Showing posts with label Wilderness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wilderness. Show all posts

Thursday, February 26, 2026

Lent | Ache for Meaning with the Holy One Who is with Us

 


Now into the wilderness.
+ The Ache for Meaning


The Ache for Meaning by Tommy Brown has been a wonder-filled book I am grateful to return to during the season of Lent.

Before I share some key questions that The Ache for Meaning highlights that are personal and universal, as well as ancient and fresh, here is a reminder about some of the background to Lent: 

We ought to approach Lent as an opportunity, not a requirement.
After all, Lent is meant to be the Church's springtime, a time when, out of the darkness of sin's winter, a repentant, empowered people emerges. No wonder one liturgy refers to it as "this joyful season." Put another way, Lent is the season in which we ought to be surprised by joy. Our self-sacrifices serve no purpose unless, by laying aside this or that desire, we are able to focus on our heart's deepest longing: unity with Christ. In Him—in His suffering and death, His resurrection and triumph—we find our truest joy.

A Whole New Way to See the World
The Ache for Meaning

I began to hear echoes from Jesus' wilderness temptations in conversations I was having, in challenges I was facing. As I returned to this story over and over, I also saw my questions with greater clarity.

Once you see, you can't unsee.
It's (been) a transformational journey, 
one of learning to walk in
contentment, fulfillment, and hope.
Some journeys are about destinations.
This journey is about invitations.

The point isn't to quickly a correct answer; the point is to experience transformation as you live with the questions in the foreground of your heart and mind.

Money couldn't buy 
the security I needed.

Success couldn't provide 
the approval I desired.

Power and control
corroded my soul.

When all the answers failed,
the questions guided me home.

The passage about Jesus' temptations, which doesn't contain even one question, revealed to me my questions, the places in my soul that longed to be noticed.

+ Will I have enough?
+ Am I enough?
+ Do I matter?

These are our questions —
they echo in every human soul.

And though we're all asking these three questions in different ways, we hardly — if ever — voice them. Because if we asked these questions, aloud, we'd risk vulnerability. 

Vulnerability opens us 
to the possibility of rejection.

Vulnerability also opens us
to the possibility of solidarity.

And solidarity means
we're not alone.

It means
you're not alone.

We can trust that we're all 
seeking the same things,
asking the same three questions
in one form or another.

The most personal desires
are the most universal,
and the most universal desires
are the most personal.
And the most ancient.

Author Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote of the wilderness temptations in his novel The Brothers Karamazov: For in these ... questions all of subsequent human history is as if brought together into a single whole and foretold ... 

In other words, the temptations Jesus faced represent every temptation you will face in life, every temptation humankind has ever faced. Thomas Keating identifies (our) basic, primal impulses as the following needs:

+ safety / security / survival
Will I have enough?

+ affection / esteem / approval
Am I enough?

+ power and control
Do I matter?

"All of these are legitimate human needs. The sin problem has to do with the fact that we have all developed unconscious ways of meeting these needs for ourselves on our own terms ... apart from God." + Ruth Haley Barton, spiritual director and teacher

What valid need — 
security, approval, or control 
 — am I trying to meet in
an unhealthy way and
on my own terms?

As you see Christ's wilderness temptations take shape in various forms in your daily life and interactions, you'll awaken to the reality that everywhere is wilderness, and we're all walking in it.

But we're not walking alone.

(And remember) you can't understand what happens in the wilderness unless you understand what transpired at the river.

Jesus' baptism — is the beginning of the temptation scene. Before he's driven by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tested, he's baptized in the river and hears the Voice of God affirming him.

God the Father proclaimed
this reality,
"This is my beloved Son,
with whom I am well pleased,"
before Jesus faced his tests,
not because he passed them.

Jesus enters the wilderness 
to face his temptations
in full confidence
as his Father's beloved,
well-pleasing Son.
And he does this having 
not passed one test,
performed one miracle,
or preached one sermon.

Jesus' identity flows
from his Father's 
words of approval,
not for his Father's
words of approval.

This ability to 
receive,
embrace,
and live
from God-given
sense of identity
has profound implications
for our lives as well,
because ...
what God says about Jesus,
God says about you.

What God says about you
... is based in the 
unshakable,
unfathomable
love of God
for his children,
for all who believe
and receive him.

Now, into the wilderness.

+ Tommy Brown
pgs. 10-18, 24-26

Bonus: 

For a complement to The Ache for Meaning, Justin Brierley's

+ human existence
+ human value 
+ human purpose

And as the poet Audre Lorde said,

"There are no new ideas.
There are only new ways
of making them felt."


