Tag: Wilderness

Luke 4:1-13 The Wilderness

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

There are many reasons why we might find ourselves in the wilderness.  When my mother died, I spent a year in a wilderness of grief. In a way I was lucky, because I could point to some loss, some reason for me being there.  Sometimes, we find ourselves in the wilderness without a reason that we can name. We are simply there. The world has become thin and arid. We feel lost and alone.

Whether we can name the reasons or not, the Gospels are clear that the wilderness is necessary to our spiritual life.  Being in the wilderness is a step along the path of awakening, of realizing the divinity within ourselves. Much of that awakening has to do with stripping away – losing our sense of insecurity and our craving for protection, surrendering our need to assert our status, setting aside useless shame and the stories that we have allowed to define us.

The wilderness is a place where the clutter of life is stripped away so that we can learn to pay attention.  Attentiveness is the first thing that the spirit is inspiring in us and that Jesus is modeling for us. His attentiveness was sharpened by fasting, and anyone who has ever fasted knows that it concentrates one’s attention on the body.  Within Christianity, fasting has always been a primary form of body spirituality, a way of getting us to listen to our bodies, a way of bring our minds and spirits into alignment with our physical forms. It is, of course, also a form of self-denial, of setting aside the demands of the flesh and the mind so that we can focus deeply on God and God’s creation.

So the wilderness teaches an attentive, embodied, self-denying spirituality, and most of us are poor students.  I don’t think I’m alone in being afraid when I enter the wilderness, and continuing in fear as I consider what each of the wilderness’s lessons will reveal about me – about the person I’ve been and about my limited capacity to change.  At the end of Jesus’ wilderness sojourn, when Satan inflicts three trials upon him, those trials enact our usual responses to fear, and assure us that those responses can be overcome.
Jesus was tempted to turn stones into bread.  When we are afraid or threatened, we reach for those things that normally give us a sense of security.  We might stuff our bodies like squirrels preparing for a long and dangerous winter. “Eat, eat” our fear shouts at us, “because you may not know when you can eat again!”  We are tempted to satiate our bodies so that we can go back to ignoring them, and curl up into a kind of hibernation until the reason for fear goes away again.

Jesus was tempted to assert his sovereignty over all of the kingdoms of the world.  When we’re afraid, we might take our security from a sense of power and prominence. Surely we are too powerful and important for anything to hurt us, and we should remind people of that just in case they get any funny ideas when they see us in a weakened state.  More than that, we should remind ourselves that we’re still in control, that God is only there to help us get through this, not to change us or show us the limits of our strengths.

These first two temptations are basic and recognizable, and we all fall prey to them.  But if we follow Jesus’s example and get past them, there’s still one tough temptation awaiting us.  Because the very fact that we overcame the fears that wanted us to fall back on our old patterns of security is going to make us feel pretty good about ourselves.  And it’s then that we might begin to feel that we’re better than other people. What enlightened spiritual beings we must be, to have resisted the first two temptations so well!  Surely other people must recognize our exalted state and find us just the teensiest bit worship-worthy. This, too, is in the end only a scrabbling after security. We tell ourselves that if we can’t fall back on ourselves and our known patterns of behavior, we can at least fall back on our community.  But we secretly suspect that they won’t take care of us, even when we know that they’re good and they love us. We need to give them other reasons for caring for us, we need to earn their love and admiration, or show them that we have earned it by our spiritual goodness.

If we avoid these temptations, then we emerge from the wilderness awakened and transformed.  Or, more accurately, we emerge with some wisdom gained that can help us as we continue down a path of more profound awakening and transformation.    Many things have changed in us, and there are many difficulties still ahead. We might, even, find ourselves returned to the wilderness as we move through life.  But always with the awareness that we’ve come through it at least once, and with a better appreciation of our ability to imitate Christ.

 

Luke 1:57-80 Joy, Community, and Wilderness

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

When Elizabeth gives birth to John, her neighbors and relatives gather around in joy.  This is the second gang of people we’ve seen in Luke’s Gospel, the first being the crowd at the temple who gathered around Zechariah after he emerged from his encounter with an angel.  I think it’s fair to say that they were a random assembly, not a true community. It’s the true community that comes together after John’s birth, and the true community that responds to his birth with rejoicing.

