Let me begin with an inconvenient truth about this crazy life that we are all stumbling through together. Pretty much everyone eventually gets to spend some time in the wilderness! If, like me, wilderness becomes part of your lived experience – embrace it – because make no mistake you are in excellent company.
In recent days, I’ve realized anew just how essential the wilderness experience is to what we can know about the Galilean God with skin on man, who practiced and spoke only love. You know, the suffering servant fella who ended his earthly days reluctantly, but somehow also willingly, nailed to a damn killing tree.
What caught my misfit mystic attention, is that in three of the four gospel narrations about the Galilean – just prior to his great mission of mercy becoming an active thing – the Spirit led him out into the wilderness for forty long testing days and nights (Matt 4:1-11; Mark 1:12-13; Luke 4:1-13).
The scripture scholars among you, my dear comrades, will know that there is an intentional comparison being made here with the Israelites wandering in the desert for forty years (Deut 29:5-6; Num 32:13). Neither do the parallels end there. It’s not incidental that two of the foremost prophets in the whole biblical shebang, Moses and Elijah, also experienced the forty days and nights hunger games as they got one-on-one with the living God (Exod 34:27-28; 1 Kgs 19:7-9).
The hunger games are never without purpose.
Crucially, these tales of tough times in the wilderness offer us not just something to be celebrated from the past, but something to be emulated in the now. The spiritual underpinnings of these stories encourage us to embrace the conditions in which we too might get seriously up close and personal with the living Spirit. Simply put, to get a real deal ongoing face-to-face encounter with the God who’s never missing, we have to be players in hunger games. And it all starts out on the barren wastelands of life where, for many of us, actually living spiritually truly begins.
Only the wilderness, give us this ‘curriculum vitae.’
I’ve yet to meet anyone who has knowingly put their hand up for this kind of spiritual wilderness experience, although I’m sure there must be some. But I’ve known plenty of folks like myself who get led into the desert, like-it-or-not, for just this reason.
I do not subscribe to Dante’s notion that “life is a vale of tears,” you know, some version or other of “life’s a bitch and then you die.” I’m much more inclined to the belief that “all things work together for good” (Rom 8:28).
I’ve written previously about trying to find meaning in suffering and the inherent necessity of personal brokenness in order to become people who can be truly walk with empathy with others on the broken shore. Only the wilderness, give us this ‘curriculum vitae,’ there just isn’t another viable painless alternative.
Pretty much everyone eventually gets to spend some time in the wilderness!
Above everything, remember this: the wilderness is a transforming space, a radical change place. We do not emerge from the hunger games as the same people who get reluctantly led in. For led in, we surely are! It’s just part of God’s grand plan. And the selfsame Spirit who does the leading never vacates the space but gets right up close and personal with us throughout the entire ordeal.
We may not emerge from the wilderness as great prophets revered for thousands of years. Or as an itinerant holy man from Galilee, followed by billions. But the hunger games are never without purpose, you bet your lunch money on that! For the Spirit takes our transformation experience and uses it in the greatest game the world has ever known, bringing that selfsame blessed life changing food to those still hunger.
Hunger for that, dear comrades, and you will walk with living God and find new meaning and purpose in crazy life that we’re all stumbling through together.
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