The Sixth Week of Lent:
The Desert Today

Monday

It wasn't long before the physical desert became inaccessible. Yet the desert experience is essential for all the People of God. That is why the Church instituted Lent -- so that everyone could experience the desert. A soft diluted Lent will do no good. Lent must be characterized by hardy asceticism: a relentless struggle with daemons, an athletic slimming down for battle, a simplified life, a holy poverty, a clearer vision, a fierce and universal love, a long loving look at the real, an emptiness -- all a preparation for the fullness of God.

Tuesday

The retreat, too, is meant to provide the desert experience. How disastrous it would be, then, to turn retreats into dialogues, brainstorming, sensitivity or therapy sessions. These opportunities ought to be provided for those who need them; but nothing ought to take the place of the retreat as the desert experience. Everyone, particularly religious leaders, ought to have prolonged periods when they can really retreat to the desert.

Wednesday

I wasn't in the desert long before I recognized why God raised his people there: the awful scale of the thing, the suggestion of virginity, the fusion of angelic and daemonic elements with the pure earth, untrammelled and untouched by anything humanly contrived.

Government officialdom defines wilderness as "a minimum of not less than 5,000 contiguous acres of roadless area." But infinitely more is involved. The wilderness invokes nostalgia -- justified, reasonable, unsentimental -- a nostalgia for the lost America and the pilgrim Church, the rugged nation and robust community of believers our forefathers knew. The wilderness means something lost and something still present, seemingly remote and forbidding and at the same time intimate. It feels like it has worked its way into our blood and nerves; it is frightening, but still draws us into its tantalizing haunts, its unbearable heat; it tones up our nerves and brings to life again those emotions that have not yet been irreparably numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and prestige. The wilderness stretches beyond us without limit.

Holy Thursday

The desert is stimulating, exciting, exacting. I am not inclined to sleep or even to relax. All my senses are sharpened and heightened for a fuller life, for more engaging action, with no other purpose than the goodness of the action itself, because the action is pure contemplation.

The early morning, evening, and the night as bright as day, are favorite desert times. But noon is the crucial hour. That is when the desert reveals itself nakedly and cruelly. I remember the first time I stood in the middle of the desert and experienced the utter shock of the real: out there as far as I could see, all that shimmering earth under the scorching sun, a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship. At that moment I recaptured my childhood, rediscovered the world of marvels, and took nothing for granted. I realized in a fresh new way how simply being on earth, able to see, touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious elements, is such a strange and daring adventure!

Good Friday

As an unknown author said: "Wilderness is no luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself. If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making. He will make himself an exile from the earth and then will know at last, if he is still capable of feeling anything, the pain and agony of final loss."

Holy Saturday

We have been warned: "Ours is the age of the bulldozer as much as it is the age of the atomic bomb. For good or ill, we need no longer conform to the contours of the earth. The only wilderness that will be left is what we determine shall remain untouched and that other wilderness in our hearts that only God can touch." Preserving both these wildernesses demands our best efforts. It ought to grab the attention and fire the imagination of government, social scientists, religious leaders, and every planetary citizen.

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