The True Wilderness

Most people's wilderness is inside them, not outside. Thinking of it as outside is generally a trick we play upon ourselves - a trick to hide from us what we really are, not comfortingly wicked, but incapable, for the time being of establishing communion. Our wilderness, then, is an inner isolation. It's an absence of contact. It's a sense of being alone - boringly alone, or saddeningly alone, or terrifyingly alone. Often we try to relieve it - understandably enough, God knows - by chatter, or gin, or sex, or possibly a combination of all four. The trouble is that these purple hearts can work their magic only for a limited time, leaving us after one short hour or two exactly where we were before.

As I said, our isolation is really us - inwardly without sight or hearing or taste or touch. But it doesn't seem like that. Oh no. I ask myself what I am isolated from, and the answer looks agonizingly clear enough. I feel isolated from Betty whom I desperately love and who is just the sort of woman who could never love me. And so to feel love, I think, must be at the same time to feel rejection. Or I feel isolated from the social people who, if the noise is the index of happiness, must be very happy indeed on Saturday evenings. Or I feel isolated from the competent people, the success-boys who manage to get themselves into print without getting themselves into court. Or I feel isolated, in some curious way, from my work. I find it dull and uninviting. It's meant - it used - to enliven me and wake me up. Now it deadens me and sends me to sleep. Not, in this case, because I'm lazy, or thinking of tomorrow's trip to London, but because it makes me feel more alone. Or I feel isolated from things which once enchanted me, the music I play, the poetry I read, the politics I argue about. I go on doing it now as a matter of routine, not in order to be, but in order to forget, to cheat the clock. The LP record will take forty minutes if you play both sides, and then it will be time for tea. Or perhaps I've been robbed, robbed of my easy certainties, my unthinking convictions, that this is black and that is white, and Uncle George was a saint, and what they told me to believe is true and the opposite false, and my parents are wonderful people, and God's in his heaven and all's right with the world, and science is the answer to everything, and St Paul was a nice man, and there's nothing like fresh air or reading the Bible for curing depression - fantasies, like children's bricks, out of which I thought I should build my life, and which now have melted into air, into thin air, leaving me with nothing. Out of what bricks, then, I ask in despair, am I to build? Is it to go on always like now, just - tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow - a slow  procession of dusty greyish events with a lot of forced laughter, committee laughter, cocktail laughter, and streaks of downright pain?

But what I have described is the true Lent, the real Lent, which has nothing to do with giving up sugar in your tea, or trying to feel it's wicked to be you. And this Lent, unlike the ecclesiastical charade, this sense of being isolated and therefore unequipped, is a necessary part, or a necessary stage, of our experience as human beings. It therefore found a place in the Son of Man. Because he is us, he too did time in the wilderness. And what happened to him there shows us what is happening to ourselves. Here, as always, we see in his life the meaning of our own.

What does the story tell us?

Notice first it is by the Spirit that Jesus is driven, thrown out is the actual word, into the wilderness, the same Spirit which had brought him the conviction of being called to do great things. The Spirit is ourselves in the depths of what we are. It is me at the profoundest level of my being, the level at which I can no longer distinguish between what is myself and what is greater than me. So, theologically, the Spirit is called God in me. And it is from this place where God and me mingle indistinguishably that I am thrown out into the wilderness. The story of Jesus reminds us that being thrown out in this way must be an inevitable concomitant of of our call to God's service. To feel isolated, to be incapable for the time being of establishing communion, is part of our training. That is because so far our communion has been shallow, mere pirouetting on the surface. We've come to see its superficiality, its unrealness. Hence the feeling of loss. The training doesn't last forever. In fact, new powers of communion with our world are being built up within us. We are being made the sort of people of whom it can be said, 'All things are yours.' But it belongs to the training to feel it will last forever.

And so, we are tempted of Satan. Tempted to give up, to despair. Tempted to cynicism. Tempted sometimes to cruelty. Tempted not to help others when we know we can, because we think, what's the use? Tempted to banish from our life all that we really hold most dear, and that is love, tempted to lock ourselves up, so that when we pass by people feel, 'There goes a dead man.' And behind each and all of these temptations is the temptation to disbelieve in what we are, the temptation to distrust ourselves, to deny that it is the Spirit himself which beareth witness with our spirit. God in us. The water in the bucket of my soul doesn't look like the ocean. Yet every Sunday we affirm that it is. For in the creed at the Holy Communion we speak of the Spirit as he who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified. We say it, but every day we're tempted not to believe it. And this self-distrust conjures up the wild beasts. Sometimes they're sheer terror, panic, which makes us feel about the most ordinary undangerous things, 'I can't do it.' Or the violent beasts are the violent rages roaring inside us, triggered off by something ridiculously insignificant - a word, a glance, a failure to show interest in some petty concern. Or the beasts prowl around snarling as envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness.

This then is our Lent, our going with Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted. And we might apply to it some words from the First Epistle of St Peter: 'Beloved, do not be surprised at  the fiery ordeal which comes upon  you to prove you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice in so far as you share Christ's sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.'

Chris's glory is his full and satisfying communion with all that is. It is the opposite of being isolated. All things are his and he fills all things. This complete communion springs from a love which is able to give to the uttermost, a love which doesn't give in order to get, but which finds in the act of giving itself its own perfect satisfaction. To love is to give. To give is to be. To be is to find yourself in communion with all about you. And this communion is glory. Christ's glory and yours. You don't have to wait for it until you die or the world comes to an end. It can be yours now. Accept your wilderness. From the story of the Son of Man realize what your Lent really means, and then the angels will minister to you as they did to him. In other words, you'll find moments when giving for love's sake really satisfies you, really makes you feel alive and in contact. And at such moments Christ's glory is revealed, and we rejoice and are glad. We look at the travail of our soul and are satisfied. Lent, we discover, is Easter in disguise.

Harry Williams