Both Lent and Passover have ended. What seeped into my soul this year as these wonderful seasons passed beside me?
Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness, fasting and wrestling – perhaps wandering. The Israelites spent 40 years in the wilderness, wandering and seeking G-d. Cultures and religions everywhere have strong traditions of fasting and “wilderness time†as part of the transformation process.
It would seem this “wilderness time†is a critical element in any transformation – certainly in transformations that we hope will take us closer to Eden.
But time in the desert is not easy. Are we willing to deny ourselves the immediate needs that our desires demand in order to allow the path through the wilderness to unfold?
When we are in the desert, it is easy to look for ways to surround ourselves with things that feel like the moisture that we seek, even though the place that we are ending up may – in fact – be the swamp. The swamp might feel like a good place at first, but we will rot there if it is only a hiding place from the desert that we are meant to cross.
When the wilderness and the desert are presented to us on our path, then shouldn’t we embrace that phase of our journey rather than hiding from it? What we might need is a little time in the desert by ourselves, to embrace the gifts of the desert and learn what the desert has to speak to us. If we hide from the desert in the swamp, then when the rain does come, we can’t discern the miracle of rain from the swamp that we have immersed ourselves in.
It is only through our time in the desert that we can gain the gift that lets us see the miracle of the rain when it comes. Miracles are happening around us all the time, but few can see them. It may be that time in the desert is tightly linked to the ability to see the miracles that we are surrounded with.
