First Sunday of Lent: The Desert Journey
Franciscan Reflections From The Hermitage
The Desert Journey – First Sunday of Lent Year C – Luke 4:1-13
Lent, an opportunity for gaining new strength, to follow the Way of Jesus into the wilderness, away from noise and superficiality, to empty ourselves of everyday concerns and sufficiency, our illusion of control, to become naked and hungry.
This, today is our opportunity to encounter Truth. As we enter into this time, our united sigh, a people’s lament for our collective loss of objective reality, truth, reason, logic, and language considered elite arbitrary constructs in a sea of relativity.
Yet, Truth has a quality, a note, a ring, a resonance, that has energy and power. Truth is symphonic and our contemplative prayer practice seeks to silence that inner tuning fork resonating to the many demanding, discordant, and divisive notes of fracture around us. It is in the silence of the desert, discarding our ‘knowing’, that we become available to the resonance of the Truth. From this humble foundation that admits the need to always begins again, the grace of Truth finds a place to resonate within us.
The Word of God is here, there, everywhere. God’s blueprint for creation within time and space is already completed and fulfilled within eternity, yet is still to be accomplished within the experience of our time; already but not yet! This Word of God, the Logos, the language of creation, of music and poetry. Our longing is expressed in words yet constrained within the language of time.
St Francis warned his followers not to go about the world contending about words… “When you go into the world, you shall not quarrel, nor contend with words, nor judge others… as becomes the servants of God and the followers of most holy poverty”. This is the holy poverty that saves us from imposing our interpretation and will on the meaning of God’s Word. When we cling to our chosen words, our little interpretations, we cling to our limited understanding and experience within time and space. It is as vain as clinging to love that must always give itself away to another; the harder we cling, the faster it slips through our fingers. Truth and Love, like the heady scent of the Rose, can only ever dimly be described beyond the experience.
It is always in the self-emptying process of letting go of control of a moment of time; letting go of our imposed interpretation, that God speaks to us. The flow between speaking and listening leads us into contemplation of Holy Scripture that resonates with all that is True, Beautiful, and Good; a love letter that consoles and upholds us through the temptations that we also will face.
The great temptation of the desert experience, to grasp for ourselves equality with God; the right to judge who and what is holy, and who and what is profane. Out of this great temptation has flowed the most terrible events of history. Deeming our particular species, our culture, our race, our sexuality, our religion, and our belief, as superior to others and to the rest of God’s creation.
Even God’s Word within Scripture is used to enslave, belittle, and corrupt. But perhaps the greatest temptation that we may face is the presumption that we are called to defend God, to defend our notion of God’s will and God’s Holy Word. Our so-called defence belittles and mocks God and the work of the Holy Spirit as we appropriate to ourselves the power and glory of God. This is where we find the real heresy, the mockery of God that would seek to destroy God’s creation, to torture, burn, bomb and dismember their brothers and sisters, using God’s Word as the banner of righteousness.
Retreating to the solitude of the desert means that we are stuck with ourselves. In the tradition of Moses and Jesus, the desert fathers and the desert mothers who wandered into the desert entered a wild, fierce, unknown place where they would encounter both ‘demons and angels’; their own shadowy selves wherein lies both good and evil, gold and lead. These men and women refused to deceive themselves by imagining that retreat to a desert meant freedom from the world. The hardest world to leave, they knew, is the one within the heart.
Our journey into the desert is not accomplished by completing a to-do list. Loss and grief are an intrinsic part of all aspects of our lives including our spiritual journey. Life is change. We undergo change, loss, and grief from birth onward. Every venture from home, every move, every job or status change, every loss of a person, a pet, belief, every illness, every shift in life such as marriage, divorce, or retirement, and every, kind of personal growth and change; a cause for grief. These are our ‘little deaths of life’.
After we have encountered and embraced this death and grief, the loss of our investment in the assumptions about self, life, and the world, we are capable of that spaciousness needed to take God’s hand. It is only after this death and grief, that we open ourselves to that vulnerability of leading a life of daily conversion, centred on prayer, metanoia, and contemplation. It is only then that we can hear God’s Word so as to live from ‘Gospel to life and life to Gospel’.
It is only then that we will become heralds of the Gospel and instruments of transformation and peace in the world. Without this metanoia we have nothing to say to the world.
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