The Desert
After the last post on St. Anthony, my eye was caught by a related article - Current Trends:The Desert as Reality and Symbol by Father Donald Goergen, O.P.. What is it about the desert that so attracts spiritual seekers? I know the idea of the desert, or more rightly of being alone, is tempting to me because I have such a hard time being around people ... but here below, Fr. Goergen explores the desert, and the thought that the journey into that isolation ends with a return from it. The article is long, so I've just posted parts of it, beginning with Fr. Goergen's excerpt from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, A Romance by Lord Byron ...
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Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling place,
With one fair Spirit for my minister,
That I might all forget the human race,
And, hating no one, love but only her!
Ye Elements! -- in whose ennobling stir
I feel myself exalted -- Can ye not
Accord me such a being? Do I err
In deeming such inhabit many a spot?
Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot.
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet can not all conceal.
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean-roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin -- his control
Stops with the shore; -- upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknowns.
... the desert. Few words are heard more frequently in the language of contemporary spirituality, and few are more expressive of the traditional roots of the Judeo-Christian experience. The desert experience was one of the formative experiences in Israel's history as it was later theologically reflected upon. Both Moses and Elijah conjure up images of the desert, and greater prophets than this there could not be. Christian origins, too, cannot avoid the role of the Judean wilderness for John, the baptizer, and also for Jesus. Even Paul speaks of traveling into Arabia after his conversion (Gal. 1:17). The religious quality of the desert has come home to me in a personal way when I have had the opportunity to be there, once at Christ in the Desert Monastery in New Mexico for forty days in 1979, and again on an excursion from the Ecole Biblique de Jerusalem into the Negev and Sinai in 1981.
This Judeo-Christian reality or symbol manifests itself over and over. It is not only rooted in our traditions; it is a direction or trend in spirituality today. We hear much talk about a "desert experience" or a "desert day." Susan Muto's A Practical Guide to Spiritual Reading (Dimension Books, 1976) devotes a major section of her book to "Living the Desert Experience." ... People are reading the desert fathers. Athanasius's life of Antony has been one of the volumes to appear in the Paulist series Classics of Western Spirituality ....
When one thinks of desert, one thinks of desertedness and barrenness. Yet it is a barrenness balanced with beauty. ... These two words, unpredictable and surprising, are the two words with which I would describe my own experience of the desert. The unpredictability can be frightening, the surprise enlightening. The desert is simply nature at its best, or at its worst, perhaps at its purest, and this quality it shares with mountains and oceans or seas ....
My first clear impression of this was at Christ in the Desert Monastery in New Mexico, and it again became apparent to me when I had several days to spend on Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain, in northern Greece. One of the effects of prayer can be described as inner peace. Yet the desert and mountains do not immediately produce this interior reality, precisely because they cause one to focus one's attention outside oneself. One can close one's eyes and pray. But one cannot close one's eyes and capture what the desert, the ocean, and the mountains have to offer -- or when one does, it is for a different reason, as we shall see. These settings of beauty draw one's attention outward. Thus, in contrast to other situations of prayer in which I felt a peace within me, I can describe the experience of the desert only as my becoming part of it, rather than its becoming part of me. It was more difficult to delineate the personal boundaries. The mountains or ocean were too big for me to master like a physical or ascetical exercise. I could only admire, appreciate, be absorbed. Rather than seeing prayer as part of me, it was more akin to seeing me as part of prayer -- which is why nature and beauty and symbol and liturgy are so closely related. We are called upon to participate rather than control ...
The beauty and calm of the desert, once perceived, once felt, be come an alluring and charming temptation as well as a source of divine presence -- the temptation to remain. This does not imply that some are not called to a life there for the sake of the larger Christian community, but rather implies that one ordinarily does " -- not go out into the desert as a home of permanence. That is only for a certain few. The Hebrew people wandered in the desert and never mistook it for the promised land. They did not settle it as later hermits and monks would do. Elijah did not stay on Mount Horeb; that was not its purpose. Nor did John the Baptizer remain in the wilderness. No matter how long he prepared himself in the wilderness, his mission brought him forth from it. And so with Jesus, one of whose temptations we could interpret as the temptation to stay in the desert. But before long he comes forth preaching the good news of the coming reign of God ... The other aspect of this temptation is to see those whose lives are lived there as the holy ones, rather than seeing the holiness of God magnificently manifest in the poor and the alienated, the stranger and widow and orphan of the Hebrew Scriptures, the hungry and the thirsty with whom Jesus identifie ... So this is where the journey into the desert leads us -- back out again ...
- view from Mt. Athos
************************
Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling place,
With one fair Spirit for my minister,
That I might all forget the human race,
And, hating no one, love but only her!
