by the devil (and by his own appetite). It was a journey reminiscent of the prophet Elijah’s, or the Israelites’ long road into the promises of God. The desert is where it all began too; the Bible says that Adam was born in the wilderness and placed in the garden. In fact he was made unceremoniously from the dust of the desert floor. Perhaps that’s why the wilderness is a chapter in every one of our stories. The desert is a part of us, and to the desert we long to return. At some point, everybody walks in the wild. You have to. King David had to go there, Abraham and Moses too, Jacob and Joseph. John the Bappy was so drawn to the wilderness that he set up shop there. The problem is that we don’t understand the desert. Churchified vocabulary has abused the metaphor, making of the wilderness an analogy for those times of trial, of barrenness, of loss and void. Those are a part of the journey; they come with the feeble fragility that God weaved into the DNA of what makes us human. But were the desert encounter this and nothing more God wouldn’t invite us, in his own words even “allure” us, to walk in the wild. No. The desert must be reclaimed.
You see, the desert is a place of beauty. It’s the ground for a miracle; a place of absolute dependency and of extravagant provision. It is a place to hide, and to be sought out of hiding. It’s a place of war, littered with the spoils of those who fought and won and haunted by the memory of the martyred that fought and ‘lost’. The desert is where you will discover the depths of intimacy with God, because “there you saw how the Lord your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way you went” (Deut. 1). It’s the preparation ground; the Promised Land is always on the other side of the desert. It’s a place, contrary to the wildly misinformed metaphor, of inexhaustible abundance. But at its heart, more than anything, the desert is a place of beauty. That’s why it must be reclaimed. Everything is beautiful in its time. You could say the desert is simply the place before the next place. Like life itself.
And so for the next few weeks I’m committing to a conversation on what it looks like to walk the wild with Jesus. I’m apprehensive about writing in this way; I don’t want to preach. After all, these aren’t lessons taught by me to you, but lessons I’m learning from God as I walk my own desert. That’s why I’ve called them letters, because perhaps it will do me good to write them down, and perhaps it might even do someone else good to read them. Sometimes you discover words penned by another to which you could sign your own name, or you discover that someone else’s thoughts afford you the solidarity to express your own. At very least it’s always nice to bump into others on the road. So these are letters from the road, lessons learnt wandering the wild. Really, all of this is just what I’m glimpsing day by day as I walk with wounded people here in the Congo, whose stories and words sometimes cut as deep as God’s own. This is where I'm encountering the arresting beauty of the desert, where in the midst of hopelessness there is reconciliation, where the deepest darkness is broken by the smallest glimmer of light, where life is bursting through the arid ground.
Lent… Groan. Or maybe not. If Jesus is walking in the wild then that’s exactly where I wanna be. The place just before the next place. After all, if the ‘next place’ is the Promised Land for which we were destined then this life, and all the hills and valleys it presents us, is never anything more than a happy and humble walk with God through the desert on the long journey home. If we recognize that then at its close we might be able to say with the sparingly worded Toni Collette: “being in the desert was brilliant, and it was hard.” Let’s walk!
