Lost IN THE WILDERNESS TO FIND A SELF

March 15, 1992

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Exodus 3:1-6
Luke 4:1-11

"Jesus...was led by the Spirit in the wilderness..." .
-Luke 4:1 (NRSV).

There is, I submit, an elemental rhythm which moves us from
life at its busiest, most human, noisiest and most hectic to
solitude, to an interior life of silence, emptiness and alone-
ness,

There is further, I Submit, a sense in which the human soul,
the spirit, the self, if you will, is nurtured, grows, is discov-
ered, in the silent emptiness; and if life does not afford silent
emptiness, some wilderness, you and I are immeasurably poorer.

Annie Dillard is a writer who lives in the city and loves
it, but who does her best work somewhere else. Pilgrim at Tinker
Creek is a book-length journal of her reflections at her wilder-
ness retreat in the mountains of Virginia. Dillard's descrip-
tions of trees ana insects, Tinker Creek and her daily walks
constitute some very good writing and satisfying reading. But
what fascinates me most, in addition to the fact that she grew up
in Western Pennsylvania as I did, and remembers Pittsburgh in the
same way I do from exciting annual trips to see the Pirates play,
in addition to that, I am intrigued by the writer's intentional
moving from city to wilderness and how full of creativity and
energy that rhythm is for her.

From creekside in Virginia she wrote (something those of us
who live in this place will understand):

"I remember what the city has to offer; human
companionship, major league baseball and a clatter
Of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong
drugs that leaves you drained. Tf remember how you
bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop
to think, 'Next year, I'll start living, next year
I'li start-my life, [Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,
Pp. 81]

When she needs to write a book or wants to write a book, she
moves away from the busyness and noise of the city to Tinker
Creek, or to a shed behind a house on Cape Cod... somewhere away,
not permanently, but regularly. And what happens there is a
deepening, a renewed awareness of who she is and what-her life is
about, a kind of periodic self-rediscovery, the happy result of
which is some very good writing.

That is what I found myself thinking about when I began to
work again on the familiar story of Jesus and his temptations in
the wilderness. The story appears in the church year annually,
at the beginning of the Lenten journey which follows Jesus to his
cross and invites us to explore our own journeys. Most of the
sermonic attention to this text revolves around what happened to
Jesus in the wilderness, how he struggled with temptation and
overcame it. I confess, however, that the three moral dilemmas
he confronted in the desert never seemed very racy to me and
barely qualified as temptation. To turn stones into loaves of
bread, to achieve political power in order to establish a little
justice and sanity in the world, to earn public attention in
order to demonstrate credibility as a spiritual authority... The
more you think about it, the better these alternatives sound,
frankly, something like an action plan devised by a group of
Presbyterians at a Long Range Planning Meeting.

So I've always found myself wondering what the real issue is
here, and what temptation means if the result of succumbing is
not. moral decadence... if doing a good thing, like feeding hungry
people - for the wrong reason - negates the good. And I've con-
cluded that what is going on in this little story of Jesus in the
wilderness is not simple at all: that it has to do with his very
basic. identity, his understanding of himself and the purpose of
his life. The real struggle here is something which is a priority
for every one of us, to find a self with no compromises, that
~rock-bottom integrity in Shakespeare:

"This above all: To thine own self be true."

I've concluded that the most interesting thing of all about
this story is in the very first sentence, namely that the Spirit
led him into the wilderness. He needed to be there. He was full
of the Holy Spirit, and the spirit led him into the wilderness;
the spirit knew who he would meet there and there was important
and hard work to do before he began the adventures of his adult
life.

"Wilderness" in Hebrew is the same word as desert and it can
-be-empty, arid land, rocky plateau, desolate mountainside as well
as the familiar sandy desert. [See Interpreter's Dictionary of
the Bible]

It's an important Biblical word and concept. Moses encoun-
tered the voice in the burning bush just west of the wilderness.
Much later, in an incident reminiscent of this one, Moses spends
forty days on an isolated mountaintop alone without food. Elijah

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spends forty days in flight and, of course, the children of.
Israel wander in the wilderness for forty years and in the proc-
ess evolve from a loose federation of clans into a people, a
nation. Israel - in the wilderness - finds a self. Se

There is always mystery about wilderness. It is part. of-sour
fascination. Robert Raines was a successful and prominent pastor
of a large urban church who, in the middle of it all, -left one.
life and started all over again as the director of.-a. retreat
center in the mountains. He wrote a book about the experience
and the transition and observed:

"The wilderness is Biblical prime. place for being.
“apprehended afresh by God." [Going Home, p.. 56}...