With anticipation and joy,

Rev. Mike “Sully” Sullivan


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Location: Worcester, MA, USA

Wednesday, January 14, 2026

New Year Beholding | The Art of Other Seeing: God & Humans

Beholding others is about approaching people as we do God, as a mystery to discover and enjoy rather than to sense-make and control. + Strahan Coleman

Beholding by Strahan Coleman continues to be a wonder-filled book I have been overjoyed to return to at the beginning of 2025 and 2026.

"Beholding" has recently been a theme in my life that I think Jesus continues to invite me back to. Why? 


This posture as a way of life not only invites me to welcome and witness what God and others are doing in my life, but in response, beholding helps me to worship God as the Creator and Sustainer who I get to thank for all that is in my life.

For more on what beholding is like, here are a few excerpts from Coleman's Beholding.

The Art of Others Seeing

"When I first saw God, 
I went a kind of blind. 
Now all I see is Heaven
in the eyes of 
enemy and friend alike."
Prayer Vol. 01

When we look at humanity 
through the artist eyes of God, 
we see little miracles in everyone we meet 
— even our enemies. 

The Church becomes a kind of artistic, 
anthropological priesthood, 
documenting and celebrating 
every little detail of our differences.

As an opportunity to find God, 
being hospitable to another person,
to any other person at all,
becomes an act of Christ-embrace.

Seeing Those We Don't Understand

Knowing the fundamental goodness about God means we can be with Him whilst we grow in our understanding. God's goodness is what our relationship is based on. Beholding others is simply our treating others with that same dignity.

If our gospel is sin obsessed, it reduces our story with God to that of forgiveness only, and we're likely to take the sin-central view of life to those around us. Sin will be the first thing we see, and we're confronted with people who touch the nerve of our particular sin horror, we will struggle to see their image. We'll only see their brokenness as the main event of their existence. If our gospel is one of reconciliation, if it begins before the fall in Genesis with God's face-to-faceness with us, then we're more likely to see that essential good in someone first and prioritize their rediscovering friendship with their Father over moral correction. We'll see their image, their imago Dei.

Christ w/ the Canaanite Woman & Her Daughter by H.O. Tanner, 1909 A.D.


The women at the well in Samaria in John 4 is a beautiful example of this. Jesus was confronted with a woman who had had many husbands and was not married to the man she was presently with. One divorce alone would have had a powerful negative connotation for this woman, and being in her current relationship would have socially marked her further. It would have been all that many would have seen first when they spoke to her. But not Jesus.

Jesus beheld her.

He asked for her water, drawing her into a deeply spiritual conversation, one that He didn't dive into with the all-together religious leaders back in Jerusalem.

Jesus saw something else.

He saw deeper than this woman's mistakes. He saw someone longing for God with the capacity to be a great evangelist. When he relationships did come up, Jesus didn't lecture her on sexual ethics.
 
He continued to invite her 
into the story of God.

And she did become an evangelist. So much so that Jesus stayed for days in the town where she lived as she drew many others out to hear Him. 

Jesus did this kind of thing all the time.
He saw the beauty in others
louder than their shortfalls.

To transcend others' shortfalls
and love like Jesus,
we need to become beholders.

It's not an either-or, of course, because one can't be fully reconciled without a transformation of the behaviors that bring relational brokenness. 

But repentance was often a response 
to Jesus' profound love and grace 
toward someone.

It matters that we choose to see someone's God-image before their sin. People are more than their brokenness. When we see others through their God-image first, over and above what we can make sense of in the interim, we can love and behold them, because no matter how they act — engaging us, confusing us, or challenging us — we know that as surely as God is good, His good image is placed within that person and we can find common ground. 

Practically, this means when we're talking with those we disagree with, no matter how our arguments end, we never denigrate the dignity or fundamental goodness of one another. Even our enemies. Even our political opponents. It means that when we see another at our borders, challenging our cultural norms, holding vastly different political views, asking more of our financial social situations than we think we can give, we're seeing God and the opportunity to meet and care for Him (see Matthew 25:34-40).

Beholding others 
doesn't mean resigning 
to their shortcomings 
or becoming indifferent, 
but it does mean that 
on the long journey 
toward healing and reconciliation, 
we can sit with each other and 
see each other with beauty and love.

Love will always long for healing wherever it sees brokenness, and full reconciliation isn't possible without the healing of the brokenness within us. 

