The Wilderness Inside

If I were to ask you to imagine what the wilderness looks like, what do you see in your mind? Do you see a wooded forest? Do you see a scorching desert? Do you see a frozen tundra?

Whatever you see, I am willing to bet that what you imagined doesn’t look like downtown Chicago. Sure, some might refer to this place as an urban jungle, but I definitely wouldn’t immediately think of our context here in downtown Chicago as a wilderness place.

Maybe that means that we are wilderness deprived here. Maybe there aren’t enough spaces where we can be utterly remote and alone without the sound of our neighbors’ music playing or a siren going by. Maybe the concept of wilderness is unfamiliar to city folk like us.

But as I thought about that more and I thought about our Gospel reading from today where Jesus is lead after his baptism in Matthew’s Gospel. The wilderness is a place where Jesus is not just remote and alone, but it is a place where Jesus is tempted.

And if we key in on that last point, the wilderness being this place where we are vulnerable to temptation, then we are surely not deprived of wilderness experiences here in downtown Chicago. After all there is temptation all around us. In the stores and restaurants we pass, in the CTA advertisements that beg for our attention, in all that is presented to us to make us feel inadequate or insufficient without the next best thing.

This wilderness of temptation is all around us in this city, and in that way, we are not deprived of wilderness even though we are here in Chicago, and we can certainly relate to today’s Gospel. But there is another type of wilderness that we can relate to as well and this one is not dependent on where we live, because this type of wilderness is not external to us, but it is internal to us.

This is the wilderness of our minds that tempts us to believe things that are untrue. The tempting accuser in that internal mental wilderness telling us that we are unlovable, that we should be ashamed, that we are lesser than others, or possibly the most insidious temptation that I experience in my mental wilderness is to believe that I am somehow superior to others because of my white skin, my US citizenship, my maleness, my cis-genderness, my heterosexuality, or my ability.

I was listening to a podcast this week when it became utterly clear to me that the wildernesses inside of us are often more terrifying and tempting than the ones outside of ourselves. It was the Liturgists podcast if you’re wondering which one, and they were interviewing the incomparable Richard Rohr. I was kind of half listening to it as I drove until Rohr mentioned the enneagram. Now the enneagram is a personality type indicator with nine different personality types. This framework for understanding my unconscious internal motivations has helped me in so many ways, but back to Richard Rohr.

He mentioned the enneagram in the interview because they were talking about religious fundamentalism and how people who identify as ones on the enneagram are tempted to become fundamentalists because ones are reformers. They care deeply about right and wrong and they want to reform the parts of the world that are violating the rules of right and wrong that a one on the enneagram would hold.

Now Richard Rohr identifies as a one on the enneagram and he said something profound about his experience as a Catholic and as a one. In describing the self-righteousness Rohr is aware he possesses, he said that even in the height of his righteousness was never openly unkind to anyone, instead he said, “It was worse than that.”

It was worse than that. Even worse than wielding his righteousness outward towards people and cutting them down for their wrong beliefs, Rohr instead kept those thoughts inside of himself in his internal wilderness of temptation, where he could harbor his unkind thoughts about others without appearing to be judgmental.

But dear people we can only give in to the temptation of the accusers lies in our internal wildernesses for so long before those internal thoughts become outward expressions. And often after being stored away for so long, those internal thoughts then usually come out sideways.

They come out as nasty anger filled tirades, they come out as passive aggressiveness, they come out as self-harm or suicide, they come out as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, ableist laws and policies that oppress and kill our siblings of God.

Dear people, the internal wildernesses we dwell in must be named, must be shared, whether it is with a friend or family member, an anti-racism caucus, a licensed counselor or psychotherapist, or even here in this community of faith. People are suffering in their internal wildernesses, and because we don’t have safe and trustworthy spaces to share that suffering with others healthily, we transmit it to others in unhealthy ways.

The wilderness can be a terrifying and tempting place, but together with God we can accompany through the wildernesses of our lives. And God knows the depths of our wildernesses. God in the person of Jesus Christ was led into the wilderness and was tempted. And because Jesus suffered in the wilderness, the wilderness can be redeemed.

The wilderness can be a place of solitude free of the accusers lies. My most profound wilderness experience was on a trip with my Brother Nathan. We road tripped through southern Utah visiting National Parks and car camping in various places. But there was one night where we didn’t camp right outside the car. We camped deep in Glen Canyon. We got deep into the canyon using a kayak as much of Glen Canyon was flooded after the construction of the Glen Canyon Damn which formed the reservoir known as Lake Powell. It’s haunting to kayak through this canyon and see the tops of now dead trees that still stick out of the top of the water. Throughout the canyon are these little beaches that form under alcoves in the canyon wall. We kayaked for hours looking for one that we could set up camp on, but as we went deeper and deeper into the canyon, we found that all of these alcoves were already occupied by house boats that had beat us there. As it was almost getting dark, we finally found a free beach to pull our boat ashore to.

We set up our sleeping mats right out in the open as the walls of the canyon radiated the sun’s heat all night and kept us warm. When twilight set in we started a fire and the bats came out to catch all of the annoying flies that were buzzing around. And then as it became darker, and the bats had had their fill, they returned to their resting places and the stars came out in the most magnificent way.

In that wilderness experience we were remote and vulnerable for sure, but never before had I felt as connected to the dust of the beach below me or the stardust above me. It was akin to an Ash Wednesday service, this wilderness moment connected me deeply to my createdness and my mortality and ultimately to God who I felt was as present in that wilderness experience as my Brother Nathan was.

Our internal and external wilderness experiences are not always so enchanting, there are many moments of temptation for sure, but sharing these experience with others, and trusting that God has been in the wilderness and is with us in our own can help us navigate the wilderness and redeem it. May your journey this Lent through your own wilderness be life giving and redemptive. Amen.