First Reading from Mark 1:2-13

"As it is written in the prophets, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. And there went out unto him all the land of Judaea, and they of Juerusalem, and were all baptized of him in the river of Jordan, confessing their sins. And John was clothed with camel’s hair, and with a girdle of a skin about his loins; and he did eat locusts and wild honey; and preached, saying, "There cometh one mightier than I after me, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose. I indeed have baptized you with water: but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost." And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan. And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him: and there came a voice from heaving, saying, "Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness. And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him."
 
 

Second Reading – from The Solace of Fierce Landscapes by Belden Lane

In the Coptic language, the single word toou is used to refer to mountain and desert alike, suggesting that for early Egyptian monasticism all terrain beyond the safety of the Nile was regarded as equally hazardous, a place of brokenness where divine mercy must suffice.

What is the impact on the spiritual imagination of a barren and threatening environment—a land studded with rocky crags, creek beds that fill with the rush of sudden rains, creosote bush, mountain lions? Desert and mountain places are often associated with people on the edge, people whose recourse to fierce landscapes has fed some deep need within them for the abandonment of control.

"Desert people themselves sometimes show an indifference towards the almighty that is decidedly cavalier." They are not particularly awestruck at the immense majesty of the divine. Said a bedouin to an anthropologist in the nineteenth century, "We will go up to God and salute him, and if he proves hospitable, we will stay with him: if otherwise, we will mount our horses and ride off."

It is impossible to attribute any facile geographical necessity to certain religious ideas or preferences in spirituality. Monotheism is not inevitably a desert belief. Neither are saints an automatic product of desiccated land. Ed Abbey would have scoffed at the very idea. The desert, as he saw it, was as likely to produce outlaws as it was contemplatives. Holiness has never been a predetermined result of topography. Nor, for that matter, has orneriness.

The danger of a simplistic geographical determinism in the spiritual life is that it makes everything too easy. I can imagine that finding the right desert monastery, making the best mountain retreat, will occasion in itself involuntary holiness. But the desert, the mountain, offer no such guarantee. Physically being there is never enough. Growth in the spiritual life requires adopting a conscious "habit of being." Far too easily do we embrace the illusion that changing places is the simplest way of changing ourselves.

(Lane comments,) "God decided against the shorter route because (or for the very reason that) it was easier and less-demanding. God intentionally opted for the more difficult landscape, as if this were habitually the divine preference.

God’s people are deliberately forced in to the desert—taking the harder, more onerous and hazardous route—as an exacting exercise in radical faith. They are shoved down the difficult path so there will be no thought of ever turning back. They cover grueling miles of terrain so tortuous they will never by tempted to recross it in quest of the leeks and onions they remembers in Egypt. Perhaps others can go around the desert on the simpler route toward home, but the way of God’s people is always through it.

The answer given toward the end of Job’s book is directly connected with the fierceness of landscape. It is the desert and the mountains that provide the geographical setting throughout scripture. Jesus, gives the sermon on the Mount—on a mountain.

When God finally speaks out of the whirlwind, it is to conduct a tour of the harsh Palestinian countryside. God points to the wine-dark sea, the towering clouds over a desolate land, the storehouses of snow and hail in the distant mountains. God asks Job what all this has to do with him. Does the wild ox pay him any attention? Does the calving of a mountain goat on a rocky slope depend (in any way) on his frail knowledge? Does the eagle mount up at his command to make its nest in the tall cedars? Does Leviathan speak to him in a single word?

The answer, in every case, is that the rich mystery of life continues, stubbornly separate from all of Job’s anxious longings. His anxieties are absorbed into a dread landscape that goes on perfectly well without him, even though it surely seemed in the bleak corridors of his own imagination that nothing could have continued beyond the enormity of his suffering.

This ultimately, or course, isn’t an answer. But somehow, for Job, it’s enough. It drives him outside of himself and his need for vindication and fulfillment.

