Advent Advice, Part 3: Entering and Emerging from the Wilderness
Christmas happens at the manger. Lent happens on the journey to Jerusalem. Advent happens in the wilderness. Are you there? How do you get out?
The Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years. John the Baptist lived and preached there. God led Jesus into the wilderness to duel with the devil. For millennia, one way (among many) that Christians have read the Bible is allegorically. This means that you, too, will wind up in the wilderness.
A new love, a broken relationship, a dream, a sickness, a malaise, an addiction, a death – something will grab the wheel, steer you off your routine roads of safety and certainty, and crash your car into the woods. Are you willing to give up control of the wheel? What do you do when the struggle is over and you climb out of the crashed car into the mystery, quiet and menace of the wilderness?
Consult a map.1 The map won’t get you out, but it will challenge the temptation to return the way you came. According to the map, in the wilderness anxiety increases; motivation falls; patches on old weaknesses fray; arguments abound; decisions get harder because you no longer know where you are, or where you’re headed. Of course you want the quickest way out. But the map says this happens, not because you have failed, but because Jesus really meant it when he said you must lose your life for His sake to find it.2 For God’s sake do not turn around.
Then, put down the map. Recall when you were 16 and spent four days and three nights in the woods alone. The first night, after setting up a tarp for shelter from the rain, you discovered bear scat where you planned to sleep. You realized that for the same reasons the spot appealed to you for sleeping - flat, dry, no roots; it also appealed to bears. Suddenly you no longer dreamed of being Thoreau; you just wanted to get out alive. You felt a deep craving for company, but the trees and the river and the creatures out in the darkness were your only companions. So you sang yourself to sleep at night with “Sweet Baby James”, because that was the only lullaby you knew by heart. And you woke up in the morning without having been mauled by a bear, feeling more humble and more confident. The same is true again: acknowledge the fear and the danger, sing what you know by heart, let the loneliness and strength of your solo voice humble and embolden you.
Imagine you’re on the other side. You will find yourself wondering with self-pity, “How long will this last?” “What did I do to deserve this?” There’s a rich Christian tradition of imaginative prayer.3 Use it. Imagine you found yourself emerging from the woods with a new life – new direction, new relationships, new inner clarity and confidence. What would you want to say as you looked back on your time in the wilderness? Here’s my guess: you learned to surrender; you learned to lie down because you couldn’t see a way forward, and you met the stars shining, and the trees swaying, and the ground cradling you, and you remembered that God and His creation were far more supportive than you ever realized. And you felt a renewed desire to walk in the world as His friend.
Imagine that your wilderness is not just your own. Theologian Phyllis Tickle argues that about every 500 years the church has a rummage sale.4 About 500 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection came the Monastic movement; 500 years later came the Great Schism in the Church between East and West; 500 years after that came the Protestant Reformation. Now we are 500 years after the Reformation, which means that your wilderness may be connected to the culture’s religious practices and institutions being as strong as a rummage sale of dusty coffee mugs and an old dehumidifier sitting on your front lawn. You can bemoan that you weren’t born at a different time, or you can decide that your emergence from the wilderness may contribute to what Tickle describes as the the Great Emergence - the revitalized religious practices and communities that arise after the rummage sale.
Imagine that you may not make it out. The Israelites spent forty years in the desert. It was not the people who left slavery in Egypt and entered the wilderness who emerged; it was their children and grandchildren. Imagine that you, too, may not make it out. But your children and grandchildren might. What do you want to pass on to them? What do you think will help them in the wilderness, and in a new land that you won’t see? Here’s my guess: it’s not money or stuff. You want them to know in their minds and bodies what religious folks describe as seeing with the eyes of the heart, or putting your hand into the hand of God. You want to teach them that the way out isn’t a path they can see with their eyes, or make with their hands alone. Work backwards from there. Clean out your heart. Join your hands in prayer. You can’t teach what you don’t know.
Leave. After you have survived the night, go down to the stream. Kneel down, cup your hands, and splash your face with cold water. Take down your tarp. Pack what you can carry. Say good-bye to the scat, and the trees, and the creatures who accompanied you through the night. Then turn and leave. Take a step as if you’re being led. And then another step.
My favorite reference, especially working with organizations, is Managing Transitions by William Bridges. The advice in this paragraph comes from the chapter of that book entitled “Leading People Through the Neutral Zone”, pp. 39-56.
Matthew 10:39.
https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-prayer/the-spiritual-exercises/pray-with-your-imagination/