Becoming Godly Listeners

If we walk with God for long enough, we'll experience seasons of dryness and quiet. Times when all our prayer, tears, longing, and searching will feel like they're turning up nothing. These seasons deeply challenge our assumptions that we can always feel, sense, or hear God when He's there, and we're forced to walk the faith journey in what feels like complete blindness.

It's often in these seasons that beholding prayer becomes a lifeline for our spiritual walk. Here, we're coerced to either behold God for who He says He is or deny Him altogether as we find we don't have the energy, faith, or mind space to wrestle with the questions anymore. Beholding prayer becomes a way of acknowledging that somehow God is sitting with us in the dust of it, strangely available, closer than our skin.

because like the psalmist's,
our prayer finally becomes honest and raw.

though they rarely feel like it
in the moment.

Through them we learn 
the silent companionship of God
in our suffering.

Over time we learn to look back and see that He was with us in awareness and acceptance even when we couldn't feel or see it in the moment. He wasn't withholding His love or presence from us by not giving us the answers or healing we wanted; He was demonstrating the audacity of His love to sit with us in our pain without giving them. He was just there with us in our grief much like He was whilst walking with Mary on the way to Lazarus' tomb. In our darkest moments, we were being beheld by God.

For the one who has beheld and been beheld by God through their own dark nights, allowing people to vent their honest anger and rail away at others and God is an act of genuine strength and compassion. They're able to let others fully be, as God once let them be.

I like to imagine a world
in which the Church can become
God's ears to the world.
Listening with this kind of grace,
sitting with others in their darkness,
teaching them how to be
in the tension of pain and

Today, as a whole world of people feel despair and depression at historic levels, maybe God longs to fashion a priesthood of believers who know how to sit in the darkness alongside them with enduring love, even when it feels helpless. We've been really good at talking, sometimes talking at people, for a long time. What if it's time to learn to listen as a form of witness? 

What if deep listening 
is a way of healing the world, 
revealing God to it?

In this way,
for our times,
helping others to make sense
of their pain, suffering,
loneliness, confusion,
success, and blessings


As we behold and love 
in these ways, 
that love engulfs people into
the kind of relationship with us 
that God longs to have 
with the world.
It shows them a little more
of what God is like.

We're the closest thing to God
for many on this earth;
we're Christ's body.

So when we love 
the image of God in others
and sit with them
in a beholding manner,
we give them a sample
of the magnificent
and all-engulfing 
love of God, too.

Not all of us are called to the vocation of the evangelist, but the universal calling of every follower of Jesus is that of being witnesses to what we have seen and touched and of those who have been seen and heard by God. Beholding invites us to be witnesses through our attentive and compassionate listening, as well as through our storytelling and sharing.

It's important to note that this doesn't mean we should keep our mouths closed about important issues in the fear that we may offend people or that it may cause them to feel less seen. That's another extreme, and it's not even the best way to love someone. But love changes our volume, our temperament, the words we use, and the place we challenge from. Reconciling love changes our tone. It makes us, hopefully, slower to speak ... speak from beside rather than across from others.

+ Strahan Coleman 
in Beholding,
"The Art of Other Seeing,"
pgs. 98-109


Bonus: The Artist Behind the Artwork

Henry Ossawa Tanner was the first African American artist to gain international acclaim. He was a realist painter and he also stands as one of the leading painters of sacred art during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tanner was not only African-American, he might well be the premier painter of African descent in all art history. 

You can read more about Tanner at:

In relation to beholding, 
"The Annunciation"
by Henry Ossawa Tanner
captivates me.

Here, Mary listens.
Here, Mary questions.
Here, Mary beholds.

Here, Mary responds
as she begins to see
what God is doing
and what she will get to do
for the life of the world.
And she says,
"Let it be done to me
according to Your Word."


More New Year posts:
May God's Kingdom come, His will be done.
Que le Royaume de Dieu vienne,
que sa volonté soit faite.
愿神的国降临，愿神的旨意成就。
Nguyện xin Nước Chúa đến, ý Ngài được nên.
Jesús nuestra Rey, venga Tu reino!
🙏💗🍞🍷👑🌅🌇

With anticipation and joy,

Rev. Mike “Sully” Sullivan


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Location: Worcester, MA, USA

Saturday, April 5, 2025

Lent | In The Face of the Deep, The Holy Spirit's Work is Wild


The Holy Spirit by Cal Ogelsby, 2014 A.D.

The Spirit's work
in the life of His people
is often a wild work,
a desert work.

He knows and loves the places
that seem empty to us
as much as
He knows and loves the places
that teem with life.