The gospel of Mark draws on this same tradition when it speaks of Jesus himself being "driven" into the desert. The Greek word ekballó in Mark 1:12 is a harsh word, having a sense of being roughly thrown or violently propelled. Jesus, like all of Israel before him, is forced to take the hard way, going directly from his baptism into the wilderness of temptation. Being thrust into the desert and its promise of death, he sounds in advance the keynote of his whole mission. The Son of God, still wet from the waters of the Jordan, impelled now into the wilds, is going to his death.

The recipients of hope in scripture are drawn geographically to the edge. An eschatological community takes shape on the boundaries, at the liminal place on the mountain’s slope. The established order breaks down, a company of the future is formed, new rules are adopted. Jesus repeatedly leads people into hostile landscapes, away from society and its conventions, to invite them into something altogether new.

Matthew incorporates a much older mountain motif traceable through the whole of Israel’s history. The most common word for mountain (har) appears no less than 520 times in the Hebrew scriptures. The religion of Yahweh takes form in a Palestinian topography distinguished by two ridges of mountains, extending down either side of the Jordan River. These mountains offer refuge and security for a people threatened by the enemies. Indeed, the Israelites become so identified with mountain ascendancy that advisors to the Syrian King warn him: "Their gods are gods of the hills, and so they were stronger than we." On the mountain, one meets the God of the unexpected.

The way of purgation involves an entry into what is unnerving, into what quickly reveals our limits. It seems at first, like most beginnings in the spiritual life, a mistake, a false start, an imperfection in God’s planning, a regression in our own growth. Only through hindsight do we recognize it for the unexpected gift that it is.

Wilderness spirituality has to start at the point where every other possibility ends, Whether we arrive there by means of a moment of stark extremity in our lives, or (metaphorically) by way of entry into a high desert landscape, the sense of naked inadequacy remains the same. Prayer without words can only begin where loss is reckoned as total.

The dainty and delicate will not thrive well in desert-mountain terrain. A life that is too comfortable or too safe will avoid such landscapes at all cost. Wild places are uncompanionable to the qualmish, to those compulsively anxious to please. They disclaim the false niceties of home, the small lies and pretences by which an entire life can sometimes be shaped. In fierce landscapes one knows that "being good, being sweet, being nice will not cause life to sing." There the fragile ego loses its props and supporting lines. Its incessant need for validation is ignored. "Count on it," says Gary Snyder, "Great insights have come to some people only after they reached the point where they had nothing left." Desert and mountain terrain provokes the identification and reordering of boundaries. It confronts people with their edges. In wild places, terror and growth-toward-wholeness walk hand in hand.

"(The wilderness), forces us to admit that grace rarely comes as a gentle invitation to change. More often than not, it appears in the form of an assault, something we first are tempted to flee. Such was the prophetic experience of Jonah and Jeremiah. For them, receiving God’s grace was more like being hit on the head with a book and called a warthog from hell, Ruby Turpin’s disconcerting experience in Flannery O’Connor’s story "Revelation." God’s grace comes sometimes like a kick in the teeth, leaving us broken, wholly unable any longer to deny our need.

In every journey through the desert and up the mountain path—there is an unavoidable encounter with the savage, fierce, and merciless. Entering the valley of the shadow of death or spending the night on Bald Mountain with its witches’ sabbath are equally terrifying experiences.

The desert is intrinsically hostile to the ego, threatening to swallow it up in its endless expanse of nothingness. Mountains (by contrast) provide—both physically and metaphorically—a decisively vertical edge. Standing at the top of a great cliff, plunging a thousand feet into the chasm below, one knows the unholy dread felt by creatures without wings. The abyss threatens to consume everything. Ed Abbey, that wild and irascible writer of the American southwest, would have growled that the desert is "nothing but a damned place to die"—a place where all your easy answers fall to pieces, where you yourself may end up as nothing more than buzzard meat.

As the early desert fathers and mothers knew, the wilderness possesses a stubborn indifference to one’s fervid quest for solace. One’s entry into the wilderness is marked invariably by confusion and loss. Something will always seem amiss.

The cloud-covered mountain is a symbol of exquisite terror, a disorienting place intimating abandonment and delusion. Whoever endures the horror of whiteout, the total incapacity experienced in a mountain snowstorm, or the frightening stillness of heavy fog, emerges with altogether new powers of being.

