"And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness." —the Gospel of Mark, chapter 1
I visited the Judaean wilderness once. Just to see it.
It was only for an hour. I was with a group, and we were on a schedule. But oh. It was like no place I’ve ever seen.
Mile after mile after barren mile of rocky, rippling hills—and wind—and silence. There is no capturing the desolateness of it in words, its strangeness and beauty.
I felt my heart go out into that place. I wanted to leave the group and go straight down into that wilderness and be swallowed up in the immensity of it. I wanted to stay and be scoured clean by the desert wind and sun; to wait and listen for a whisper from the Holy One, the God of patriarchs and prophets, refugees and returning exiles, the God of wilderness wanderings. It made me ache to look at it. I couldn’t explain it: It was like looking at a part of myself.
Rocks. Wind. Silence.
How could something so scoured and stripped be the start of anything?
But in the Bible, it’s where every new chapter begins.
Here at the Juniper Tree, we want to start a conversation about God in the wilderness. Not just how strange and disorienting it is to find ourselves “driven out” by the Spirit to seek God connections in the world at large—though it is strange, and it is really disorienting.
We also want to talk about what our hearts are going out TO.
City sidewalks and grubby doorways, crowded waiting areas and cramped hospital rooms…
…the stripped-down places where people wind up when they’ve run out of other options—when they’re hurting in body and spirit, when they can’t shake their past, can’t outrun the demons, can’t hold down a job, can’t play the game, can’t keep their mouth shut, can’t escape the bottle, can’t keep a roof over their head. Places of desolation that turn out to contain so much more than just rocks and wind and silence.
Look at the top photo, and you’ll see what I saw: a beautiful but barren landscape, devoid of life. But I took that picture from a distance. What would my experience have been if I could have followed my heart’s longing, and entered the landscape not as tourist or spectator, but as an inhabitant?
I imagine myself coming upon a white broom tree, like Elijah, and taking refuge under its shade, watching the desert around me gradually come to life: birds, bugs, here and there a scrubby plant, maybe an occasional snake or a herd of ibex. Or a shepherd with his goats. If it was spring, and if it had rained, there would be flowers.
Life is wherever we are willing to sit still and pay attention. Holiness is everywhere.