He calls us to the wilderness
to work in us in ways
that could not be done well
(perhaps not done at all)
were we not drawn away ... 

+ Paul Pastor
The Face of the Deep


I continue to return to The Face of the Deep by Paul J. Pastor to reflect and meditate on the Holy Spirit who welcomes us into the holy wild. This book has not only been a great companion when I first read it during a silent retreat at the Abbey of the Genesee, but also a needed re-read during Lent.

This post will include favorite pull quotes from the chapter entitled:

 "The Wind of the Wilderness: 
The Spirit of the Desert." 


The Wind of the Wilderness
The Spirit of the Desert

Let all teachers hold their peace;
let all creatures be silent in Thy sight;
speak unto me Thou alone.

+ Thomas a Kempis
The Imitation of Christ
pg. 165


Be Led to Sacred Silence
in a Place Apart
When I have hiked into the true wilderness, it is the depth and quality of the silence that enters my soul and leaves me changed. When I meet people – and there are many – who say that their most profound encounters with God are in nature, it is this sense of quiet they usually want to remember. It is the sacred silence of a space, silent not because of the absence of sound, but silent because of the effect it has on the soul. A holy silence of the interior, prompted by a sacred simplicity on the exterior. A reminder that the true silence of the Holy Spirit is presence as much as it is absence. It is entering a place apart. … I began to know the rough roar of silence as the voice of the Spirit. He was leading me, mysteriously, to a place apart. + pg. 167, 169

The Spirit Whistles
in the Wilderness Wind

If the Bible were a movie and if places were characters, "the wilderness" would hold a starring role. It's a recurring setting, all the way after the expulsion of humanity from the garden in Genesis, to the "wander in tears, forty years" of Israel's desert time, to the visions of Ezekiel, to the famous temptations of Christ, and Jesus's well-known habit of wandering into desert places for prayer. The wilderness is a place of contradictions, a place portrayed in Scripture as an empty place yet full. The wilderness is cruel and bare, yet a setting for kindness and miraculous provision. The wilderness reveals things often by obscuring them. The wilderness welcomes God and the people of God by – sometimes concretely, sometimes abstractly – meeting evil. More than anything, the wilderness is the background that most clearly highlights the high, good strangeness of the Holy Spirit, who, so often in Scripture, whistles like a wind among the rocks of the desert. A cloud by day, a fire by night. Faithfully leading. Faithfully obscuring. 


The Wild, Affirming,
Driving Desert Work
The Spirit's work in the life of His people is often a wild work, a desert work. He knows and loves the places that seem empty to us as much as He knows and loves the places that teem with life. He calls us to the wilderness to work in us in ways that could not be done well (perhaps not done at all) were we not drawn away, brought away, thrown away, finding ourselves on a lonely trail. This was Jesus' experience. Directly after the soaring high of His baptism in the Jordan, the joy and affirmation of the Father speaking His belovedness over Him, the Dove of heaven seemed to distend and whip apart into a lionlike whirlwind, launching Christ into the first great trial of his adult life. In Mark's account, he writes: " ... And the Spirit drove Him into the wilderness. ... " The Greek word translated here as "drove out" is a rough one, from which we get our word ball, and as you would expect, it means to throw, fling, send flying, hurl. It is not gentle. Like a Major League Baseball pitcher sending a fastball straight through the strike zone, the Spirit in Mark's Gospel downright hurls Jesus (the Beloved, remember) into the wilderness. + pg. 171 

Danger, Scarcity, Abundance ...
All a Work of Love

The Spirit is not playing around. Nor is Jesus – who, in the more detailed accounts of this story elsewhere, is fasting, hungry and thirsty during this time in the desert. He is besieged with temptations in the wilderness – the temptation to work miracles on His own behalf rather than the Father's; the temptation for immediate acclamation and acceptance by the people who would eventually reject Him, screaming for his crucifixion; and the temptation for an easy path to world power rather than the death-road, the God-road to the eternal Kingdom promised to the seed of David. All His suffering and all His overcoming are kept between the lines in Mark's Gospel. I like that. All that we are given here to make sense of Christ in the wilderness is the duration (the ancient "forty" of Noah's flood, of Moses on the mountain, of the wandering years of Israel in the desert), the Devil, the beasts, and the angels. A long time. Danger scarcity, abundance. The wilderness. And this, like every work of the Holy Spirit, was love. + pg. 171 