All of us are called to occasionally leave the cities and the marketplace. The desert monks were hardly naïve despisers of culture. What they fled with greatest fear was not the external world, but the world they carried inside themselves: an ego-centeredness needing constant approval, driven by compulsive behavior, frantic in its effort to attend to a self-image that always required mending.

The secularity most renounced by desert monks was the tendency they found within themselves to seek the praise of others, being dependent for their well-being on the favorable responses of their milieu. Ultimately, they chose to live in a desert habitat because they knew how well it teaches, without even trying, the importance of being emptied. American naturalist Sigurd Olson said that years of walking through wild country had taught him a great deal about traveling light. Back-packers learn, sometimes the hard way, that simplicity is always a question of knowing what to leave behind. This is a desert truth, translatable to the rest of one’s life as well. The spiritual path, as Meister Eckhart observed, has more to do with subtraction than addition.

"How much can you give up?" the desert asks. "And how much can you love?" Only in offering the severest answers to these two questions, does one ever discover, at last, the solace of fierce landscapes.
 

The fierce landscapes are not necessarily limited to the physical topography of mountain and desert.

Washington, D.C. has become a harsh environment for our government, where "survival of the fittest" seems to be the ruling principal in the debate over our President and his impending impeachment proceedings.

And there are fierce wars in Kosoco, and in Africa, and in Russia. There has been fierce weather, not only in the Southeast, but also in global financial markets.

So whether we like the wilderness or not, we’re surrounded by it. The religious questions is, What can be learned by going voluntarily into the desert? What can be gained by climbing a mountain? or sitting in front of a rocky cliff?

Richard Nelson once wrote, "There may be more to learn by climbing the same mountain a hundred times, than by climbing a hundred different mountains."

Next Sunday, after church are you invited to join with members and friends of the parish for yet another ascent of Mt. Wachusett. This is a small and friendly little mountain. It only takes about thirty minutes of moderate walking to get to the top. But there is always much to learn, to observe, to discover about yourself and your fellow travelers and your surrounding.

This summer, my husband and I went up onto a different kind of a mountain, Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. It was a perfect summer day in July, 80°, clear and sunny. Except you couldn’t see the summit: that part of the mountain was hidden in clouds. We went up in a friendly, and most unathletic fashion: by the Cog Railway. You sit back and have the steam engine do all the work. We did intend to take several hours at the top, hiking along the ridge. We expected the temperature to drop to 50°, and we’d read that there were strong winds. We brought lots of warm clothes, including hoods on our jackets, but at 80°, gloves seemed a bit much to take. We didn’t have a water jar, but there was a Visitors’ Center at the top with water and a big refreshment stand. Not to worry.

But we did worry, when we stepped off the train. Fifty mile per hour winds were whipping around us, and visibility was exactly ten feet. We couldn’t see the Visitor Center, which we were told was right in front of us. The wind made it difficult to walk. The trails were composed of large rocks (2-3 feet high). You had to use your hands to climb, and suddenly gloves seemed quite essential. We were rethinking our decision to hike. We went inside the Center, and there was a large poster; a long list of people who had recently died on Mt. Washington. The poster read: "We tell you this information, not to be morbid or sensationalist, but to warn you of the very real dangers on this mountain." And listed below were brief biographies of tourists who had come to the top without compasses, water or appropriate clothing and had taken a "little walk." A sudden storm had moved in, and they became disoriented and died of exposure to the elements. We asked the Ranger, "Is there any chance the weather will improve?" He said the forecast was bleak, but that up here, "you never know."

Jeffrey and I were definitely rethinking our hiking plans. We tried going down a short piece of trail. In less than a minute, we could no longer see the Visitor Center. We quickly returned.

We reluctantly re-boarded the train to go down the mountain. I was sad, but I knew we had made the prudent decision. Just as the steam engine started chugging away from the top, suddenly, the clouds parted and you could see twenty miles in every direction. I grabbed Jeff’s arm, "Let’s jump the train. I have to be out in this wild, ferocious, stunning, breathtaking scenery!" "No," he replied firmly, "the clouds could move back in just as quickly." He was right. But I was heartbroken. Some day soon we will return to the mountaintop, this time with gloves, food, hats, and a compass…and a whistle. But there are still no guarantees. Fierce landscapes always have the last word.

