Father Richard invites us to take a journey of faith. It may be plagued by uncertainty, but we can trust in God’s presence along the way.
Sometimes it is only when we look back over the years, many of them spent in the wilderness, that we see the providence of God. When we were traveling through those years, none of them may have seemed very glorious. But when we look back, we can see how God was leading us, and we behold the beauty of God’s saving love.
Yet when we are in the middle of it, it may not seem very beautiful at all. It may seem quite ordinary. Usually we cannot tell for certain if God is acting in our life. In fact, we may be able to make a strong case against it. Just look at the prophets, Job, or Jesus! The way of faith is not a way of certitude.
I can imagine quite easily that Moses faltered on occasion. He must have hesitated and wondered whether God was really leading him, or whether he was just on some big ego trip. If Moses saw some visible apparition or heard some audible sounds which made him absolutely certain that he was right, Moses’s way would not have been a way of faith. It would have been a way of knowledge.
We are all called to a way of faith. At each step God asks us to trust, to say yes, to put our lives in God’s hands. It’s like walking around in a pitch-dark room, afraid that we’re going to bump into something or trip or fall. We put our hands out in front of us and walk very slowly. We want desperately to have our pathway illuminated. We want to know where we are going and how we are going to get there. Yet a voice comes to us out of the darkness, asking us to trust. We want certitude, but instead God asks us to have faith.
Our faith and our trust, then, are in God—not in our own cleverness, strategies, or planning, not in our status or money. In the desert, all our idols are taken away from us and our security is gone. The desert, the darkness, is the school of surrender, the place for learning total dependence on God.
Very often we experience faith in its purest form when we are in the midst of suffering. Perhaps we grew up picturing ourselves as some kind of glorious martyr (or perhaps that was just me), but when we are in the middle of it, it’s not glorious at all. It all seems so meaningless, so unjust and wrong, yet that’s the heart of the suffering. The essence of the desert experience is that we just want to get out it. If we could find a pattern in it, it would have some meaning. If we could find some purpose in it, it might give us a sense of direction. We truly suffer when we can find neither of those things, and yet even then, God is present.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr and Joseph Martos, The Great Themes of Scripture: Old Testament (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1988), 21–22.
Image credit and inspiration: Clay Banks, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, USA, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Walking into the wild becomes a mirror of the Exodus itself—risking the unknown so that, in the wandering, we discover the quiet, faithful presence that leads us toward freedom and deeper communion with God.
Story from Our Community:
I am intrigued by the relationship between grief and joy. In 2019, my husband died from a brain tumor. It had been a very difficult year, and his death was both a great sadness and a relief. Three months later I was on a holiday in Jordan and sat one evening watching the sun set in the desert at Wadi Rum. I felt an almost ecstatic joy as the tears rolled down my face. How could I experience such joy in the midst of such grief? The sense of the Divine was so deeply present, I will never forget it.
—Christine M.
