Desert Things

Vicki K Black has posted this remarkable passage

The desert is the threshold to the meeting ground of God and man. It is the scene of the exodus. You do not settle there, you pass through. One then ventures on to these tracks because one is driven by the Spirit towards the Promised Land. But it is only promised to those who are able to chew sand for forty years without doubting their invitation to the feast in the end.

Alessandro Pronzato, quoted in The Desert: An Anthology for Lent by John Moses. © 1997. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com.

The Desert is a place of the heart, almost more than it is a physical isolation. It is a place of stillness apart from the alien concerns of the world, a place where the incrustations of possessions and the desire for possessions (whether things or people or fame or security or anything else...) fall away, and we are alone. There is nothing there to hide us from God.

In being unable to hide from God, we are paradoxically unable to hide from our call to love all our fellow-humans as ourselves. The Desert is not a place to deny human life: it is a place to know the truth of it, and to know that we are bound in love to every other life. In Christ we are part of everyone who has ever lived, part of the whole Creation, for "without him not one thing came into being," (John 1.3) and in the Desert there is nothing to prevent our realising it.

I'm afraid of the Desert myself, and yet it's where I long to be. I think this is more than a shrinking from seeing myself in the mirror of that poverty, that absence of "riches." In folklore, I believe, the Desert is regarded as the dwelling-place of ghosts, and I can sort of see where they're coming from. CS Lewis has a passage somewhere (I can't place it just now, but it's quoted in Rudolph Otto's The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational):

Suppose you were told that there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told "There is a ghost in the next room," and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is "uncanny" rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply "There is a mighty spirit in the room" and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking–described as awe, and the object which excites it is the Numinous.

The Desert, then, is the place of encounter with the Numen. There is a very real sense, no pious figure of speech, in which we do meet God face to face - or as nearly face to face as we could survive - in the Desert. There is a sense of the possible terror of this (though in a different context) in Hebrews 10.31: "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."

Yet within awe there is something far more than shrinking: there is a quite desperate longing, which goes way beyond "risking one's life for." The sense of it is captured once for all in that psalm of the desert heart, number 42:

As a deer longs for flowing streams,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.
When shall I come and behold
the face of God?