Silence with Jesus
is a Very Good Place to Start
I sat with my spiritual director, Father Stephen. He asked me to describe my relationship with Jesus. I was silent for a minute, fumbling around inside my head until I came across the right words. "It's as if," I began, "Jesus and I are sitting together in a dark room. He's not saying anything. I'm not saying anything. I look at Him. He looks back at me. We're together. But silent. Quiet. Like we're each waiting for something. He was quiet for a while himself. I sat, adjusted my chair. I wondered if I should continue to talk, to fill up the room between us with words. I didn't like the silence. I wanted to speak or for him to speak or for Jesus to speak. Anyone, really. He breathed deeply. "Silent?" he asked. "Silent." "Well, that's a very good place to start." + pg. 172

Can't Understand
Without Slowing Down

In her classic Walking on Water, Madeleine L'Engle wrote: When I am constantly running there is no time for being. When there is no time for being there is no time for listening. I will never understand the silent dying of the green pie-apple tree if I do not slow down and listen to what the Spirit is telling me, telling me of the death of trees, the death of planets, of people, and what all these deaths mean in the light of the love of the Creator who brought them all into being; who brought me into being; and you. It's a beautiful truth, but a wilderness truth, a desert truth. A truth of windy silences – to somehow believe that to understand ourselves, to understand the great breath of creation, we must first walk backward, back along the trail, back through the deaths of things large and small, slowing life and heart and mind, all the while listening for the voice of God, all back, back, back, to the edge of the deep, to the starting place of being. That hazy place where the Spirit summons us up from the waters of beginning and whistles love and joy, creating and sustaining. "It's good that you are; how wonderful that you exist!" We must know the Spirit's desert road, the trail away from the roars of man and nature. ... It is time for the wilderness. Somehow, with the Spirit, we must learn to enter a place apart. For all its difficulty, it is a very good place to start. + pgs. 172-173 


The Spirit Tears Us Up
with Blessings ...
This Too Is Love,
If We Can Accept It
The sacred silence of our interior becomes the void, the good and empty place into which the Spirit can speak. ... He leads us into desert places ... He pounces, tumbles us in the sand and grit either roughly or gently. Away from the noise He carries or flings us, from the dullness of full belly and full brain. ... He tears us with blessings, tears us open sometimes till the red blood flows out so thick and abundant that we fear our life is leaving, that our bones will be left behind us when we wander on. And for all this, He makes no promises other than His love. If we can believe it, even the bitterest wrestling with the Spirit out in the desert is for our good, the good of His beloved. We must sometimes suffer wounds before we can be bound again, better made and wiser than before, bearing the scars of wilderness as witnesses to the nearness of God. This too is love, if we can accept it. + pg. 174 

It Is the Wind of the Spirit
That Seeks to Polish Us
with the Sand of the Wilderness

It is the wind of the wilderness, dry and cutting if necessary, that blows our own thoughts out of us and the Spirit's knowing into us. It is that wind that will eventually allow us to see though our eyes be closed and hear though our ears be deafened. It is the Holy Spirit, the wind of the wilderness, that flings us into the desert like rag dolls, cradles us out there like children, feeds us like the ravens above Elijah's creek. It is the wind that seeks to polish us with sand, to let the erosion of the grit reveal our truest contours. To see what we take with us out of nothing. What we leave with the nothing. But for all this, who wishes for the wilderness? For some it has a romance before and after we are there and its own glass-like beauty that shimmers when we're in it, but for any beauty we may find, we still quail and quiver. The wilderness is where the Spirit takes our masks away, where our own hearts are flayed, where the faces of devils and angels, once obscured by rocks and birds and lust and thirst, stare at us, challenging us to blink before they do. + pgs. 174-175


If We Can Not Say
Thank You to the Desert Yet,
Then It Is Likely
We Are Still in It
What are we to make of a Spirit – the Spirit of the same Jesus who knew the pain of wilderness so well – who not only accompanies us into the desert but throws us into it? If it is true that He is the wind at our back, blowing us into places abandoned by men, places hard to live in and dry, places of thorn and curse and cruelty, places of the sun by day and the catamount or wild dogs by night, then what are we to say to Him for such treatment? "Thank you"? I mean no presumption, and I speak this in faith. If we cannot say thank you for the desert yet, then it is likely because we are still in it. The wind of the wilderness, ever seeking your good, does not expect your gratitude when you have not eaten for forty days. "What are you doing here?" The ancient question hangs, as it did for Elijah, over the mountain, over the hot bedrock of the desert. But we might as well ask it of the Asker. And who knows if we will receive an answer that human ears can understand? He only promises love. No answers. Not ease. Only love. + pg. 176

