Essentials

We do not know much about the time that Jesus spent in the wilderness. The gospels largely leave us to speculate, to guess, to wonder, to ponder--as they often do at critical moments in their narratives. So, for the most part, we can speak of His experiences only by reference to our own, imagining what we might have thought and felt under such momentous circumstances.

I was puzzling over this the other day when I ran across a story about the neurologist Oliver Sacks, who recently discovered that he has terminal liver cancer. Sacks wrote a beautiful essay about his response to the news, a fugue in multiple parts on living fully. The line that moved and impressed me the most was his observation that he had "no time for anything inessential."

Perhaps, above all other things, this was the experience of Jesus. Sitting in the wilderness on a hilltop, how could his mind possibly have strayed toward anything trivial? Surely his entire being was stripped of all inessentials as he meditated on his next steps, his act of ultimate love and redemption, his sacrifice.

In thinking about this I was reminded of one of my favorite passages from the notebooks of Albert Camus, an atheist, reflecting on his visit to a Franciscan monastery:

"September 15

"In the cloister of San Francesco in Fiesole there is a little courtyard with an arcade along each side, full of red flowers, sun, and yellow and black bees. In one corner, there is a green water sprinkler, and everywhere the humming of bees. A gentle steam seems to rise from the garden as it bakes in the heat. Sitting on the ground, I think about the Franciscans whose cells I have just visited and whose sources of inspiration I can now see. I feel clearly that if they are right then it is in the same way that I am. I know that behind the wall on which I am leaning there is a hill sloping down toward the town, and the offering of the whole of Florence with all its cypress trees.

"But this splendor of the world seems to justify these men. I put all my pride in a belief that it also justifies me, and all the men of my race, who know that there is an extreme point at which poverty always rejoins the luxury and richness of the world. If they cast everything off, it is for a greater and not for another life. This is the only meaning that I can accept of a term like 'stripping oneself bare.' 'Being naked' always has associations of physical liberty, of harmony between the hand and the flower it touches, of a loving understanding between the earth and the men who have been freed from human things. Ah, I should become a convert to this if it were not already my religion."

Amen.