Our Time in the Desert

 

Adversity can play a key role in honing our ability to hear what is beyond the usual scope of our ordinary consciousness. No doubt for many of us the Covid 19 pandemic forced us to face stressful challenges that were outside the “norm” of our usual experience. I wonder how this time of confinement and isolation heightened our awareness of events that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.

Many people seek so-called desert “experiences” by way of solitary retreats during which forced confinement might help provide clarity and enlightenment that otherwise might be overlooked or taken for granted during “ordinary times” during which we are surrounded by our family, friends and our routine. 

Unlike John-the-Baptist in Luke 3:1-6 , we don’t always get a chance to choose our desert times and places. They sometimes are provided for us in the form of illness, change in employment, failures in relationships, death of a loved one and in the case of Covid 19, natural disasters. These deserts all hold new possibilities for hearing the word of God at ever deepening levels.

Speaking personally, it’s too soon for me to assess how forced confinement has been a transformational experience. Perhaps it’s still too easy for me to dwell on the things I missed or have been taken away. Perhaps it’s not a matter of addition or subtraction or replacing what no longer is with something else. What no longer exists is not forgotten and may be a springboard to new ways and personal growth. One thing the pandemic taught is that life can turn on a dime and that the present is only as certain as our last breath. It’s all we can count on.

Richard Rohr writes in A Spring Within Us ,“Reframing Our Cosmology” that there may not be an external designer or a micro-managing God working from the outside, but neither is the world devoid of His divinity. God’s divinity is so intimately present in the world, in us and through us, that the world can be regarded as an incarnate expression of the Trinity, especially in times of tribulation. This was very apparent in the selfless dedication and courage of emergency responders, health care workers and “ordinary people” who put their lives on the line to provide support and comfort to those afflicted. I guess for me then, the greatest lesson from the pandemic particularly during this Advent, a time for watchful waiting, is that God is intimately involved in our lives all the time… we just need to open our hearts to see Him and know his presence.