Lenten Practice: The Desert

 

 

Last year during Lent I preached a series of sermons on spiritual practices.  I think that they were well-received, but then: THUNK.

 

It wasn't for some weeks, maybe months, that I realized that I had introduced the unfamiliar concept of spiritual practice to my congregation without offering them any concrete, practical advice on how to implement any such thing in their own lives.

 

(I often find that matters that seem clear to me are . . . not so much to others.  This applies to all kinds of things, including where one should store the vacuum cleaner.)

 

So, this year: a reprise, with practical suggestions and a handout each week.

 

My first thought was to send them off with an idea for an hour's attentive solitude to try once during the week, but a pastor friend told me, No.  Too much. 

 

And then I remembered how often I suggest to people who are just embarking on a new life of contemplative prayer that they give it three minutes a day, while they're brushing their teeth in the morning.  Most of us complain, when we try to get serious about contemplation, that we don't have time, that we can't catch a break, that we are endlessly distracted ~ but we all have to brush our teeth, right?  So choose a topic ~ gratitude, say ~ and ponder that while you brush.  It's a start.

 

I'm trying something of the same approach with my congregation.  Every week, a handout inserted in the bulletin, with images and quotes and suggestions for three ten-minute periods of prayer, to do whenever they want during the following week.

 

This week's topic is Practicing the Desert.  The handout's finished; I'll include it here in bits and pieces over the next few days.

 

 

 

 

Image: Sossusvlei Dune, Namib Desert  ~ Wikipedia.

Practicing the Desert - Sermon

Most of you probably know that A. is our contact person with the local paper.  Every week she sends in the scriptural texts and title for our Sunday sermon, so that they’ll appear on the Friday religion page.  The other night she stopped me and asked,” Now what was that sermon title?”  The woman from the paper had called her to make sure that she had it right – “Practicing the Desert” – could that be? ”Yes, that’s right,” I said, and A. walked away shaking her head.  I guess the lady at the paper had been shaking hers, too. “Practicing the Desert” -  what a weird title!

 

The topic of spiritual practice has become a popular one in the past several years.  The ancient church offers us a treasure trove of spiritual practices, or spiritual disciplines, but for several hundred years most of them were largely ignored or, at best, referred to in different terms.  Today we might wonder how to categorize them or describe them.  

 A few years ago, another pastor and I wondered about whether there’s a difference between spiritual practices and spiritual disciplines.  The words indicate different emphases perhaps, if you think about it:  A practice is something that we repeat in order to acquire some skill or proficiency.  Piano practice.  Baseball practice.  It’s a familiar enough word, right?  It comes from an ancient Latin word for work, and an ancient Greek word for to do --- or to see.  Interesting: it seems to involve both activity – doing – and some kind of understanding – seeing.

A discipline, on the other hand – perhaps that sounds a bit more rigorous.  A discipline also involves repetition in order develop a skill or knowledge, but it comes from the Latin word for instruction.  It seems to involve learning, being taught.  And it’s related to  the word disciple – now there’s a word we’re familiar with in the Christian context.  A disciple is a follower, someone who follows and learns from another.  Someone who learns to discern, to sort things out, according to the teaching of another.

So whether we call something a practice or a discipline, it involves repetition, it involves learning, it involves acquiring knowledge or skill from someone whose instruction we follow, knowledge or skill that will help us to discern, to sort, to figure out and live our lives.   

Quaker theologian Richard Foster, in his famous book of about thirty years ago, Celebration of Discipline, refers to the spiritual disciplines as “doors to liberation.”  He likes to break them down into inward disciplines, such a prayer and fasting, outward disciplines, such as simplicity and service, and corporate, and community disciplines, such as worship and celebration.  Dorothy Bass, who directs a university program on spiritual education and formation and has written several books on the Christian life, including one called Practicing Our Faith, emphasizes community.  She tells us that “Christian practices are things Christian people do together over time in response to and in the light of God’s active presence for the light of the world.”  She talks about many facets of life that we know well, but perhaps have not thought of in terms of Christian practice: things like household economics, and dying well, and singing our lives.