And it is. It's why we head out for Michigan and Wisconsin,
to mountains and seashore, to get in-touch with a primal: world, a
world you can touch and see and feel and smell - as it always has
been, a world of grandeur and majesty, a world so beautiful, only
art and music and poetry can approach an adequate expression of
it. .

Raines quotes the poet Theodore Roethke:
"I would unlearn the lingo of exasperation, all
the distortions of malice and hatred
I would believe my pain; :
and the eye quiet on the rose, we
_ I would delight in my hands, the branch singing...-

I long for the imperishable quiet at the
heart of form...

This ambush, this silence." oo
[The Longing, Theodore Roethke, in Raines,
Going Home, p. 57}

Annie Dillard describes it this way:

"Something pummels us, something barely sheathed...
Power broods and lights. We're played on like a pipe;
our breath is not. our own." [p. 13] we SE

That is a given. in the wilderness God comes to Moses. -In
some wildernesses you. and I. reacquaint ourselves with the handi-
work of the one who created the world and everything in it; that
one whose handiwork stuns us into reverent adoration when we look
at the moon and stars in the dark night sky; that one. whose
spirit is what we inhale and exhale as we bre;the.

When Matthew and Mark tell the story of Jesus and his temp-

tations in the wilderness, the conclusion is that angels come and:
minister to him. The divine puts in an appearance; the last time -

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I used this text for a sermon I concluded that the wilderness is
not a bad place to be because it is where angels can find you.

But not in Luke. No one comes in his version. The story
ends with the devil "departing from him until an opportune. time."
I take that to mean that whatever happened in the wilderness
would continue to happen, that the temptation or test of his
integrity would reappear.

Jesus doesn't find God in this wilderness. What Jesus
discovers is a self. And the way Luke teils it, God almost
intentionally stays out of the picture so that Jesus can find his
self alone. This wilderness is abandoned by God, not out of
meanness or callousness, but precisely so the work of self-dis-
covery can go on, because self-discovering cannot happen in the
presence of your parents.

Psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy knows that. In his
popular book, The Uses of Enchantment, the late Bruno Bettleheim
observed:

"In many fairy tales being pushed out of home
stands for having to become oneself. Self-reali-
zation requires leaving the orbit of home, an
excruciating, painful experience fraught with many
psychological dangers." [p. 79]

When you take the time to explore your own spiritual journey
it is not uncommon to discover that one of the most important
days in your life was the occasion when your parents, in one way
or another, pushed you out, or dropped you off in some God-
forsaken wilderness - like a summer camp, or turned you over to a
stranger -~like a kindergarten teacher, or abandoned you in front
of a college dorm, or put you on a train and cheerfully waved
goodbye. Nor is it uncommon to acknowledge that for many people
a sense of adult selfhood appears when one's parents die.

The spirit led Jesus into that wilderness. He would not
have volunteered to go on his own. It was not a particularly
comfortable place to be. But it was time. It was time for him to
decide who he was and what he was going to do with the rest of
his life. His self was forged in the wilderness, alone.

Dutch priest and theologian, Henri Nouwen, describes this
wilderness into which the spirit leads us as "the solitude of the
heart," a state of being which may or may not be a physical place
in an actual wilderness. Solitude of the heart is a state of
silence, and introspection, a contemplative space into which we
can go regardless of where we happen to be. A discipline helps
of course... an actual place to be alone, without noise, distrac-
tion, conversation, and other people, even if its your bed, or
desk in the early morning, or a walk alone by the lake.

The wilderness makes us nervous sometimes. One of the
things I immediately notice when I have occasion to be away from

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the city is how Qeafening the silence sounds. We are simply
unconscious to the persistent, uninterrupted noise of the city.
Its absence - the silence - is palpable. The settlers on the
prairie - utterly dark and silent - used to beat pots and pans at
night to frighten away beasts, real or imagined. And so we fill
life with noise. Nouwen writes:

"The experience is frightful. as well as Fd
exhilarating because it is the great experience
of being alone in the world, alone before God."
[Reaching Out, p. 17]

Coming from another country, Nouwen thought Americans would
go to any length to avoid being alone and quiet. He wrote:

"When I came to this country for the first time,
Lf was struck by the open-door life style. In
schools, institutes and office buildings, everyone
worked with open doors. It seemed as if everyone
was saying to me, 'Do not hesitate to walk in and
interrupt at any time,' and most conversations had
the same open quality - giving me the impression
that people had no secrets and were ready for any
question ranging from their financial status to
their sex life." [p. 21)

My suggestion is that if there is no wilderness experience
in your life, no solitude of the heart, you are missing some- _
thing.

