This is a piece of the desert. It is not the whole desert, just a piece. So many important things happened to the people of God in the desert that we need to have a piece of it with us, so we can hear the stories.
The desert is a dangerous place. The wind blows where it will, and the sand shifts, and there are no paths anywhere. It is easy to get lost in the desert. The sun beats down and it gets very hot and there is no water and no food. People can die without water or food. The wind blows the sand, and it stings the skin and the eyes. Dust, raised with every step, insinuates itself into every crack and pore. And at night, the desert is cold, and there is no shelter anywhere. People were lots of clothes to protect them from the heat and the cold, and the choking dust and stinging sand. People can die from too much heat or cold, or blinded by dust and sand. The desert is a dangerous place. People do not go there unless they have to.
And in these words, or similar ones, we begin many of the stories of the People of God in our Godly Play classes. You’ll have to imagine the box larger than what I can bring up here in the pulpit, and imagine as well the way the sand shifts and drifts under the storytellers hands, hardly ever ceasing in motion until the story itself begins. But the words are very similar each time. The desert is a dangerous place. People do not go there unless they have to.
There is something about the desert, the wilderness. The desert is, today, a place of deep temptation, but it is also a place of spiritual renewal. So often the people of God encounter God in the desert. Either a prophet, or the people as a whole come so close to God and God comes so close to them that they know what God is saying to them, that they know what God wants them to do. And I am left wondering what it is about the desert that makes it, despite the obvious and very real dangers, such a spiritually rich place.
The desert is a place of stillness amid shifting sands. A place where our old tracks, the patterns, ruts made by our routine passage, are wiped away. A place, a state of being, in which our own feet raise clouds of dust, the dust to which we all return, and our minds begin to raise clouds of inner noise, the rumblings and chatter that muffle the still small voice within. The voice that is uniquely ours, yet from the heart of God.
Cynthia Bourgeault, in the first chapter of her book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, talks about two kinds of noise. She says, “With some effort, we can stop the outer noise. Silent walks in the woods, Lenten and Advent quiet days at the local church or a retreat … are wonderful ways of doing just that. But stopping the inner noise is another matter. Even when the outer world has been wrestled into silence, we still go right on talking, worrying, arguing with ourselves, daydreaming, fantasizing. To encounter those deeper reaches of our being, where our own life is constantly flowing out of and back into the divine life, what first seems to be needed is some sort of an interior on/off switch to tone down the inner talking as well” (5-6).
In the desert, in the wilderness, as well as on nicely structured retreats and quiet days, the outer world is wrestled into silence, and we begin encounter our dust, our noise, ourselves. To encounter ourselves may seem fairly simple, but, if we reflect on our lives, most of us encounter ourselves only rarely. We have obligations to honor, tasks to accomplish, promises to keep, and most of us do not take the time to stop in the woods if we have miles to go before we sleep. We run and run and run and collapse at the end of the day, gathering the bare minimum of sleep we must have so that we can get up the next day and do it all again. And this is not just adults! The number of teenagers and tweens I know who seem to run from one commitment to the next, from music to sports to scouts to volunteering, not to mention school, homework, and a social life is really astounding and a little frightening. We establish our ruts, our rails that we run on, and we never, ever stop long enough to wonder why we are doing everything that we’re doing, or whether what we do flows out of who we are, God’s beloved.
But in the desert, the tracks are erased, whether we like it or not. The patterns stop functioning, and our outer noise is brought abruptly to a halt. It’s not a comfortable feeling, for those of us who have become acclimatized to the noise and the rush. Children are actually some of the best at it, because for all that their bodies may not cooperate with sitting still for very long, while they are quiet, they can be utterly still as both inner and outer noise rests in peace. I have told stories with the desert box in which the room was so quiet you could hear the soft chi-chink as each small wooden figure was moved, so, so slowly, an inch or less at a time, across the box, across the desert, from the Red Sea to the great Mountain where God would begin to instruct the People of God in the best ways to live. And this might go on for several minutes. Nothing happening but each of the people being moved in turn, one at a time. Chi-chink. Chi-chink. Chi-chink. Chi-chink.