And recently, noted preacher and teacher Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest and college professor, wrote a wonderful book entitles An Altar in the World.  She brings a fresh, contemporary point of view to spiritual practice.  She wonders whether some of the ancient practices are so ritualistic as to turn people away; they sometimes seem hollow and boring.  We need to look right where we are, in our everyday lives, she says, for ways in which to become attentive to God.  “The last place most people look is right under their feet, in the everyday activities, accidents, and encounters of their lives,” she says, on her way to concluding that “What is saving my life now is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth. My life depends on engaging the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them.”  She talks about spiritual practices that focuses on the reality that being human “requires a body as well as a soul,” and her chapters have titles like “The Practice of Carrying Water” and “The Practice of Pain.”   

Now perhaps you understand how I came by my weird sermon title.  Practicing the desert – it’s something we’re all called to do, whether or not we give it a name, or think of it as a spiritual practice.

Let’s start by taking a look at how Jesus experienced this practice, this sojourn in the desert.  Not that we get a lot of information from Mark who is, as he so often is, brief and to the point.  But he does give us some crucial information.

First of all, Jesus was driven into the desert.  He was not invited or escorted; it was not suggested to him  – he was driven into the desert by the Spirit. The spirit sees the desert as a necessary, life-forming and life-shaping experience. It’s an emphatic break from a past life, a jolt into solitude, into challenge, and into bleakness.

And for Jesus it comes right after the glorious moment of his baptism, a moment when he has emerged from the waters of the Jordan River to see a vision and hear a voice, a moment when his identity seems assured.  He sees the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove; he hears a voice say, “You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.”    It certainly seems that from here on out all should be well.

But no – the desert lies ahead. And isn’t that so often the way of things?  All seems to be going beautifully, we seem to be making progress, achieving successes; we’re happy and comfortable – and then life falls apart and we find ourselves in a desert, in a wilderness not of our own making and certainly not of our choice.

Mark doesn’t tell us much about it  He tells us that Jesus was surrounded by wild beasts, and ministered to by angels, and that’s all he tells us directly.  We have to go to the gospels of Matthew and Luke to hear how Jesus was tempted by Satan, and how he responded by remembering and quoting the teachings of Scripture.  And we have to read the rest of Mark to learn what kind of a man Jesus became, what his priorities were, what, as some of my friends call them, his “non-negotiables” were, to understand what happened to him in the desert.  To understand what can happen to all of us in the desert.  We have to read the rest of the story, to see him teaching about a kingdom of justice and love, to see him caring and healing for others, to see him suffering and dying on the cross, to understand that the desert made of him an uncompromising ally of God the Creator and God the Spirit.

Early Chistians sought similar experiences of the desert, sought to practice the desert so that they, too, might become stauncher allies of God.  Among the most well known of them was one of the first, Antony of the Desert, considered to be the founder of monasticism. He headed out to the Egyptian desert in the late 200s, where he spent about thirty years in solitude, and became famous for his writings on inner spiritual warfare, on the battle a person does when confronted by those inner demons we all face at one time or another.  

Antony was followed by dozens of men and women, known to us as the Desert Fathers and Mothers, who sought the clarity and wisdom that come with solitude.  To most of us today, it seems unlikely that we would find knowledge in emptiness, that we would hear God’s voice in the silence, that we might encounter God in the vast emptiness of a desert land.  We live, after all, in a world in which we are bombarded by sensory stimuli.  Most especially, we are bombarded by sound, and by busyness.  Many of us have our television sets on for most of the day – for company.  We listen to music or talk radio in the car.  We listen to Muzak when we shop, when we wait, when we get our teeth cleaned!  Silence is unfamiliar to us, and often uncomfortable for us.  Look at how we rush to say something when we are pending time with someone else.  Look at how difficult it is for us to sit silently in church!  It’s a universal problem of our age – silence is just not our milieu.

And yet – we find ourselves in the desert.  More often than not we are, like Jesus, driven there.  We don’t choose it.    

When . . .  How . . . have you experienced your own desert times?  When have you found yourself practicing the desert, learning from the desert, discovering that you have to sort things out in the desert, whether you want to or not?

                

Perhaps it was a failure in school or work?  The loss of a job, a farm, a business?

Perhaps it was a personal loss?  Of a marriage, of a loved one – a husband or wife, a child, a sibling, a best friend?

Perhaps a personal limitation drove you into the desert?  Perhaps an addiction?  A discovery that you are less capable in some areas than you imagined?  A misstep that brought the police to your door?  

            

             And then -- What does our culture tell us?