When I was in college and quite a committed agnostic, I first went to the desert, Big Bend National Park (in the southwest tip of Texas). It was the first time I had ever heard silence. No cars, no electric lines, no rustling leaves, no birds, no people. The silence was deafening and awesome. Even as an agnostic, I instantly knew why prophets and saints sought out this geography.

What draws people to the desert, to the mountains, to a wilderness spirituality (so beautifully described by Beldon Lane)? What is it about these places on our planet (and in our own hearts and minds and souls) that have the apparent power to teach us some of the most important lessons of our lives?

Lane describes these fierce landscapes as being savage, merciless places capable of killing you in an instant; places that are utterly indifferent to your well being. In this geography there are no distractions—there is only harshness and great spans of what looks sparse, ordinary and relentless. The dessert, Lane reminds us, is neither a dude ranch or a resort. It is a place of sandstorms, and heat and freezing cold, and poisonous snakes.

How strange that Mark would begin his gospel by proclaiming that it is only in the wilderness that you can hear the voice of the divine messenger. It was John the Baptist’s home, and he dressed like a true desert rat, a native. He had a good reputation of being ornery and combative. And when Jesus sought to be baptized, he went to John the Baptist and to the wilderness to get the job done. And then, the Holy Spirit shoved Jesus of Nazareth into the desert. Instead of a nice warm, comforting reunion between the Holy Spirit and Jesus, the Spirit, (we are told) drove, pushed, forced Jesus into an even worse environment. In this wilderness, even Jesus was forced into situations of deprivation, temptation and testing. In the desert Jesus encountered God and Satan—wild beasts and the company of angels.

In a very brief passage, Mark has given us a stirring description of the path of the spirit. While I personally love the wilderness (and will find almost any excuse to go out into it), my personal preference as far as a spiritual home would be something a little more comfy, safe, predictable, and reassuring. Why can’t we experience God in a formal garden? in a hot tub? at a great restaurant?

Flannery O’Connor announces that "grace isn’t nice." Well, that may be true, but I don’t have to like it! If it were up to me, the path to truth, reality and peace would be strewn with rose petals and some nice little shops, a good expresso bar, and the weather would be spectacular. And the road would be short, smooth, and reasonable with lots of great company. Of course, it’s not up to me (or to you either). Sooner or later, life will take us to places of vulnerability, anguish, helplessness and danger.

In the movie The Edge, the wealthy industrialist stranded in the wilds of Alaska (played by Anthony Hopkins) announces (to his fellow survivors) that most people in the wilderness die of shame. They feel so guilty and remorseful and inadequate for having gotten themselves into such a difficult jam, that they give up. They feel that when they find themselves in the desert (vulnerable, threatened, and needy), they have somehow failed "Life 101."

Scripture and the desert monks and nuns, and Beldon Lane would say, ‘No, finding yourself in the wilderness is not a sign of failure. It is a sign of grace." For there is solace and wisdom to be had in the desert. There are treasures that only come when our needs are irrefutable. There are consolations and blessings that are only available to the spiritual athletes who are willing to let go of comfort and control.

The gifts of the wilderness are miraculous, transformative, and without number. This morning I will mention only three: the gift of no choice, the gift of irrelevance, and the gift of the ordinary.

The first involves our capacity to embrace the challenges of this day, the unique circumstances that surround you right now. Peter Mathison tells the story that at the climax of his pilgrimage in search of the snow leopard, he met the lama of Shey Gompa, a monastery on the slopes of the Crystal Mountain, high on the Tibetan plateau. He asked the lama if he was happy there, where he’d lived for years in seclusion. Now old and crippled, he would never again be able to cross the high passes to the outside world. With arms flung to the sky the lama answered, "Of course I’m happy here! It’s wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!"

There’s the crux of the paradox. Can I learn to say the same, here; in the caughtness of where I am? Seeing this job as able to occasion the holy? Wishing for nothing else. "Especially when I have no choice!"

