Lent, a very rich time for the whole Church, is a great call to deepen the preparation for Easter of the Lord. It is a liberating invitation to all Christians, which favors a fruitful return to the heart of God, through perfect repentance. As it says in the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel: “Repent, turn from your sins, and you will not fall into sin. Cast away the trespasses you have committed, and be formed into a new heart and a new spirit” (Ezekiel 18:30-31)[1].
When we experience true conversion, we are faced with our indifference to God. We know that man was created in the image and likeness of God, but he is subjected to a struggle against sin that insists on stealing that likeness by trying to destroy the aspects, the characteristics, the genuine meaning of life and, above all, the original holiness that we received from God.
Place of the Eternal
It is time to be inserted in the spousal way, which travels the Via Crucis: way of the Cross and Resurrection, way to and from happiness, way of conformity to the Immolated Lamb, way of prayer, fasting and penance. It is time to take up again the mystery of Christ and to conform oneself to Him, following in His footsteps. Steps that inaugurate the public life in the desert, coming to be consummated in the passion, cross, death and resurrection. The desert is the place of eternal combat with the devil himself, and yet it is also the place of intimacy with the divine, for the desert is the place of encounter with God, where man sees himself in the light of Truth, seeing inner and outer realities, and where he still needs to be converted.
Place of spiritual battle
The desert, in this sense, is the place to which God Himself draws His children, as Deuteronomy 8 points out, in which He leads the people of Israel into the desert to speak to their hearts. To plunge into the mystery of the desert, then, requires a posture of supplication and docility, in view of the purification, emptying, stripping, and hiding of each man.
For many, the desert means a spiritual battle to be fought, especially for those who are farthest from God. These find themselves in their existential emptiness, that is, immersed in the frustration of the absence of meaning in life, as Viktor Frankl, the founder of Logotherapy, emphasized. For St. Thomas Aquinas, this absence of meaning means “the further man moves away from God, the closer he gets to nothingness”, recognizing the need to always be before God. In the same way, St. Paul affirms: “the Grace of God is everything”!
Place of interior silence
In the spiritual desert, man is driven to interior silence, to intimacy with God. This place that invites to prayer, favors listening to the voice of the Master that echoes, leading him from the slavery of his sins to the freedom of the new man for a new time. As happened to Blessed Charles de Foucauld, when he said: “Everything changed forever in my life; as soon as I understood that God exists, I understood that I could do nothing else but live for Him. God is so great and there is a great difference between God and everything that is not God…”. It was precisely in a desert that this great Blessed made the singular experience of his life. An experience that led him to decide to leave everything behind. In this case, the desert is also a place of decision!
Another expressive example, that leads us to meditation, is that of Oscar Wilde, a great writer, who also had this desert experience. After touching his humanity, he repented and resorted to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, saying: “A man’s supreme moment – I can never doubt – is when he kneels in the dust, pounds his chest, and confesses all the sins of his existence. The peace that comes from these words, ‘I absolve you of your sins… Go in peace’ is priceless!”
Such is the magnitude of the desert, which leads man to an encounter with God and with himself. Only God’s unfathomable love for man is capable of introducing him into this context, in order to recreate him. For in the desert, God reveals Himself to man and reveals Himself to man: He tears the veil, showing man who he really is and what he is made of. At this moment, we can proclaim as the psalmist did, saying to the Lord: “He led his people into the desert, because his love is forever” (Psalm 136:16).
Unmasking our weakness
Knowing this, the desert is like a pure unveiling of sins. Sins that make you impious, stuck, empty and prevented from corresponding to the path of fidelity to sanctity. In this regard, St. Teresa of Avila proclaims “The soul does not remember the penalty it has to suffer to atone for its sins”. In this, the soul, feeling an emptiness, an acedia, a torpor, a mistreating hopelessness, finds itself losing the taste for contemplation, the burning desire for sanctity, being invaded by a sadness, a loneliness, as if it were an absence of God, as if He had temporarily withdrawn Himself from man’s life, to the point where man begs for His presence. Since man no longer feels God’s consolations, but only the temptations of the devil, for some there is a spiritual dryness, for others a spiritual disturbance.
When entering the mystery of the desert, man is reached by Divine Grace, which introduces him on the way to touch the most crystalline truth of God’s love: the glorious marks of the Passion. St. Ambrose says that “nothing is more consoling and glorious than carrying the signs of Jesus Crucified”. In the same way, St. Alphonsus Mary de Liguori emphasizes, when he declares that “The throne of grace is the cross, where Jesus sits to distribute graces and mercy to those who turn to Him”. In this, man is reached by the Passion of Christ, and casts his miseries into the mercy of the Crucified One, becoming again a son in the Son. As St. John of Avila writes, who, reached by this same Passion, proclaimed: “Lord, when I see You on the cross, everything invites me to love: the tree…and to forget You no more. Living the desert impels man to feel the extreme love of Christ: the Via Crucis”.
Place of lights
Being in the desert, although it can provoke repudiation because of the aridity and the truths discovered, is what causes light to be shed on man. It is as if man uses a “divine magnifying glass”, which allows him to see his whole human condition. Being reached by grace, man moves on to this inner battle, which is the constant combat of the temptations in the desert. At the same time, man is awakened to the clearest reality: God fights for him! It is up to man to cooperate with grace by praying, watching, fasting, fighting; in other words, God awaits human action.
In the desert, man is formed, strengthened, freed from his sins, in order to be ordained for his final end, heaven, eternity. Quite rightly, said St. Philip Neri, “I prefer heaven”. He allows himself to be recreated by the Passion of Christ, through the process of daily cross, death and resurrection. As St. Bonaventure well emphasized, “nothing contributes so much to a person’s sanctity as the Passion of Christ”.
Place of maturation
In this experience, man is matured and honed on the path of union with God. During this journey, man becomes aware of his most hidden disorders, his weaknesses and his most perverse inclinations. As St. Augustine exclaimed “the sinner cannot bear himself; sins are sorrow, and holiness is true joy”. This awakening generates repentance, perfect contrition, the desire for inner change, and the joy of returning to the Essentials.
This man experiences liberation from his shackles: slavery, pain, death, coldness, aridity, for sin had deformed him, he, God’s most beautiful creature. Through the redeeming blood, which is the seal of absolution from sins, man now becomes worthy to receive the Highest Good, which makes him able to start again and again, for the struggle in the desert is daily and lifelong. Far from discouraging us, this truth pushes us to live from battle to battle, and, with God, from victory to victory. This shows how fertile the desert is, for there dwells the Sacred: we are not alone.
Cristina Brilhante