Anyone who’s lived in a community knows that communities are complex, as full of willful hurting as they are of spontaneous rejoicing.  But with this first real community in Luke, we’re shown what they should be like when they’re authentic. The communities that Luke will portray throughout his two books are often a little awkward, confused, and stumbling.  Sometimes they’re downright funny. And this first community of Elizabeth and Zechariah’s relatives has all of those qualities. They think of themselves as the keepers of tradition, maybe even without realizing it. Of course the boy should be named after his father!  That’s how it’s done. And Zechariah, if he could speak, would say the same. I find it hard not to imagine Elizabeth’s frustration with this, and the frustration of any woman reading this story and remembering those times when what she’s said has been ignored or discounted.  This community of loved ones is stumbling through its joyfulness, getting things wrong. They don’t know that they’re dealing with the Holy Spirit, and that things are about to get weird.

No wonder they’re fearful after Zechariah writes John’s name on a slate, and then begins to prophecy.  It’s obvious that during his nine months of silence, he’s been pondering some things. The Holy Spirit directs his words, and what comes out of his mouth is so rich and profound that it’s become a canticle of the church, said or sung during Morning Prayer or Lauds.  The most surprising thing about Zechariah’s prophecy is that it’s not about things that will come true, but about something that already has come true.  God has already redeemed the people of Israel, has already made good on the divine promise that was given to them.  Zechariah is speaking about Jesus, of course, but Jesus hasn’t even been born yet. It’s as if the very promise of Jesus, the very possibility that God would become human and show us how to approach divinity through our lives and actions, is enough.  And this promise is already working in us. Because of it, we will be able to serve God without fear, in holiness and righteousness all of our days. Because of this promise, our sins are forgiven, and we will know how to walk in the way of peace.

Imagine being part of the community that first heard those words.  Some of what Zechariah’s saying makes sense, you might say to yourself.  We are descended from Abraham, and we have been waiting for certain promises to be redeemed for quite awhile.  And we get that John is going to be a nazirite, like Samuel was, and live in the wilderness and never cut his hair.  It’s a little old-fashioned, but we remember when people used to do that. But what about this new thing, this mighty savior that he’s talking about?  Who is this person? Where will we find him? What will he be like? And why are Elizabeth and Zechariah packing their bags and moving to the wilderness with their baby?

That last question is the most immediately important one to Luke’s narrative.  This portion of his Gospel, that starts with a community coming together to rejoice, ends with Zechariah and Elizabeth choosing isolation from community.  And this points to one of the things that Luke wants to say about community in general. Community is a good and important thing. But it’s not the most important thing.  Sometimes it will hurt and betray you. Sometimes you will need to leave it behind. In fact, if a new community, full of holiness and righteousness and hope is to be born, it’s necessary that the old community scatter so that bad habits will be broken, good habits regathered, and new practices ushered in.

Blessed Voyagers

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Mark’s story of Jesus’s baptism is like a storm front.  The brightness of the baptism and the descent of the dove is met, almost immediately, by the darkness of the temptation in the wilderness, and the whole story seems to exist in that liminal space where warm air meets cold air and a storm begins to brew.  It’s unsettling to have baptism and temptation so close together.  It seems to bring the very nature of baptism into question.  If baptism is meant to make us into new people, to free us from our sins and fill us with Christ, then what is it doing in such close proximity to temptation and emptiness?  It’s as if Mark is telling us to be wary of any pleasant theology of baptism, any belief that after baptism everything in life will be good and easy.

In Mark, baptism doesn’t automatically make the world anew.  And this is more true, I think, than any hope that we can become new people in one moment, through the completion of one act.  In the past week I’ve heard two people describe churches that seem to be happiness-centered.  These churches seem to believe that becoming a Christian should free one of all doubts and that baptism is a way out of sorrow.  Because of this, they get impatient with doubt, but more than that, they refuse to admit to their own occasional sorrows.  They believe that admitting to sorrow is the same thing as not trusting in God.

