The Interior Wild
AM Psalm 97, 99, [100] • PM Psalm 94,
Isa. 63:7-14 • 1 Tim. 1:18-2:8 • Mark 11:12-26
I cannot say that I know much about the wilderness. I haven’t ever been to the desert. I’ve spent some time in the mountains but that is the extent of my experience in the ‘wilderness.’ There is something of the wilderness, that uncharted territory, in today’s readings. We are reminded of God’s faithfulness to God’s people in the wandering of the Exodus, through the uncertainty of the Davidic period, and through the Exile and return in Isaiah.
Often the wilderness can take on an air of evil. It would be easy to impose onto the wilderness any of the following words: wild, untamed, vast, dangerous. However, that doesn’t always have to be the case. The early monastics, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, sought out the harsh landscape of the wilderness as the backdrop to their ascetic struggles. There is an old saying about Egypt in the 5th and 6th Century, its deserts became the cities of God. Those great heroes of the faith St. Anthony, St. Pachomus, Amma Syncletica, and uncounted and unnamed others sought out the wilderness. In that wilderness they encountered the Divine in a way that is baffling to my modern sensibilities.
The Psalms for today remind us that God is with us in the wild places, both the literal deserts and mountains of the world and the figurative wilds of our interior self. For me, today, I think of the wilderness as a place I ever find myself in. It is the wild path of life. But as the Psalter reminds me, I am not alone. That same God of the stories is also ever-present to me in my wanderings, Their pillar of fire to light the way, and Their pillar of cloud to provide relief from the beating sun.
I leave you with a saying from one of those Desert Fathers, Abba Anthony, who said “'Our life and our death is with our neighbor. If we gain our brother, we have gained God, but if we scandalize our brother, we have sinned against Christ.”
Written by Jonathan Leonard
...who has had his love of the early monastics reawakened as of late.
For those interested in the Desert Fathers the Life of Anthony by St. Athanasius is a great place to start.