The journey through Lent is always one of an encounter with the wilderness. You know something about what the wilderness is like — we all do. Just a little after and just a little before all of the experiences in life that break us, we awake to find that we are once again in the wilderness. It is the place of journeying and of waiting; it is the impassible and the unyielding, and the ground which shifts too quickly beneath your feet.
The wilderness is filled with silence which is full of every possibility and the desolation that the unyielding din of the sun inevitably brings. It is a space both of becoming and of dissolution.
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As Christ returns from the Jordan, immediately following the events of his baptism, and overwhelmingly filled with the Spirit, it is the wilderness into which he is led. He goes there by the guiding of the Holy Spirit, and there he knows temptation.
First, it is the desperation that comes over him: his unfulfilled needs threaten to consume him. Desperation tells us that it is worth giving up everything we have in order to obtain that which we lack. For the desperate person, it would be worth it to give up your job, your family, and everything you have, everyone you love, to relieve the pain that so possesses you. The first drink, the next high, and even death can become your whole world in your most desperate moments.
Next, it is the temptation of power and might, of a sure and certain path towards success. There are too many examples in the world of people who seek security, comfort, and opulence through the control of others. It happens among those whose names spring too-readily to mind, and it dominates the private lives of so many whose suffering goes unnoticed. We are lonely, vulnerable creatures, and so we coerce others to care about us, and to attend to our needs. We lash out in vulnerability at any hint of abandonment by our families, our friends, and our God.
Finally, the terror and helplessness of being cast into a place from which there is no retreat. Life itself is not so very much unlike this: we are brought into a way of being whose fundamental nature we can do very little about. We have moments, circumstances, which we cannot change and must somehow find a way to live with. We experience overwhelming loss and uncertainty and cannot tell which way to go, let alone how we might go there.
These extraordinary temptations experienced by Christ in the wilderness are, in fact, known to all of us in the situations that have most tried us, and in the suffering of our friends and neighbours.
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The season of Lent is a journey in a wilderness place, because it is a human journey, and our lives are never far from the true depth of the wilderness. All our lives are filled with an abundance of silence and waiting and stillness, just as they are touched by desperation and the wish for power and the terror of helplessness.
The wilderness of Lent is not an isolated trial, but an experience that we share and mark together. We gather in worship and in reflection in many ways, confessing our humanity before God and one another. We are on this trying human journey together, and that makes all the difference.
Something like four years ago, there were researchers exploring the effects of a profound wilderness time on the inner lives of young people: children who were affected by periods of isolation and disruption due to the heights of the COVID-19 pandemic. The children who were most disturbed by the experience were those who felt like they were experiencing it in isolation, that it was happening to them somehow uniquely, and that their suffering was private and individual. Those young people who saw their experiences as part of a shared suffering with peers and with the rest of humanity were able to cope with very, very much less distress.
We hide our suffering from one another very well, and we mostly endure the most difficult moments of our lives in privacy and loneliness if we possibly can. So it is that we can become convinced that it is our own wretchedness that is at the heart of our pain, when our pain may very well be something that is actually very human. In Lent, we are urged to pierce that veil. The illusion that we have everything together and our lives are devoid of difficulty does a great disservice to ourselves and to those around us. That illusion divides us from our own humanity.
The American psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden says that it takes two minds to think one’s most disturbing thoughts. When they cannot be shared, they have nowhere to go, and so consume us with their immovability, like the sun which hangs over us in an exposed desert place, and from which we can find no shelter. Sometimes, to share our burdens with another will let us move beyond them, but even when they remain, it is better not to fear that we are all alone.
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God is always with us in the desert places, and Christ has gone before us into the wilderness. There are moments where our health, our sanity, and our existence will seem to teeter on the brink, and so, too, for all of humanity, for countries and peoples everywhere, and I do not pretend that it always goes well. There are encounters which change us, there are experiences that wound us, and there are damages from which we do not ever fully recover. Countries fail, bodies fail, and truly awful things happen just about anywhere you really look.
We must not withdraw from life, and we must not imagine that God is only in the places that are beautiful or tranquil, or that God is somehow particularly with the powerful, the comfortable.
We proclaim in Lent the presence of Christ alongside us, who suffered, who was tempted, and who has gone absolutely everywhere that we might go in our glorious and difficult lives. We are invited to see that as well as our own private comforts and fears, we are bound up in a journey with loved ones, neighbours, and strangers of all kinds, who desperately need for us to let our own humanity slip out now and then, and for us to see their humanity, too. In Lent, we have a foretaste of the inevitability with which riches and poverty both will ultimately fail, and to be stripped down to the essentials of our being, in which we are never really alone.
All the things which seem to divide us are ultimately passing away, and as our own Nancy Wigen reflected after the Ash Wednesday service: the stuff of our bodies is always being recycled, and there is no substantial distinction that can be made between us and the rest of Creation. We are one with all that God has made, with all of humankind, and everything else besides, and all of it is filled with the unfailing presence of God.
To be a human person is a very strange journey indeed, and our existence is a brilliant wilderness, filled with good horizons and strange paths towards which to proceed. May we know that we are ever in Christ’s footsteps, and that there is nothing of humanity which has not been assumed into God. May we know that every moment of our lives is impossibly full with the absolute presence of the Holy.