The
Fifth Week of Lent:
The New Testament
Desert
Monday
Jesus is the desert man. He was not essentially, as so many modern theologians erroneously believe, the man for others. Altruistic unto his death on the cross, utterly selfless and totally expended for all, he was still essentially the man from the Other, the Wholly Other. So he was a silent solitary; always going out to the desert and onto the sea and the mountaintops because of the supreme reality of his Father. The Father's absorbing, compelling presence empowered him to be the man for others.
Tuesday
Jesus submitted himself to John's baptism, manifesting his own willingness to endure God's judgment and even to die for the sins of the people. After his baptism he was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted. This is a highly significant sequence of events in the life of Christ, and should be pondered by those who burlesque the baptism of the Spirit. Jesus’ desert experience was the unconditional outcome of his baptism. His return to the desert was no strategic move in view of a future coup or a temporary retreat in preparation for an active mission. St. Mark's "desert gospel" does not consider Jesus’ miracles, healings and debates as final triumphs. In them the struggle takes shape, but is not ultimately won. When Christ withdrew into solitude, he was not retreating but renewing his attack on the power of evil. It was in the wilderness that the decisive cosmic struggle took place. It always does.
Wednesday
The wilderness reminds us of a deeper level of history undergirding the tangible events of Christ's ministry. The desert marked Jesus indelibly as God's man and Satan's enemy. To live in a state of struggle with the Adversary of God, to persevere in this conflict in direct and complete dependence on God himself, eschewing the political, economic, and spiritual powers of the three temptations, and remaining utterly poor -- this is the wilderness life. Such a life may unfold far from the physical desert. But if Christ needed to withdraw periodically into silence and solitude, it seems presumptuous to assume that we can go on forever on our own steam with no direct and intimate contact with the infinite Source of our being. Despite the suspicions of our secular society, withdrawal to desert solitude is not only justifiable but essential.
Thursday
After St. Paul's dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus, he immediately went straight to the Arabian desert and spent a long time there. The full meaning of his vocation could not be penetrated unless he returned to the traditional source of spiritual strength, the place where we meet God. Only after Paul had steeled himself by prolonged retreat in the desert did he plunge into his exhausting apostolic endeavors in the crowded bustling cities.
Friday
The desert tradition continued among the Desert Fathers and Mothers who abandoned the cities of the ancient world to live in solitude. By the fourth century, the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Arabia, and Persia were teeming with hermits in quest of what today we term authenticity, integrity or wholeness. The desert hermits refused to drift along in a questionable society. But they were not escapists. They met the problems of their time; in fact, they were way ahead of their times, and opened the way for a new humanity and a new society, shaping the history of the Church and the Western world. They were axial or marginal. They were like live fish, the vital, valiant kind you see jumping out of their natural, comfortable habitat, leaping into the air, drinking in the oxygen. Such saltatory stunts kill ordinary run-of-the-mill fish! The Fathers and Mothers of the desert were not the passive pawns of a decadent state or soft, mollycoddle members of conventional society. Their flight was positive and dynamic, not negative and fearful.
Saturday
What the desert hermits sought most of all was their own true self, in Christ. They rejected their false self, fabricated under the crazy compulsions and phony values of the world. They chose an unmapped way to God, a God no one knew except by experience. In the arid desert they were weaned away from their old images and ideas of God, and readied for what the desert is always meant to disclose: the unknown God in the cloud of unknowing.
They went into the desert to pray, to
feed on God. What was at the heart of their
experience? Death: no attachment to their
own egos or their own desires, plans, or
achievements; no identification with their
superficial, transient, narcissistic selves.
They had to die to the values of an ephemeral
existence as Christ had died to them on
the cross, and rise from the dead with
him in the light of an intensely new wisdom.
And so the pampered ego was purged away,
and the real self and Christ became one
Spirit.