You may be missing a self you have not known before - a you
that is unique.

You may be missing creativity which. you have never. recog-
nized in yourself. Artists ana musicians and writers must look
inside, before all else. Annie Dillard wrote a book about her
craft, The Writing Life, in which she tells about where she
writes:

"Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants
a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory
in the dark." [p. 26}

And Ranier Maria Rilke in his famous letters to a younger
poet, advised his junior colleague to stop frantically cranking
out poetry simply to send it to publishers.

"You are Looking outward," he advised. "There is
only one way ~ go into yourself."

Albert Einstein said he got his best ideas while shaving. in
the morning - for him, a brief wilderness. sojourn.

-You may be missing your spiritual self if you do not go into
the wilderness. Jesus went off by himself to pray, and when he

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advised others, it was to go into a closet - into silence ana
aloneness. Our prayi is almost exclusively talking, thinking
up things to say to”’God. But there is a praying that is listen-

ing, a being silent before God, a speechless, voiceless. atten-:-
tiveness.

a

And in aloneness and solitude you may find a self that is
more Clear about your relationships, more capable of caring, more
loving and understanding. During the enforced experiences of
solitude that are part of Outward Bound and other outdoor educa-
tion programs, participants - absolutely alone in the woods for a
day or several days - almost always find their thinking focusing
on the other people who are important to them and almost always
report a profound deepening of their feelings about the relation-
ship even though the other person may be miles away.

The late Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, who thought and wrote
So perceptively about spirituality described this phenomenon:

"It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness
with which I can truly love my brothers. The
more solitary I am, the more affection I have

for them." [In Merton's Journal, The Sign of
Jonas, 1/2/50]

And if you have ever experienced the intimacy of love, you
know the rightness of the poet Rilke's. unforgettable observation:

"Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect
and border and salute each other."
[Letters to A Young Poet, p. 59}

. In the wilderness you meet your own humanity, a sense that
this is the day the Lord has made, this day given to you to live
fully, to treasure and to use this one and only life which began
with your birth and will end with your death. In the wilderness
you'’meet your mortality - and perhaps that is why.we are not
always. comfortable there.

In the wilderness Jesus encountered his vocation. He did so
by contemplating three alternative ways to live out his sense of
God's call, each of them involving a small compromise of his
integrity. It was vocational training for him. For three years
he was faced with similar decisions and at the end, the real
test.

The power of his story, which we have heard since childhood,
changes focus as we become older, and live more and know more.
And for me these days, the compelling dimension is my sense that
he did not have to-go to Jerusalem. He did not: have to do the
things and say the things he did there. He did not have to die,
just a small compromise, a word or two in the right time and
place would have mollified his persecutors and satisfied his
critics. He could have, with a very understandable ana very

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realistic word or two, given Pilate the reason he needed not to
crucify him.

The issue will, pray God, never be so dramatic for you and
me. But there is a sense in which we are put to the test every
day, responsible for making. decisions, entering relationships,
doing business... deciding for whom to vote, and which values and
hopes you want and will stand for and pay for, deciding to which

causes we will give ourselves, affirming who we are and what our -

lives are about... decisions that in one way or another refiect,
or do not reflect, God's love and God's will for the world and
God's purpose for our lives. 7

The moment comes without warning, with little time to re-
flect and how we face the test will depend on whether or not
there is a self - in here - discovered, nurtured, lived out in ~
some solitude, some wilderness. 7 .

God seems to abandon Jesus in the wilderness. That's how it
feels sometimes. The truth is that it is precisely when:-we feel
abandoned, that we begin to discover who we are, that we-find a
self; a self - loved into being by God, a self - capable of -
loving others, a self - created for full and joyful life.

So may you find, or may the spirit. lead you... into .some
wilderness, some solitude of heart... this ambush... this. si-
lence. a

Amen.

+ oF + FF + FF + FF + +

God. of all gentleness, in these days of Lent, lead us. once
again into the wilderness, to contend with temptations, to know.
ourselves, and to listen for your word of love and courage, in
Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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