Interior Desert

Desert spirituality has been very important in my spiritual life, and it is something that has been coming up consistently over the past two weeks. And what does this look like?

I wish!

The desert is a place of solitude, which makes it a place of encounter with 1) self, 2) God, and 3) evil.

It is a place that has loomed large in the spiritualities of monasticism and especially the Christian East, but there are many levels of interpretation and understanding the desert.

Fuge, tace, quiesce (be alone, be silent, be still)

In the Bible, the desert is a place where Israel is courted and betrothed to God, but also a place of temptations and trials. It becomes a battleground of the eschatological battle of Christ against the powers of the world. Defeating Satan means weakening him by spreading the kingdom of God and supporting other Christians through prayer. In the desert, the means to fight are acquired: mortification and penance used systematically for the practice of virtue keep the individual focused on the "narrow gate" of the Gospel, the asceticism (askesis, "exercise") essential for seeking union with God. By fasting and penance, it is also shown that man "shall not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God" (Mt 4:4, Deut 8:3; cf. Vita Consecrata 7b).

The desert is a place to flee to "live alone for God alone," a place of radical detachment, an exhortation to the Church and contemporaries never to lose sight of the supreme vocation: to be always with the Lord (cf. Vita Consecrata 7b). The first encounter is with self: the discovery of how far one is from God and the difficulty of return. It thus becomes a place of spiritual combat, struggle against the passions and the devil that oppose union with God, against the evil in the world that begins in the individual heart. True knowledge of the human heart is attained in the desert. Its weaknesses and foibles are revealed and it is strengthened for spiritual battles. Herein lies the importance of controlling "thoughts" (custodia sensuum), understanding virtue and vice, and honing weapons: continuous prayer, nourishment by Scripture, humility, and mortification.

The importance of purifying the heart and the senses from passions (apatheia, "equanimity") is paramount: "Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God" (Mt 5:8).

In addition to this negative interpretation, there is also a positive one. The desert is a place of God's providence, where Elijah was nourished (1 Kings 19:7) and a place prepared for God's people (Exodus, cf. Rev 12:6). In Thomas Merton's book Thoughts in Solitude, he described the desert as a place dear to God precisely because it is useless to man, where there is nothing attractive and nothing to be exploited; it was made to be nothing but itself, the perfect place for man who seeks to be nothing but himself.

This was my primary experience of "interior desert" over the past week. It is a place of profound silence and imperturbable solitude, a place of refreshment where food and water are forsaken for nourishment on God alone. It has been a place of rest with God, but also pilgrimage: no one who takes a long look at himself in the presence of God can be satisfied. The pilgrimage that begins and ends in the world must at some point pass through the dry wasteland where there is nothing to depend on but God and no one to blame but the self, and thus there is purgation. But beyond every desert is a promised land, beyond the teaching is the goal of the lesson, and beyond the pilgrimage is rest.