The Fearfulness and Beauty of the Desert

 

Dear Friends,

Today, in our liturgy, we see how the Israelites fleeing from Egypt, the captives in Babylon, John the Baptist and Jesus himself suffered in the desert and they found it to be a place of growth in God. But it wasn’t easy for them nor for us in the deserts of our times.

Throughout recorded history, people have known deserts to be dangerous, inhospitable, inhuman places. In ancient literature, including the Bible, deserts were peopled by demons, and therefore, a testing place. The children of Israel, on their long journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, to Jesus himself, faced the rigors of the desert. Humanly speaking, the desert is a lonely, terrifying place.

At the same time, though, as today’s first reading tells us, the voice cried out in the desert “prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God” (Isaiah 40.3). The Israelites were free to come home after a 40-year captivity in Babylon, and as they travelled, the desert before them and around them was in bloom. Beauty and redemption were in the desert. 

Centuries later, John the Baptist, newly emerged from the desert, cried out familiar words: “Prepare the way of the Lord” (Mark 1.1). He would be the precursor of Jesus, who would point to Jesus as the expected Savior. But before his encounter with Jesus, the wilderness, the desert had been home to John. There, he survived on locusts and wild honey. When the time came, he left the desert to preach, baptize, challenge Herod and ultimately die as the price of a dance. 

Just as John found his salvation in the desert, so do we find salvation in our modern desert. The voice of the Lord speaks to us in the wilderness of the pandemic, the awful desert of a destructive relationships. We know the wilderness of moral wrongdoing or depression, addiction, loneliness and war, the wilderness of working for justice and peace in a less than conscious world. The desert is anyplace that the integrity of our soul is tried, where the fabric of family life is stretched to tearing, where communities are tried by tragedy and the challenge to human value.

We travel through a variety of deserts that endanger or frighten us. Yet like the people coming home from Babylon we too can find great beauty, in the desert. Most especially, it is here, in the desert, that we find the comfort of our God. “Comfort, comfort my people,” says God in Isaiah (43.2).

When tempted in the desert, Jesus needed the strength of God, the comfort of God, and he was given both. The temptations were overcome, and there was joy! 

Joy happens in life, when the wilderness does not overcome us, when we reach quenching waters and they are not a mirage, but real. 

As Advent continues through this strange and unwelcome year, we are not alone in the personal wilderness of our society and world. Listen. Listen. Listen to the voice you hear in the wilderness, for surely, there will be one.

~Sister Joan Sobala