Adversity can play a key role in honing our ability to hear what is beyond the usual scope of our ordinary consciousness. Facing stressful challenges outside the norm of our usual experience can heighten our awareness of events that otherwise would go unnoticed.

“Samuel Johnson put it well “Depend upon it sir, when a man knows he is about to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” It is precisely for such clarity and insight that people seek out desert experiences such as solitary retreats, in which we step away from many of the usual supports of life, family, friends, familiar surroundings and routine, in order to be open to God’s call.

Unlike John-the-Baptist in John 1:6-8, 19-28 , 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 even, natural disasters. Yet these deserts we’re told all hold new possibilities for hearing the word of God at ever deepening levels.

In the past year much of our focus has been centered on the devastating Pandemic which has altered our lives in ways we have yet to understand. Countless lives have been lost to the Covid 19 virus, which targeted the elderly, the infirmed, and people with co-morbidities. Following active infection ten percent of patients who survive continue to experience ongoing debilitating morbidities attributed to autoimmune "cytokine" storms long after the virus had been cleared from their systems. These patients are euphemistically labelled as “longhaulers.”

The pandemic’s devastating economic impact has resulted in the closing of many businesses, some of which were teetering on the brink of failure and yielded to a Darwinian-like winnowing fork, never to return. Countless jobs, originally furloughed by the demand for people to remain at home, were no longer there when in-person attendance resumed, leaving people who never were without a job, now unemployed for the first time in their lives. 

 Our elementary and schools of higher learning struggled to do whatever they could to salvage a precious year of education, once lost forever gone. 

And yet through what seemed like never ending bad news, there is hope as vaccines are coming available in an optimistic timeframe once considered wishful thinking. 

In recent weeks our Scripture Study discussions revealed that our “spiritual nerves” are raw and “closer to the top of our skin.” We, God knows, didn’t choose these cosmic events. Richard Rohr tells us that there may not be an external Designer and 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. The selfless dedication of emergency responders, medical personnel and ordinary people to provide comfort reminds us that God is intimately involved in our lives all the time. (adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring Within Us “Reframing Our Cosmology”)