The second gift is that of irrelevance, an especially difficult pill for Unitarian Universalists to swallow. Thomas Merton spoke of a "deliberate irrelevance" lying at the heart of the monk’s vocation. Mountain spirituality witnesses to that which seems irresponsible to people on the plains.

Lane writes, "So much of my existence is motivated by the pragmatic, calculative values of the job. Even when I set aside time to be "wasted," I try to waste it in the most profitable way. In years past, I’d walk my children to the neighborhood playground, wanting to take out appropriate time for "fathering," but I’d also carry a book under one arm, just in case they began playing with others and I found myself with nothing to do. Even in deciding to go to a movie with my wife (for the sheer deliberate irrelevance of it), I unconsciously ask myself which film might offer insights useful in teaching or writing. (Quintessential American that I am), I do everything for the worth that’s in it, relating it to my job and the meaning I hope to derive from it. I keep returning to the basic Zen (and Christian) truth that it takes phenomenal skill to do nothing well. In his Autobiography, G. K. Chesterton shuddered at seeing people throw away their hard-won holidays by doing something, filling in the time with something relevant. "For my own part," he said, "I never can get enough Nothing to do."

Sometimes, human beings need to stop doing useful and worthwhile things, and pay attention to what is larger than their plans, their schedules, their immediate agenda. The work of the spirit will almost always seem irrelevant to the flatlanders, to those pursuing power, wealth, fame and approval—and the aggrandizement of their own egos. But some of us will occasionally need to step out of our normal environment and seek what is ultimately more true.

The last gift I’ll mention this morning is the gift of the ordinary. If you’ve ever spent a few days in the desert or the mountains, you discover a relentless sameness to the topography—lots and lots of rocks and repetition and monotony.

Lane writes, "There is a prolonged redundancy of ordinariness in the wilderness. How could I adjust to life’s untheatrical regularity when I’d been prepared for grand opera and dark tragedy? I could handle bad news. I’d worked at it all of my life. (Crisis is the only invariable constant for people schooled in codependency.) But how would I deal with the uneventful and commonplace? It was the disconsolation of the ordinary that I found most difficult to accept. I needed a book about When Ordinary Things Happen to Average People. I needed a spirituality of the uneventful, of the low places in one’s life that are neither deep nor exhilaratingly high. The ordinary invites us back to simplicity and a quiet acceptance of life’s rhythms."

The deepest joys are not so much spectacular as commonplace. "Do not forget," wrote Teilhard de Chardin, "that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things…as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value."

Edward Abbey also states it eloquently. "The desert world accepts my homage with its customary silence. The grand indifference. As any one of sense would want it. If a voice from the clouds suddenly addressed me, speaking my name in trombone tones, or some angel in an aura of blue flame came floating toward me along the canyon rim, I think I would be more embarrassed than frightened—embarrassed by the vulgarity of such display. As any honest magician knows, true magic inheres in the ordinary, the commonplace, the everyday, the mystery of the obvious. Only petty minds and trivial souls yearn for supernatural events, incapable of perceiving that everything—everything!—within and around them is pure miracle."

For those of us who don’t live in the deserts, who only visit the mountains or wilderness infrequently, Lane extends the invitation to search out those wilderness places close by where danger and death and emptiness are real. They are not far away.

"…Where, then, does one look for the moral and social equivalent of desert in our world today…in the deserted, abandoned centers of our major cities, in the waiting room of radiation oncology, the nursing home where I still visit my mother’s friends, the AIDS hospice nearby? People there are accustomed to risk, vulnerability, brokenness. But in a place where God often seems absent, they discover something liberating and free, something they cannot name but would never want to lose. The desert has to lead us, at last, from aloneness with God (in a moment of great and silent emptiness) to community with others, from the loss of the fragile self to the discovery of a new identity binding us to the world. Desert attentiveness and desert indifference lead necessarily to desert love."

Deserts will teach us what we need to know. They will bless us in ways we cannot imagine. And we will emerge from the desert with the kind of strength, and wholeness, that will accompany us all the days of our lives.