Ye Elements! -- in whose ennobling stir
I feel myself exalted -- Can ye not
Accord me such a being? Do I err
In deeming such inhabit many a spot?
Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot.
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet can not all conceal.
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean-roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin -- his control
Stops with the shore; -- upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknowns.
... the desert. Few words are heard more frequently in the language of contemporary spirituality, and few are more expressive of the traditional roots of the Judeo-Christian experience. The desert experience was one of the formative experiences in Israel's history as it was later theologically reflected upon. Both Moses and Elijah conjure up images of the desert, and greater prophets than this there could not be. Christian origins, too, cannot avoid the role of the Judean wilderness for John, the baptizer, and also for Jesus. Even Paul speaks of traveling into Arabia after his conversion (Gal. 1:17). The religious quality of the desert has come home to me in a personal way when I have had the opportunity to be there, once at Christ in the Desert Monastery in New Mexico for forty days in 1979, and again on an excursion from the Ecole Biblique de Jerusalem into the Negev and Sinai in 1981.
This Judeo-Christian reality or symbol manifests itself over and over. It is not only rooted in our traditions; it is a direction or trend in spirituality today. We hear much talk about a "desert experience" or a "desert day." Susan Muto's A Practical Guide to Spiritual Reading (Dimension Books, 1976) devotes a major section of her book to "Living the Desert Experience." ... People are reading the desert fathers. Athanasius's life of Antony has been one of the volumes to appear in the Paulist series Classics of Western Spirituality ....
When one thinks of desert, one thinks of desertedness and barrenness. Yet it is a barrenness balanced with beauty. ... These two words, unpredictable and surprising, are the two words with which I would describe my own experience of the desert. The unpredictability can be frightening, the surprise enlightening. The desert is simply nature at its best, or at its worst, perhaps at its purest, and this quality it shares with mountains and oceans or seas ....
My first clear impression of this was at Christ in the Desert Monastery in New Mexico, and it again became apparent to me when I had several days to spend on Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain, in northern Greece. One of the effects of prayer can be described as inner peace. Yet the desert and mountains do not immediately produce this interior reality, precisely because they cause one to focus one's attention outside oneself. One can close one's eyes and pray. But one cannot close one's eyes and capture what the desert, the ocean, and the mountains have to offer -- or when one does, it is for a different reason, as we shall see. These settings of beauty draw one's attention outward. Thus, in contrast to other situations of prayer in which I felt a peace within me, I can describe the experience of the desert only as my becoming part of it, rather than its becoming part of me. It was more difficult to delineate the personal boundaries. The mountains or ocean were too big for me to master like a physical or ascetical exercise. I could only admire, appreciate, be absorbed. Rather than seeing prayer as part of me, it was more akin to seeing me as part of prayer -- which is why nature and beauty and symbol and liturgy are so closely related. We are called upon to participate rather than control ...
The beauty and calm of the desert, once perceived, once felt, be come an alluring and charming temptation as well as a source of divine presence -- the temptation to remain. This does not imply that some are not called to a life there for the sake of the larger Christian community, but rather implies that one ordinarily does " -- not go out into the desert as a home of permanence. That is only for a certain few. The Hebrew people wandered in the desert and never mistook it for the promised land. They did not settle it as later hermits and monks would do. Elijah did not stay on Mount Horeb; that was not its purpose. Nor did John the Baptizer remain in the wilderness. No matter how long he prepared himself in the wilderness, his mission brought him forth from it. And so with Jesus, one of whose temptations we could interpret as the temptation to stay in the desert. But before long he comes forth preaching the good news of the coming reign of God ... The other aspect of this temptation is to see those whose lives are lived there as the holy ones, rather than seeing the holiness of God magnificently manifest in the poor and the alienated, the stranger and widow and orphan of the Hebrew Scriptures, the hungry and the thirsty with whom Jesus identifie ... So this is where the journey into the desert leads us -- back out again ...
- view from Mt. Athos
posted by crystal | 1:02 PM
2 Comments:
Hi Crystal,
I wish you wouldn't feel like you have a rough time being around people. You have such a wide range of interests, you needn't feel that way. But then again, I don't like parties and big gatherings, and crowds, etc... I love having periods of solitude. I ty to carve out some monk-like space every day without neglecting my responsibilities.
I've never seen a true deseert, really. Do you live near one in CA?
Hi Jeff,
I'm uncomfortable even around one other person ... maybe it has something to do with not being able to see the other person very well. At parties, I'm the person in the corner talking to the potted plant :-)
There are deserts here in California - the most well known is the Mojave desert ... I've driven through it, but never spent any time there. It's pretty far away from me, maybe about 400 miles?
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