             It tells us to ignore the desert – to pick ourselves up -- to get back into

             circulation – to have a           drink – to pretend it never happened.

And we have a long history to back us up!  Need I tell you how many jokes and cartoons have as their subject Moses and the Israelites wandering the desert?  We look for humor in their desert experience because  when we are anxious, when we are filled with frustration and resistance, we want to find a way to laugh it off.  It’s not difficult, given the stories our Bible tells us, for us to imagine that resistance to and frustration with desert practice go back quite ways.

 

But Lent tells us to practice the desert, to learn the desert.  Lent tells us that there is value in the desert.   Lent reminds us that Jesus emerged from the desert strengthened and committed to his mission.  Scripture tells us repeatedly that, his forty day experience behind him and his ministry at hand, Jesus returned again and again to places of solitude in which to pray, that he found in the desert opportunities to reconnect with God, to seek guidance, to listen, and to be affirmed in who he was and what he was called to do.

Lent tells us that our lives can re-shaped by our desert experiences – that when we live into the demands of the desert, our lives can be re-focused, sharpened, clarified.  We can discover what’s truly important in our desert times.  We can discover who is really important in our desert times.

Now, that’s not always the case.  We all know people whose desert experiences have left them embittered, angry, and self-absorbed.  Sometimes people are broken by the practice of the desert.  Sometimes the wild animals of loss, of grief, of anger, of bewilderment – sometimes they are too much for us.  Sometimes a person finds it impossible to accept the ministrations of others, those angels in the desert who arrive to support and care for us.

But when we can accept our desert times as Spirit-driven, they can prepare us for an unexpected future.  Look back and see: The desert fathers and mothers became sources of wisdom for their followers, for the communities that sprang up after them, and for us today.  Look back further: in the desert, Jesus shed all the expectations which clung to him as a first century Galilean and committed himself to the reign of God, to ushering into human history the good news of new life.   

When we enter the desert, whether driven there by the circumstance of our lives, or whether we choose a season apart, we may find that it deepens our relationships with God. Jeremy Hall, a Benedictine sister in her 80s who herself spent two decades living in solitude, tells us that “[i]n Christian faith and life, the seemingly or really negative aspect is always for the positive.  Not only is the desert for the Promised Land, but Lent is for Easter; death is for more life, as Christ’s death was; discipline is for strength and vitality; real obedience is for real freedom.   [And] silence is for the word, and solitude is for communion."  

So if you find yourself practicing the desert, if you find yourself in a place in which the landscape is bleak and the wind howls through the emptiness, know that Jesus went before you, and he goes before you still.  Where you are called he has been, and he has triumphed on your behalf.  Thanks be to God.

Body, Breath, Place (Sermon ~ Ezekiel 37: 1-14)

There's a good chance that when  I preach this tomorrow, I will refer to my son's death in only the most general way.  I realized, as I printed the bulletin into 28-point font so that I can read it, that there may be very young children in this congregation, as they do not usually have Sunday School during worship.  Their parents are not bringing them to church so that they can learn the definition of suicide.  (I remember my horror when one of my friends at my own church, whose wife sings in our choir and was there for our son's funeral, talked about explaining what had happened to his own little nine or ten-year old son.  Horror that my family's circumstances mandated such a discussion in his.)  But this is how it emerged earlier in the week, with a little subsequent RG editorial assistance.

**********

I’ve been here enough times in the past few months that I think we know each other a bit.  Enough for me to preach a bit more personally then usual, at least insofar as sharing some of my experience in encountering today’s texts.  Perhaps that experience will speak to all of us who have found ourselves in deserts filled with dry bones. 

 

As I think most of you know, we in our family lost one of our young adult sons two and one-half years ago.  He died of suicide, just as I was preparing to return to Pittsburgh for my second year of seminary.  I use the term “died of suicide” these days because I have learned a lot in those two-and-one-half years.  One of the things I’ve learned is that very few people “commit” suicide, not any more than they "commit a heart attack" or ""commit a stroke."  Most people who die of suicide suffer from unresolved or – in the case of our son – even unrecognized clinical depression or bipolar disorder.  And that’s a problem we won’t even begin to confront successfully until we get rid of the very language that implies the victim is somehow at fault.  And so – my son Josh died of suicide.  That means that he died suddenly, and unexpectedly, and violently, and alone – and left behind a completely crushed and devastated family.

