The Face Of The DeepSample

The Spirit of the Desert

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 like a kindly predator—to separate us from the herd, to get at us alone, to approach from the flank, out of the sun, where our peripheral vision is hazy. He pounces, tumbles us in the sand and grit either rough or gentle. Away from the noise he carries or flings us, from the dullness of full belly and full brain. His beak sinks into bone and flesh, he tears us with blessings, tears us open sometimes til 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 most bitter 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.

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 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. Sometimes he strips us naked and puts us in the dust, like Saul at the feet of Samuel.

The wind dries the eyes, dries them too rough and thin even to weep sometimes.