With the beginning of Lent, we step into the desert.
We all find ourselves in the desert sometimes. We all have periods of spiritual dryness or desolation, whether in connection with events in our lives or simply as part of our journey of faith – and for reasons we might or might not be able to see. But whatever the catalyst and whatever the topography of our particular desert places, we all spend time there.
Deserts are remote, solitary spaces, where it can be hard to pick out the thread of a trail. Sometimes we have to rely on little stacks of stones left by other travelers. Sometimes we have to navigate by the sun or the stars, which burn clearer in an arid, scouring place.
Deserts are places of poverty. Traveling through them we can only carry what’s essential. In the overwhelming heat and plunging cold, unshielded extremes strip away our distractions and complacency, and we have the opportunity to learn who we are and what’s really important.
Possibly more than any other kind of experience, the desert invites us to recognize our need for God. To stop ignoring Him or interrupting Him, deferring His life or cluttering the path of His grace. When we lose the furniture blocking the door to whatever part of our lives we thought we couldn’t bear to give Him, there is only the door left. And outside it, Christ.
This is why we need Lent. It allows us to choose the desert for a time; it teaches us how to survive when we end up in those deserts of our lives, when we feel alone and lost and so tired. The answer is always the same. Turn to Christ. He is even closer to us in the desert than at any other time because the desert has a way of removing the things we use, even subconsciously, to keep Him at a distance.
This Lent, whatever desert sacrifices you make or devotional compasses you carry with you, I invite you to join me in two particular ways:
First, try always to remember that the desert is ultimately a place of hope: revealing the reality that God answers our poverty by coming to find us within it. He embraced and suffered this poverty, Himself, and He has not left us to travel it in isolation. God calls us into the desert because only by rejecting the illusion of our self-sufficiency and embracing our own poverty can we receive the inexpressible wealth of His life. The Way of the Cross is the road to Resurrection.
Second, although in the desert we are, in a profound sense, alone with God, our God is in fact Love, and He always invites us to participate in His love for others. By His mercy, then, we also have some share in our loved ones’ desert journeys. In the comfort of this, let’s try to find small, concrete ways to accompany each other through Lent, to leave little stacks of stones or bits of star charts for our fellow wanderers and pilgrims. An act of love from desert to desert, however small, can remind someone, by the grace of God, of the hope for which the desert itself exists. It can help us remember that the Way is Love.
Safe journeys, friends.