             

A desert of dry bones, indeed.

             

Josh’s death also means that when I looked at the OT and gospel texts for today – the texts we’ve just heard, Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones and Jesus’ raising of Lazarus, my heart stopped for a second.  There are certain texts which preachers steer clear of, for personal reasons, and these are the kind that I avoid.  They’re just too hard – one of my seminary professors refers to the situation as one of “existential dissonance.”  My own life experience and that of the text simply do not match up.  Not yet, anyway.

             

Even a year ago, I wouldn’t have tried.  I would have just gone off lectionary and preached on something else.  But this year – well, Lazarus seems a bit beyond my capacity, but I thought that I might try Ezekiel.  And I tell you all this not to be self-indulgent, but because sometimes, as we contend with our own desert experiences, it helps to have something concrete in someone else’s desert to hang onto. To know that while our experiences are unique to us, the realm of the desert is something that we all experience, one way or another.

             

One of the things I try to do in my preaching is what I call “preaching ahead of myself.”  We are all called, I think, to move beyond ourselves, especially in our suffering – to move beyond our own self-absorption into a space in which we might have something to offer others.  If I were a nurse, for instance, and my son had died, I would try to work ahead of myself by returning to my unit and caring for other people’s sons, helping them to heal and live.  As a preacher, I try to preach ahead of myself by preaching into what I hope, what we all hope, rather than falling backward into the hard specifics of what I merely know.

             

 So once I had decided to give it a try, I started to prepare for this morning by thinking about Ezekiel, imagining him and this bizarre vision of his.  I looked at some paintings online; I even found a wonderful short video, which you can probably find as well if you google-image something like “Ezekiel dry bones.” I looked at all these images of deserts and bones, and I thought about all of the people whose bodies I have cared for and prayed with, in my family and in my chaplaincy training at the Cleveland Clinic, and I wondered what Ezekiel thought and how he felt.  What did he think and how did he feel when God invited him into this vision in which death becomes life?

            

 And so I went back and re-read the text, and I found out.  At least, I think I found out some of what the writer of Ezekiel, perhaps Ezekiel himself, was thinking and feeling as he shaped this vision into words for later generations.

            

I discovered that at both the beginning and ending of this passage, Ezekiel talks about three things.  He talks about bodies, incarnational beings.  He talks about Spirit – about breath enlivening those bodies.  And he talks about places – geographical places.  Body, breath, place – things we all need to live.

             

It’s not surprising, I suppose, that these matters come up on the fifth Sunday of Lent, the last Sunday before Palm Sunday.  Lent begins in the same way: with Jesus, the incarnate one, the embodiment of God, being led by the Spirit, into the desert.  Body, spirit, place.  Jesus needs those things in order to live, just as we do, and he needs them in a specific way in order to live into his ministry.  He needs his body as a source of temptation: a body that hungers, that thirsts, that might triumph, that might be imposed upon others.   He needs the Spirit, the Spirit that belongs to and participates in both him and his Father, to lead him.  And he needs the desert, that empty, desolate, vacant place, in which to come to terms with the life to which he is called.  We heard all of this at the beginning of Lent –

             

And now we hear it with Ezekiel.  The same three requirements for life are brought to bear. “The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.”  Me – Ezekiel is the person, the ordinary, embodied human being.  So ordinary and embodied that he describes his encounter with God as a physical one: The hand of the Lord came down upon me.  As metaphorical as that statement might be, we visualize it, don’t we?  We see God’s hand - the same hand that reaches out to Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel - we see that hand clamping down on Ezekiel’s shoulder.  The hand of the Lord came upon me –

             

And he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord – there’s the first appearance of the Spirit who will be so ey to this passage.  The Spirit leads Ezekiel just as it leads Jesus.  Just as it leads us. 

            

Now we like to think that with the Spirit’s leading, we will be directed to good places.  Joyous places.  Places filled with possibility. 

             

Not desert places. 

             

And yet, the place to which the Spirit leads Jesus is the desert. And the place to which the Spirit leads Ezekiel is the valley of dry bones.

             

Imagine this valley.  You don’t need all those internet images. Just close your eyes for a moment and imagine:  the bare ground, sandy here, rocky there, stretching before you for miles.  Perhaps in the distance some mountains, but they are barren, rocky.  The colors?  Greys, browns, deadened colors, colors as devoid of hope as the ground itself.  And the silence.  The oppressive, weighty silence. 

