Wilderness Experience

Most of us probably experience the wilderness as an amiable place. When we were children,it was the far corner of our backyard, the vacant lot where we built a fort, or the clearing in the neighborhood woods where we set up a tent on a muggy summer night. As we grew older, wilderness became the Michigan forest with the icy trout stream, the national park with the souvenir stand at the trailhead, or the Adirondack mountain with the well-worn path beside the blueberry patch.

Some of us wander into trickier and less accomodating terrain. But, for most American denizens of the twenty-first century, the idea of being in the wilderness has lost some of its edge. I recall hearing a fellow traveler into the African bush puzzle aloud over the fact that her cell phone seemed to have stopped working.

In many respects, life in biblical times was a scarier place than it is now--and so was the wilderness. When Moses led the Israelites into the wilderness they left behind the yoke of the Egyptians. But they also left behind reliable sources of food, shelter, and water. Surely, the Israelites would not have complained so much if they knew that a good meal, a bottle of wine, and a soft bed were fairly close at hand, as we often do today when we venture into the wild.

This matters because when we read that Jesus went into the wilderness we may conjure up notions of a genial retreat to commune with Nature. We might think of Jesus as being like Thoreau, who went to the woods to "live deliberately," or Yeats, who fantasized poetically about living alone in the "bee-loud glade." Sometimes, when I hear people rhapsodize about Jesus heading off into the wilderness to engage in an act of self discovery, I feel like all that is missing is the hammock, the sport-utility vehicle, and the L.L. Bean catalog.

In my view, we miss something important about the significance of Jesus's journey into the wilderness if we lose track of what true wilderness means. Sure, wilderness can be beautiful and inspiring. But it can also be hard; unforgiving; disorienting; frightening. In this sense, a journey into the wilderness is not a retreat from human existence. It is a voyage into the essence of human existence at its most challenging.

Indeed, we all have our wilderness experiences--even if we never leave town. We get sick. We lose a job. We make a change in life that we deeply regret. We age. Someone stops loving us. We struggle with loss and depression. We feel judged and unappreciated. We sense our own mortality heavy upon our shoulders. At one time or another, every human heart will find itself deep in the wilderness. And that is precisely why Jesus went there.

In the course of his forty days, Jesus revealed and embodied all of the other things that we might discover in the wilderness spaces of life: focus; strength; resolve; peace; even praise. Yes, even praise.

We can find these things when we go into the wilderness.

We can find them when the wilderness comes into us.

Amen.