But in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus trusts God and is brought immediately into a wilderness of sorrow and temptation, as if the true sign of trusting God is a willingness to be sent anywhere, into any domain of loss or joy.  If that’s true, then what is God up to in baptism?  What is baptism supposed to be, or do?  How is it supposed to help us?  Again, it was my friend Laurie who provided the answer.  She suggested that baptism is a blessing – that God prepares us for life as a Christian, not by transforming us utterly, but by blessing us so that we can experience that full transformation in the minutiae of every day, in spiritual quests that can take years, if not lifetimes.  Baptism prepares us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, to paraphrase Saint Paul.  It affirms that the wildernesses are navigable with the aid of God’s blessing.

And the truth is that the wildernesses are really amazing.  The Holy Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness as a kind of pioneer.  He’ll struggle with demons and defeat them, and reclaim the wilderness for human use.  This is what the desert fathers (Saint Anthony, Saint Symeon Stylites, Saint Martin of Tours)  were doing when they went into their own wildernesses.  They were reclaiming the spiritual landscape and making it fertile.  With the blessing of God, they didn’t hesitate to venture into any combat, and found their demons in odd and surprising places, but by finding and defeating them, reclaimed those places for us.

If anything, the proximity of Jesus’ baptism to his wilderness sojourn should be a clarion call to our own pioneering spirits.  Enter the wilderness, with God’s blessings, and transform it.  I had a moment of serendipity when I was thinking about the pioneering spirit this week.  I was listening to Radiolab (a terrific podcast which you can find here), and they had a story about Voyager 1 & 2, the two exploratory spacecraft that NASA launched in 1977.  For the past thirty-five years they have been moving through the solar system, photographing the planets and taking measurements.  Much of what we now know about Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune is due to the work of these two little unmanned ships.  Their cameras were turned off on Valentine’s Day, 1990, but before they were, they turned back and took one last picture of earth, which from that distance was nothing but a pale blue dot against the backdrop of a band of solar light.  To quote Carl Sagan, that dot represents: “Everyone you ever knew, everyone you ever loved, ever superstar, every corrupt politician, everyone in all of history, everyone, the sum total.  Think of the rivers of blood that have run so that one indistinguishable group could have momentary domination over a fraction of that pixel.”

That’s part of the wilderness that the Voyager spacecrafts have already reclaimed for us.  Against the immense backdrop of space, our petty ambitions are put in devastating perspective.  If we are to thrust ourselves into wildernesses of ambition, we will never be able to do so again in the full believe that we’re engaged in an important cosmic act.  We are small, the picture tells us.  We should act humbly.

Fourteen years after taking that picture, the two spacecraft reached the edge of the solar system.  The solar wind died away, but readings sent back to NASA revealed that the ships weren’t out of the solar system yet.  They were still caught in the magnetic fields of the sun.  So they are in a liminal place, not quite in the solar system and not quite out of it.  It’s like they are traveling through the shell of an egg.  Scientists call this place the “stagnation layer.”  Voyager 1 & 2 could move beyond it any day now.  When they do, they will be the first human made objects to leave the solar system, and move into the far greater wilderness of interstellar space.  Who knows what they will be able to reclaim from that wilderness, what they will show us and teach us as they move ever onward.

When we are in our own private wildernesses, it may feel like we’re trapped in stagnation layers.  Whatever lessons we have to learn, whatever tasks we have to complete, seem impossible, and sometimes even forgotten.  And we may feel like we’re in a storm front, buffeted about by spiritual combat, fighting our own demons and the demons of the world.  How do we live in stagnation layers and storm fronts?  That is largely up to us.  But God has given us a gift that will bring us through them.  As we sit, stagnate, waiting, we have the memories of our baptisms to uphold us.  As we battle, are wounded, and struggle within ourselves, we have the memories of our baptisms to uphold us.  We have been blessed and sent out as pioneers, reclaiming spiritual space in our souls and moral space in the world for God, and in those moments when the struggles of the wilderness might seem overwhelming, we only need to remember the descent of the dove.