             

And then you realize: the ground before you is littered with bones.  All sizes and shapes of bones, grey and brown and bones bleached to white. 

             

Now me – as you might guess, I see this scene pretty literally.  And perhaps some of you do as well.  It depends, I think, upon what the barren, desert places are in your own life right now.  What bones cover the ground, when you have the courage to look there?  What disappointments?  What frustrated hopes?  What losses?   What lies around, lifeless and hopeless, in your own existence?

             

Oh, this is a hard one, isn’t it?

             

God knows it is hard.  And God tells Ezekiel to speak to the bones, and he does, and they begin to get up and be melded together again, muscles and tendons appearing and skeletons being reconstituted.

             

Now how do you think Ezekiel feels? 

            

 I’m guessing that he’s reminded that bodies are not enough.  It sounds as if these bodies are complete – but they do not live.  They do not live until God tells Ezekiel to speak again, so that the winds will come and breathe life into these bodies.  Wind, breath, spirit – all the same word: ruach – in Hebrew.  The cultural memory is triggered: In the very beginning, according to Genesis, “a wind from God swept over the waters.”  Now a wind from God sweeps over the desert valley.  In one of the Genesis stories of creation, God breathes life into God’s first human creation.  Now God’s Spirit breathes life into an entire population.  A population of bones.  Bones in the desert.  Bodies, spirit, place.

           

Where are these places in your life?  Where are the places in which bones lie, in which the wind of God needs to rush in, into which the Spirit of life needs to breathe?

              

This is the why of Lent.  We know that without the cross, there is no resurrection.  We know that unless we look deeply into the desert places in our lives, there can be no wind of life.

           

“O my people,” says God through Ezekiel. ^“I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act.”  Bodies, spirit, place. 

             

We can hear this story literally, as the Israelites would have done, as Zionist Jews do today.  Real people, enabled by the Spirit of the Lord, are returned to their land, to Israel. Or we can hear it as God’s engagement with us, regardless of the geography of the matter in question. We can hear that God cares about who we are – embodied people, animated by God’s own Spirit.  We can hear that God cares about where we are, because embodied beings have to be somewhere.  We require place. If we find that we are standing in the middle of a dry valley, we can hear that God is laboring there.  If we stand on the precipice overlooking the valley, afraid to move, we can hear that God is ready to force air into our nostrils.  If we have crashed onto the plain, we can hear God saying, “Oh, my people.”

             

What did Ezekiel think?  What did he feel?  Was he terrified, watching those bones being re-assembled  into bodies, and listening to those bodies being re-animated by the wind?  Was it all that he could do, to stand there and not run away?  Or was he filled with hope, astonished by God’s love and God’s willingness to try again with God’s people?

             

In another two weeks, we will celebrate a similar story – a story in which a body is reconstituted, breath is released – and people do run away. At least, some of them in some versions run away, before they all get it right. And when they do get it right, and are able to grasp the reality – body, spirit, place – then they will recognize, and perhaps we will as well, that God still sighs, "Oh, my people.”  That God still seeks to transform valleys of dry bones into meadows of life. 

             

This is what I mean by preaching ahead of myself.  I mean this: that our God, who sees the starkness, the emptiness, the shattered lives strewn across the deserts of human existence, says to us: This is not the end of the story.  This is the Lenten journey, this is the journey through the wilderness but, Oh, my people, this is not the end.  My hand will roll a stone away from a tomb, and you will know that your God speaks and acts.  You will know that you are beloved and that you live, O my people.

             

Amen.

Image: Barry Donaldson, Ezekiel Speaks to the Dry Bones

Approaching Lent

I suspect that many of us for whose lives the desert has become a primary metaphor have spent time contemplating Jesus' sojourn there as depicted in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.  This poem was unknown to me until this morning; I'm grateful to have discovered it.

Lent Darkness

Dragons lurk in desert spaces
Penetrating the mind with evil claw.
Serpent’s teeth seek out the chinks
insidiously, relentlessly, gnawing on the bone;
searching out the interstices of muscle and sinew.

