God in the Desert
God in the Desert
Monday of the Fifth Week of Lent – March 30, 2020
Dealing with the coronavirus pandemic seems to be all that is on anyone’s mind at the moment. We are experiencing a sobering moment in time.
Where is God in this moment? Where is God in any desert experience? It is one thing to affirm in normal times that God is present always and everywhere. In these edge experiences that press hard on us, though, we may find that our usual felt experience of God is missing. We don’t have the same sense of God as we ordinarily do.
Often we find that what Cummings calls, “the purifying action of the desert experience” centers around our notions of God. In other words, the expectations and beliefs we have built up around God – who God is, how God is, where God is, and so on – in ordinary days gets tested, even purified, and the desert experience presses hard on those assumptions. In fact, a shift in our image of God may very well be what comes from a desert experience such as the one we currently are walking through.
Our ideas about God have to shift from pie-in-the-sky notions of God – many times they are carried with us from childhood into adulthood – to the grit of real-life, everyday survival in the face of a pandemic.
In short, I have found in my own life that desert experiences usually cause me to take a good, hard look at the image of God I have been carrying to see if that image matches up with the God who is actually present as I go through the desert. Quite often, I’m invited to jettison old notions of God (the old wineskins) in order to embrace a notion of God that is more real, sturdier, and more true-to-life.
Cummings speaks to some of that experience while walking through desert times.
The desert experience seems to have destroyed my more or less satisfactory relationship with God. Now he is maddeningly absent and I wonder what is going on in my life. Have I been duped by theologians and spiritual writers into thinking that I can find any fulfillment at all in an interior life? Is it worth going on like this, through a desert?
In this situation I can resist the purifying action of the desert experience by letting myself fall into lassitude and inertia, refusing to try any longer, settling for anesthetized mediocrity. Or else I might give in to despair, indulging in morose self-pity, hating myself and life and God. Or I can blame God for treating me so unjustly, for punishing me when I do not deserve it, for being arbitrary and high-handed when I have tried to serve him faithfully all my life.
[Charles Cummings, Spirituality and the Desert Experience (Denville, NJ: Dimension Books, 1978).]
For reflection:
o I reflect for a moment on my experience of God through this pandemic . . . through the physical distancing from others, through my own fears, through my own courage, through my own health concerns.
o Is my notion of God sturdy enough to hold me steady through these days?
o When God seems “maddeningly absent” and all the external props of my faith are gone, I may be able to find some inner resources – where my soul is connected deeply and intimately to God – for the next steps on my journey.
Monday of the Fifth Week of Lent – March 30, 2020
Dealing with the coronavirus pandemic seems to be all that is on anyone’s mind at the moment. We are experiencing a sobering moment in time.
Where is God in this moment? Where is God in any desert experience? It is one thing to affirm in normal times that God is present always and everywhere. In these edge experiences that press hard on us, though, we may find that our usual felt experience of God is missing. We don’t have the same sense of God as we ordinarily do.
Often we find that what Cummings calls, “the purifying action of the desert experience” centers around our notions of God. In other words, the expectations and beliefs we have built up around God – who God is, how God is, where God is, and so on – in ordinary days gets tested, even purified, and the desert experience presses hard on those assumptions. In fact, a shift in our image of God may very well be what comes from a desert experience such as the one we currently are walking through.
Our ideas about God have to shift from pie-in-the-sky notions of God – many times they are carried with us from childhood into adulthood – to the grit of real-life, everyday survival in the face of a pandemic.
In short, I have found in my own life that desert experiences usually cause me to take a good, hard look at the image of God I have been carrying to see if that image matches up with the God who is actually present as I go through the desert. Quite often, I’m invited to jettison old notions of God (the old wineskins) in order to embrace a notion of God that is more real, sturdier, and more true-to-life.
Cummings speaks to some of that experience while walking through desert times.
The desert experience seems to have destroyed my more or less satisfactory relationship with God. Now he is maddeningly absent and I wonder what is going on in my life. Have I been duped by theologians and spiritual writers into thinking that I can find any fulfillment at all in an interior life? Is it worth going on like this, through a desert?
In this situation I can resist the purifying action of the desert experience by letting myself fall into lassitude and inertia, refusing to try any longer, settling for anesthetized mediocrity. Or else I might give in to despair, indulging in morose self-pity, hating myself and life and God. Or I can blame God for treating me so unjustly, for punishing me when I do not deserve it, for being arbitrary and high-handed when I have tried to serve him faithfully all my life.
[Charles Cummings, Spirituality and the Desert Experience (Denville, NJ: Dimension Books, 1978).]
For reflection:
o I reflect for a moment on my experience of God through this pandemic . . . through the physical distancing from others, through my own fears, through my own courage, through my own health concerns.
o Is my notion of God sturdy enough to hold me steady through these days?
o When God seems “maddeningly absent” and all the external props of my faith are gone, I may be able to find some inner resources – where my soul is connected deeply and intimately to God – for the next steps on my journey.
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