The cessation of our usual flow of life activities and the meaning we attribute to them is necessary to see what is around us, that in our sustained focus we have been unable to recognize. When we are in constant movement, our peripheral vision is compromised, and with it, our ability to see things in context. Unplanned events and their interrupting power naturally hit the reset button, and place us in the desert for a season of contemplation and recalibration. Like plants gone dormant in winter, we can see it as a bleak and fruitless time. And yet, it is a crucial time to taking steps forward in our next season of life.
For most of us, we do not initiate the stopping. Rarely, do we like the Desert Fathers and Mothers freely vacate into a “desert experience”. Rather, in different forms, life stops us: unexpected illness, financial crisis, family straits. We worry and wonder what the best path forward is when the known, tried and true becomes hopelessly rearranged. We sit among the puzzle pieces and wonder how and when things will ever seem integrated again.
This is the very ledge of transition: letting of go of what was, to embrace what is. We chafe at the sense the uninvited seems to already be embracing us, whether we want it or not. We related so long to a certain paradigm, it is bewildering to find ourselves in the midst of the new, and we struggle to reach back into what was familiar, if for no other reason than to simply find our bearings.
But there is purpose in the confusion, the annoyance, the frustration, and even in the devastation that can follow when a staid course becomes interrupted by the inevitabilities of life in a fallen realm. That purpose will manifest differently to every person – and yet, one constant remains. However indiscernible, the love of the Creator meets us in the austerity and envelopes us in arms capable of shielding us from the grief that would otherwise consume. Our inability to perceive this all-encompassing reality does not change the fact that it remains constant. But when we choose to acknowledge its presence, we begin to see that there is indeed a limit to time in the desert.
We can do nothing greater in our lives, in the desert or in the most lush of oases, than to pursue this Love.
As the desert path comes to an end, we will look back not at its pain, but at the gifts forged as a result of being there. They are gifts both for the giving, and the keeping.