Moving towards Easter in the Desert

For the last weeks of Lent until Easter, we will provide daily reflections on the a desert journey. The citations come from John Moses, The Desert. An Anthology for Lent (Harrisburg, PA.: Morehouse, 1997).

The Presence and Absence of God

“The desert is an arid, scorching, frightening place where everything portends death. But at the same time it is also a place of rest, gentleness and life.

“In the desert you find friendliness and hostility, anguish and joy, sorrow and exultation, trial and triumph. The desert is the land of malediction and the land of benediction. The desert can be hard and merciless. You might die of thirst there, but if it rains you could be drowned. In the desert nature manifests itself in its extremes: prodigal fertility and cruel barrennness. We wait for years and do not get even a drop of rain. Then, without warning, the rain comes down in torrents; and, with frightening speed, the wadis fill up and overflow, sweeping everything before them. You might come upon an oasis where there is life and vegetation. And a little farther on you could find yourself on a desolate patch where you fear your sanity.

“The desert can be tomb and cradle, wasteland and garden, death and resurrection, hell and heaven.

“Thus in the desert you will find that God is simultaneously present and absent, proximate and remote, visible and invisible, manifest and hidden. He can receive you with great tenderness and then abandon you on the cross of loneliness. He consoles you and torments you at the same time. He heals you only to wound you again. He may speak to you today and ignore you tomorrow.

“The desert does not delude and least of all does the desert delude those who accept it in its two-sided reality of life and death, presence and absence. Nor will they be deceived by God who calls them to the desert. God never abandons us.

“The desert is a good teacher. It is a place where we do not die of thirst. It is a place where we rediscover the roots of our existence. Once we grasp this lesson, we realise that the physical desert is not necessary to lead the life of a hermit. It then becomes pointless to go in search of a desert on the globe. You can find your desert in a corner of your house, on a motorway, in a square, in a crowded street. But you must first renounce the slavery of illusions, refuse the blackmail of pressure, resist the glitter of appearances, repudiate the domination of activity, reject the dictatorship of hypocrisy. Then the desert becomes a place where you do not go out to see the sand blowing in the wind but the Spirit waiting to make his dwelling within you.”

Alessandro Pronzato