The desert, in its silence and grandeur, incites the heart to prayer and praise.
It is good to enter into the desert as our personal relationship with God has so much in common with two meaningful aspects we find in the desert: changelessness and silence.
The changelessness of God
The mesa’s layers of geological strata, of varying colors, are its wrinkled lines of age.
These strata were thousands or millions of years in formation by the wind and elements.
Surrounded by these ancient sentries of time, problems and worries lose their urgency.
What a blessing!
Our lives, our culture, our relationships… all are subject to change.
These changes are often rapid and difficult to control.
They serve to make our time and our lives unmanageable.
We need to take time to get away from the rapidly changing aspects of our lives.
We need to enter into the life of the desert.
Being so barren and devoid of change, the desert offers a reprieve and a reminder of the ever-present and unchanging nature of God.
In fact, the greatest wealth of the desert is the seeming timelessness it shares with God.
Timelessness is the very gift that God wishes to share with us that we might order our lives by it.
Allow me to explain.
Now God is pure spirit and His abode is outside of all time and space. He lives in an eternal now.
Yet, He chooses to abide in a soul in the state of grace, making the soul capable of entering into His timelessness, His abode in the soul. The Saints have said that God is, in fact, closer to us than we are to our very selves.
We do rejoice in God’s Presence. He is personal and loving.
Jesus Himself said, “we (the Holy Trinity) will come to him and make our abode within him” (Jn:23).
And “The kingdom of God is within you” (Lk 17:21).
Think of your soul as a deep chamber where God dwells in silence, never-changing.
In God’s original plan the Holy Spirit wells up from within like a ‘living spring’ of life-givine water.
This spring was meant to refresh our spiritual thirst for He who is alone changeless and eternal.
When the soul unites with the Spirit of God in its deepest abode it is in God’s time.
God lives in an eternal now!
But original sin dried up this ‘spring’ of the Holy Spirit… so we are forced to live outside this sacred abode of our soul in an ever-changing world that thirsts for God’s unchanging love.
Jesus told us that he came to give us a new source of the living water of His love.
He said, “the water that I will give will become a fountain of water within springing up to everlasting life” (Jn 4:14).
Through grace, the human soul becomes this oasis of life-giving water of love, the Holy Spirit.
It is the water promised by Jesus through which he grants us to share in His Divine Nature (2 Peter 1:4), and enter into the space of His timelessness and changelessness. From within, the Spirit can well up and renew our fallen nature bringing its eternal life to all of creation.
St. Paul spoke of this mystery of renewal that God wills to give the world through His ‘Elect.’
He wrote, “creation waits with eager longing for the revelation of the children of God” (Rom 8:19).
And our Blessed Mother gave insight into this mystery by her wonderful prayer when she greeted her cousin Elizabeth that we call her “Magnificat.”
Her song goes: “my soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my savior.”
Like the moon reflecting the light of the sun (that is not its own), so do our souls reflect the Light and Love of the Holy Spirit into the world (that is sourced in what is not our own).God is always present In practical terms, there are often times that we cannot feel God’s love, His Presence.
We should not believe that He has somehow changed or that He has left us.
That would be an error.
To know God and His love, is to know that He has always loved you.
And it is to know that He has always been present to you and will always be so.
He is like the air surrounding us.
You feel it in the wind, yet it is always there, even when the wind ceases to blow.
I like to recall the classic prayer of St. Teresa of Avila: “All things are passing away: God never changes.”
It is true He never changes, His love is everlasting (Jer 31:3).
His love for you and me is the one constant and unchanging element in our souls.
It is in this way that timelessness becomes that precious gift the elect receive from our Lord.
Entering into their souls through prayer and by faith, they encounter His eternal Presence.
It is there that His love ceases not, and His time becomes our time.
All else passes…
The silence of God
This is the other aspect of the desert that reveals the nature of God.
And it is perhaps the most endearing aspect of the desert… and, perhaps, the most difficult for us to bear.
The silence of the desert, like God’s Word, is pregnant with meaning.
His Word, as the silence of the desert, only seems to be absent of meaning to the uninitiated.
This is because they cannot hear it without grace.
Our finite human nature is helpless to know God as He truly is.
He is pure spirit who exists outside of all our time and space.
Our natural five senses only with difficulty can trace the effects of His Word in creation.
And when God did enter creation in Jesus Christ to speak His Word, few heard it, few listened.
Recall the words of St. John the Evangelist, “the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him” (Jn 1:10).
The world cannot hear or recognize the Word of God because of His silence.
God’s silence serves as a proof to the unbeliever but it is a treasure to the faithful, the initiated.
Silence is the living reality that monks and hermits order their interior lives by.
The Desert Fathers of the third century fled the noise of the world and entered the desert to listen only to His Word… in silence.
In our day we rather seek to avoid silence.
We live attached to media devices that keep us linked together, informed… to what can all be an unsettling distraction!
I have often pondered the following, which the Lord spoke to a mystic friend of mine.
He told her, “If you cannot understand my silence, you will never understand my words.”
This seems to be contradictory at first.
It has come for me to mean that as we quiet our soul, our thoughts and imagination, with the help of grace… it is then that the Spirit within speaks His Word.
And His Word is always love.
The Spring rain
One last thought… When the annual Spring rains come to the desert, it comes alive.
Flowers and plants appear from out of nowhere.
Little fish swim in ponds that the rain forms that never existed.
Somehow that life was there already, albeit in some seed form, hidden, waiting, ready.
So it is with us.
Believe.
The Life of Christ is within you, hidden, waiting, ready for the Spring rain.
As Solomon poetically sang, “The rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come…” (Song 2:11-12)
In conclusion,
We should strive to enter by prayer into the silence and changelessness of the desert.
There we trust to hear His Word, which always speaks to us of His love.
There we find that nothing has changed… and the time of our singing has come.