A Favorite Story of Abundance

There is something that awakens inside the soul when one realizes that in God's view of the world there is no such thing as scarcity. Let me tell you one of my favorite stories of abundance. I will try to tell it as it was told to me by my friend Randy, a Keetowah Cherokee: In the 1950s, Canada's government was consolidating rule in the Arctic by forcing the native Inuit peoples onto settlement reservations. One old man, a grandfather, resisted. He did not want to live in the white people's houses. He did not want to eat their food. He did not want to lose his culture. His family, concerned that he might do something rash in his yearning for the old freedom, took away his weapons, his tools, his precious knife – all that he needed to live off the land in the frozen, blustery tundra. Or at least they thought they took everything away. They could not take away his knowledge, his way of seeing things. And his way of seeing was the most important thing he had. One dark night, as the wind shrieked around his place, the grandfather stepped out into the blizzard. He was empty-handed, but only for a moment. He defecated into his hand, molding his own "waste" into a keen blade as it froze, spitting on it, wetting and sharpening the bloodletting side with saliva. It froze solid and sharp. He took the knife and killed a dying dog, skinning it to make coat and harness. He used its rib cage for a sled, its flesh for food. He hitched up a healthy dog, and with a flourish of his blade, the grandfather disappeared into the white desert. ... The grandfather was strong in the old ways of seeing things – that is to say, seeing the world, for all its dangers, as a place (in its own desolate way) of abundance. + pgs. 177-178


Even the Desert Places
Whisper Back the "Very Good"
of Their Maker
For all appearances to the contrary, there is no such thing as scarcity where the Spirit is concerned, even in the wilderness, even after the forty-day fast. The bare clarity of the desert may corner us, reduce us, winnow us, take us next door to death, even, but if the process is allowed to work, we will see, gradually or all of a sudden, that we have never been alone, that there has never been utter silence, that tools and food and fire and comfort and meaning and the kindness of God can be everywhere, even here, for those who can see things as the Spirit sees them. ... Abundance can look like barely enough sometimes, sometimes like scarcity itself – five loaves and two fish before a hungering multitude. ... After all, in spite of the hunger and thirst, who, among all those whom God led into the wilderness, starved there? Who died of thirst? For the wind of the wilderness, there is no such thing as scarcity, no such thing as emptiness. In spite of any curse and harshness, even the desert places whisper back the "very good" of their Maker, who rustles the sage and dances among the rattlesnakes. + pgs. 178-179

The Difference is Seeing

The difference of the desert is the difference of the seeing. If we think the Spirit is cruel to blow us into the windy and desolate places, then we have not yet understood this. We need such barrenness much more than we think. ... The wind of the wilderness blows where it wishes. The Spirit's presence can be as arid and contradictory as the desert – but always in the service of love. + pg. 179


The Wilderness is Empty of Words
It Is Full of Meaning
At some point, every person's path leads into the wilderness. Into the desert, to be quiet for a time, or perhaps to rage and to curse God where only ravens and silent angels can hear. Sometimes we wander there; sometimes we walk with purpose. We look for the path. Sometimes it is clear. At other times the sands cover even our own footprints. Sometimes it is a place emptier than empty; sometimes we glimpse a silhouette under the cleft of a rock or a cloaked figure moving parallel to us down a far ravine. The wilderness is empty of words; it is full of meaning. It is silent yet howls until the head pounds. Sometimes it is an experience of such profound suffering that others wonder how you make it. Sometimes it is so simple and personal that others wonder why you don't just "get over it." In any case, being thrown into the wilderness is an act of love. There are no promises whether you will live or die. But even there, in the deepest desert, the Spirit can lead you to wells of living water. + pg. 180

The Desert, Like All Places, 
Is the Dwelling of the Holy Spirit

Though He may cast you there, He will fling Himself alongside you, rough as sackcloth, gray as ashes, and good. He does that so that in the emptiness, like so many before us (like Jesus Himself), we might find fullness; in the absence, presence; in the scarcity, abundance; in fasting, a feast spread in the presence of our enemies. In the roar of the wind in both ears, the joyous shriek of the Dove of creation, that ghostly white wind of the wilderness, you might hear Him asking the ancient question: What are you doing here? He knows your answer already, but it is no matter: you have been kindly hunted, brought or carried or thrown here because it is you who must answer Him. 

+ pgs. 180-181

Christ is all,

Rev. Mike "Sully" Sullivan
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