To the biblical mind the wilderness is a holy place in which one may enter into communion with God. It is a place where one can clearly sense God’s sustenance, and, more importantly, it is a place where one learns to turn habitually toward God. We may arrive in the desert by different paths. We may journey there of our own accord, or we may be led there by the hidden work of the Holy Spirit.
Once we owned a cat named Nora who seemed to have set up shop at a middling level on the ascent to God. Placid and fat, Nora spent her mornings lying in a pool of sunlight near the back door, and sometimes she gazed into the distance as if she were seeing something of great importance hidden from the rest of us.
This experience of living at the edge is not so extraordinary as it may sound. We have all had it. Perhaps you have sat with someone who was near death, and found yourself drawn into her inner radiance, into a place where pain and fear give way before a lucid awareness of the nearness of life’s source.
What’s needed is a structure for our spiritual life, some container to keep our growing awareness from dribbling away. As John Tarrant writes, in The Light Inside the Dark, “Everything new needs to be held, needs a place into which it can be born.”
I have on my office door these words from an accomplished Indian yogi: “Before speaking, consider whether it is an improvement upon silence.” The man who wrote them once went nineteen years without speaking, setting a standard I can’t hope to meet. Yet his words remind me that when we do speak, we must speak truth.
For much of my life I’ve lived contentedly by a few simple rules: don’t track mud in the house, take care of your own, help others, do as little harm as you can, change your oil every three thousand miles. But maybe enlightenment is simpler than we think.
Wild animals don’t have to accept themselves. They can simply be. As thinking animals, we must work to create some space for our wild natures, to give them room to roam. Whether keeping our awareness on the breath as we meditate, on our bodies’ rhythm as we run, on our sensations as we sink our hands in bread dough, our practice
The example of Jesus, and the experience of mud season, remind me of a harsher truth: to be reborn, we first must die. The way to Jerusalem lies through mud. Dying, like mud, can take many forms, but every death, in the sense I mean, is a letting go. We let go of ambition, of pride, of ego.
I am not suggesting that anyone learn more about world religions in order to subvert them. Sacred truth is a very deep well into which human beings have been lowering leaky buckets for millennia. The more we learn about what other traditions have fetched up, the more we learn about our own.
That which we more strictly call piety, or the love of God, and which is an essential part of a right temper, some may perhaps imagine no way connected with benevolence: yet surely they must be connected, if there be indeed in being an object infinitely good.