Such is the pain of the wilderness.
Alone, alone, alone,
Christ sits
in the waste place of abandoned pleas and questions
until exhausted
finally
at last
the realisation
comes
that in the end
there is only
God.

In the night-time of our fears
in the present reality of abandonment
when family and friends
turn and run,
be present, ever present God.
Be present with those
camped out in the fields of hopelessness
with refugees and homeless,
those who live lives of quiet desperation.
Be present until the desert places
blossom like the rose
and hope is born again.

– Kathy Galloway (ed.), The Pattern of Our Days: Liturgies and Resources for Worship (Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications, 1996), 130.

Kathy Galloway was the leader of the Iona Community when our church group spent a  week there five summers ago (I don't think she was there at the time).

 HT to Jason Goroncy at Per Crucem ad Lucem

Image: The hillside Columba climbed when he arrived on Iona in 563 CE and, according to legend, wanted to be assured, in his own loneliness and despair, that he would not have to see Ireland across the sea again. (In truth, he probably continued to travel back and forth.) (July 2006 photo)

Words (Friday Five)

Jan at RevGals offers the following:

There is a dramatic and surprising venue for Spiritual Formation/Sunday School classes at my church: Each week a different person teaches about a "word" that expresses his/her passion or interest. The first week someone spoke about "hospitality" with abundant treats on her mother and grandmother's china arrayed on tables. Other words have been "connectivity," "Trinity," "money," and "dreams." No one knows which person will be teaching until the class convenes. I am teaching this Sunday and plan to talk about "stirrings."

For this Friday Five, please list five words that identify your passions, spirituality, and/or life. Describe as much or as little as you wish.

**********

In no particular order:

Images.

Desert Wilderness Tsunami  (So, pretend they're one word.)

Companionship.

Silence.

Frontier.

Maybe I'll do some writing about these this week.  In the meantime, an image:

Wernersville Jesuit Retreat Center (PA) ~ October 2010

Slow Reading, Prayer, and Is God in the Desert?

I read a lot, and I usually read very fast.  I just counted and there are 22 books piled up on the floor next to my bed, on the table next to my bed, and in my bed.  (Yes, my favorite place to work is in bed.)  Oops ~ two more under the bed.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided that for my daily focused prayer time (which sometimes is daily and sometimes is not, and sometimes is all at once and sometimes takes place in brief periods scattered through the day), I was going to read and journal about two things v-e-r-y  s-l-o-w-l-y.  One, something in Scripture and the other, some kind of classic devotional reading.

I decided on Luke for the Scripture.  I know, the Luke lectionary year is about over, and it might be more sensible to move on to Matthew, but this has nothing to do with work.  This has to do with God and me, and Luke is the gospel filled with healing stories.  I did decide to make one concession to the liturgical year by starting with Luke 4.  I'll go back to the first three chapters during Advent.  So far it's been two weeks and I'm just reaching the end of the Chapter 4.

My other choice is Jean-Pierre de Caussade's The Sacrament of the Present Moment, originally entitled Abandonment to Divine Providence.  I've read it before, via my usual zip-through method, but I thought that it might be a good choice for something more considered.  It's basically a series of letters written by a 17th century Jesuit priest to the nuns to whom he had been appointed spiritual director.  You might be startled to discover how much of what he says applies to a 21st century person seeking to be more attentive to God in the daily.  Two weeks and I'm at page 19.  I 'm doing remarkably well at slowing down, yes?

What has astonished me as I read at this snail's pace is how complimentary these two books are. I read a very short passage in each in the morning or at night or whenever I get around to it, and then use what I've read as the basis for prayer then and through the day, and with almost every set of readings, I say to myself in a surprised inner voice, "They're on the same topic."

You may know that Jesus spends the first portion of Luke 4 in the desert where he is tempted by the devil.  And believe me, that episode reads a good deal differently when you have spent two years as I just have.  But as I was reading de Caussade one night, and trying to grasp what he says about being intensely and completely in the present, I came across a sentence that says, "Thus, the present moment is like a desert in which simple souls see and rejoice only in God." 

And I thought, I don't think that I've ever read or heard anyone say anything about Jesus' forty solitary and tormented days in the parched and barren desert being a time of rejoicing in God.

And, I continued, I'm pretty sure that my Desert Year blog does not represent a time of rejoicing in God.

And then I wondered, Is the desert perhaps not empty, but in fact filled with God?