But we adults and teenagers have forgotten. If you ever invite a group of people who are not practiced at it to simply sit in silence for a time, you will quickly notice how uncomfortable the silence makes people. We shift, we sigh, we fidget, we look at our watches (and are surprised! Has it really only been two minutes?! It seems so much longer!!), we wonder when this will end. Sometimes we even find ourselves getting angry with the person we perceive to be ‘in charge.’ Why is this taking so long?! Why haven’t they called us back to order?! When can I let go of this silence and relax into my normal rhythms and patterns again?! This silence raises too much inner noise, too much dust for me!
In those moments, in those silences, in those desert, wilderness, experiences, we encounter our inner noise all too clearly. What we might even call temptations. We hear within ourselves the voices calling to us, calling us to pursue pleasure, power, spiritual glory, our own good before everyone else’s. We hear voices that call us to put ourselves, not God, at the center of our existence. That is the overarching pattern of Jesus’ temptations. To create bread not for the world, but to hoard for himself. To dominate the rulers of the world in order to grab and hold political power. To demonstrate spiritual power not to invite others into relationship with a loving God but to show off super-human abilities. I can fly! See how great I am! To put self, rather than God, at the center.
In one way or another, most of us face those temptations. That is why desert moments can be so uncomfortable. So dangerous. But facing those temptations is part of what can make the desert so spiritually rich as well. Because hearing that inner noise, seeing that cloud of dust, is a step. Becoming aware of our own resistance teaches us something about ourselves. Once we are aware of our temptations, however they may manifest themselves for each one of us, once we are aware of them we can begin to work through them, instead of allowing them to function below the surface, to control how we act completely without our knowledge. We can notice how we might do something mainly for the ego trip we get when people are appropriately grateful. We can become aware of how our own search for security, food, money, houses, cars, causes us to choose more and more busy-ness and less and less time spent enjoying what we already have. We might even see that a desire for spiritual growth is based not on a desire to accept what God offers us but a kind of spiritual self-improvement program, to make us the best at being humble! More humble than anyone else, darn it!
Jesus begins to work through his inner noise in 40 days. 40 days removed from all the outer noise, even that of the constant search for and obsession with food. And the gift he receives in that time is, I think, a deep centering of himself. He knows himself fully as the beloved of God. The way the story is written, the hearer might assume that Jesus achieved a permanent victory over his inner noise, his inner temptations, and was never bothered by them again. I kind of doubt that was really the case. Whether they were so directly dramatized again or not, I suspect that Jesus always wrestled with the temptation to put himself at the center, as so many people begged him to do. To fight the Romans, to make himself king, to rule the nation of Israel, to take power, security, into his own hands. Perhaps that’s one reason he went off by himself to pray so often. Not to escape those temptations but to engage directly with his own dust, his own inner noise, so that the outer noise, pressures from uncomprehending disciples, resistance from arrogant Pharisees, the adoration of the crowd, might not subvert God’s mission. And by doing that, by going back into his own desert, he remembers, renews his own center once again. By engaging his own inner noise, he comes so close to God, and God comes so close to him, that he touches base with that spark within himself, the spark we share, that is the light of God.
You see, the desert is a dangerous place. The quiet, shifting sands remove our convenient tracks bring to a standstill our outer noise and allow us, even force us, into engagement with our inner noise. But the desert is where the God comes close to us, and we come close to God. Because when we sink through our inner noise, we learn more about ourselves, and we find our own inner spark; the divine that has chosen to dwell within each one of us, that names us God’s beloved. And when we touch that center, when we move through our own outer and inner noise in the desert, our external life flows, in alignment with God within and beyond and among us. We come back out of the desert, but perhaps we carry a small piece of the desert with us, allowing us to engage our distractions, our noise, even allowing God to speak through that noise, so that we remain centered in the middle of life’s hurry and busy-ness.
Lent is a moment, a time in which we can enter the desert. A time in which we are given the chance to truly encounter ourselves, dust and all. On Ash Wednesday Tim suggested that we fast from, give up, the hurry that we so often find ourselves in, rushing from one thing to another, and that we engage in a daily examen, a reflecting on each day. I think that if we do that we may well find ourselves instinctively forming a kind of outer silence that allows us to engage our inner noise. The challenge then is not to run from that inner noise, but to move through it, learning what we can about ourselves and our temptations, and perhaps, after 40 days, or 400, or 4, touching that center that names us the people of God, the beloved of God.
The desert is a dangerous place. Because in the desert we find ourselves, and because in the desert, we can, if we will, come close to God and allow God to come close to us and name us who we are, God’s own, God’s beloved. I hope this Lent we will have the courage to enter the desert.
Amen.