Places of our Transformation

A landscape stretches before our eyes, suggesting the arid beauty of the desert and around the desert, mountain peaks. Deserts and mountains have traditionally been places of revelation. The wilderness and wildness of the desert accentuate the vulnerability of the human. Here without the consolation, comfort or burden of the city, people learn who they are and what truly sustains them. The people of Israel wandered in the wilderness for forty years and were given bread from Heaven, bread that could not be saved, stored or hoarded. Here too, they received the Law on Sinai and their identity as God's people was formed.

Forty years is a long time to wander. For some of us, wandering in the wilderness seems to characterize the whole of our journey. It is rarely, if ever, a straight path to Canaan. What is God teaching us all this time? What conditions will allow us to enter the promised Land? Step by step, including all the missteps we make, we are learning to trust God. The desert, which is the visual analogue of humility, strips us of the unreal, the superfluous and false and reveals to us our need need for Divine guidance and sustenance. In the desert, we encounter our fears, our desires, our finitude and vulnerability. Jesus entered the Judean desert to be tempted by the devil. By choosing God again and again over the allure of power or fame, he was able to confirm his core identity as God's beloved son. He came out of the wilderness knowing who he was. And it was the spirit, not the devil, who sent him there.

Wandering in the desert is never as dangerous as living an unreal life. And we are never safer than when we accept that we are in God's hands.

Hondi Duncan Brasco