Jesus Caritas Fraternity of Priests, USA - The Vision of the Gospel

The beauty of the desert is, obviously, not that of a garden, with its mass of colors and well-ordered shapes. Its beauty lies. rather. in what it lacks: its absence of living things, its colorless colors, its disorder. And its positive qualities are those that mark, for us at least, a rupture: extremes of temperature, violent sand-storms, rare but sudden bursts of drenching rain that endanger life. Perhaps by reaction to his past life of over-indulgence, Charles has a natural attraction to the bareness of the desert. Its austerity healed his spirit. There was, too, the challenge of conquest, each journey a victory over odds.

But even before his conversion, Charles had felt "the pull" towards something "more" that passes through the desert, and that his fellow soldiers experienced, whether believing or not. Of course, God is omnipresent, but we are not always present to Him! The desert can, and often does, remove many obstacles. Distractions are removed, attention is concentrated, and so an emptiness is created, which can, grace aiding, become an expectant and welcoming emptiness, a space for God. This vague feeling, which Charles like others experienced, became, when he returned to the Sahara filled with Jesus, a positive desire to enter more into the depths of God. The physical deprivation and solitude of the desert were welcomed as both symbol and means for loving union with his God.

As always, Charles referred to the example of Jesus. Had he not spent "forty days" in the desert, as the Israelites, as Moses, as Elijah did? And did he not go off apart, to pray in desert places, alone with his Father? Charles is clear that the desert-life was not that of Jesus, as it was for John the Baptist, or, we could add, for the Qumran community. But, as Charles loves to insist, Jesus did regularly and frequently retire to desert-like places, as though to renew and prolong the intimacy and strength of his original "forty days".

A closer examination of Charles" meditations on the meaning and value of the desert show, I think, that, if we analyze, we can find three elements. The physical desert is the symbol of, and the summons to the "desert" of solitude; and the "desert" of solitude in turn is the symbol of, and summons to the "desert" of the heart with God. More simply, the concrete experience of living and travelling in the "real" desert of stone and sand tends, of itself, to free the heart from false and multifarious attachments, and so the heart, thus freed, and as it were "alone", is open to respond to the calling of God who "speaks" to the heart that is "pure", that is, free and given over to His presence. God thus uses nature and grace to lead the soul of His bride back to Himself, by the "bonds" of tender-love, healing, enlightening, uniting.

Does such a desert experience remove us from people and their problems? No, it rids us of prejudice, and opens new ways.