“After fasting for forty days and nights, Jesus found that he was hungry.” – The Gospel of Matthew
Forty days lie before me,
and I’ve lived this wilderness repeatedly,
meeting it with joy on a fractal river,
or in the rain on a mesa’s ledge,
finding my love in a mountain meadow,
agape with blue, like the lake below,
and the sky, and the minds of the mountain goats,
standing above the ice bridges
that drape down the rock like skirt folds.
Always, at the beginning, there is joy in fasting,
freedom in the long lope of the sky,
the cloud’s running, the wind’s shriven cry.
The stones and mountainsides want to hold me
and tell me that I’m loved.
And then, one morning, I wake up hungry,
and grimace at the shimmering sands,
and leave the round oasis of my joy.
The devil stands on the horizon, waiting.
My hunger sends me stumbling towards him.
I find my emptiness again.
Illumination
The Gospel says that it took Jesus forty days to become hungry, and this is true to my experience of the beginning of Lent. Always at the beginning there is a spacious sense of freedom. As one would find in the wilderness, where the sky is big and undisturbed, and the mountains catch the sunlight and hold it there. Then, near the end of the season, in its last weeks and days, all of the disciplines that I’ve taken on become onerous, and the compulsions that I’ve surrendered start making their demands again.
Yet, if I’m honest I must admit that the first stanza of this poem contains half-truths. As I thought about the freedom of the wilderness, I thought of a camping trip when I was twenty-one, and an acid trip beside a river in Coronado National Forest. I thought about an attempt at a vision quest on a mesa of that same forest. I thought about my honeymoon, spent hiking in Glacier National Park. Each occasion impressed me with scenes of beauty and felt encounters with the sublime. But each also occurred at a time when I was lonely, or felt alienated from the friends I was camping with, or felt anxious as I was trying to discern my role as an adult and as a husband. That is, each occasion allowed for a moment bathed in wonder, but wonder was not the prevailing sentiment of the days or weeks spent in the wilderness. I have borrowed images from these experiences to illustrate the freedom I feel at the beginning of Lent, but the images come from a time when I was anything but free.
I have never really had Jesus’s experience of wilderness. I am a twenty-first century American, and I have been taught by romanticism and an idea of the frontier to think of wilderness in a strange way. In 1995, William Cronon wrote a famous essay entitled The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. The essay is a critique of American environmentalism’s approach to wilderness. He writes that for most of human history the term “wilderness” referred “to places on the margins of civilization where it is all too easy to lose oneself in moral confusion and despair.” Wildernesses were thought of as desolate, savage wastelands, and much human effort was given over to changing them, cultivating them, bringing the memory of the Garden of Eden into the lands that existed beyond the gate that was guarded by the angels with the burning swords. If one sought paradise in the wilderness, it was through the cultivation of the land and the soil, the slow, generational work of making it habitable for human beings. Until such cultivation was complete, the wilderness remained a place of spiritual testing where, in Cronon’s words, “the boundaries between human and nonhuman, between natural and supernatural, had always seemed less certain than elsewhere.”
But in the eighteenth century this began to change. In the writings of William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau, and many other poets and philosophers, wilderness became a sublime landscape, a place of wonder that represented everything that human beings had lost. Our conception of it moved from the wastelands beyond the Garden of Eden to the garden itself. These writers named mountaintops and waterfalls and roaring rivers and massive canyons as temples set aside for religious awe. But because awe was now the standard, other places of wildernesses – swamps, plains, scrub lands – went disregarded, and, when the National Park system took shape, unprotected.
In addition to being the site of sublime experience, the wilderness also took on the nostalgia of America’s closed frontiers. The frontier was the place where American democracy found its vigor and creativity. Some late 19th century writers saw it as a collectivist place, where people bonded to create new institutions. Some saw it as the landscape of rugged individualism, where a man could be a man, unsullied by the corrupting demands of civilization. In both schemes for imagining it, the frontier wilderness was what made us as a people, and its closing was met with sorrow and fear. And so the national parks were created to allow us to visit it, to experience both a sublimity that was close to God and a monument to who we are supposed to be as a people.
Cronon points out the many drawbacks to this way of thinking about wilderness. If wilderness is set aside into national parks, it becomes a tourist destination. Since its sublimity is supposed to be preserved, no one can live in it. The fact that people have lived and worked it for millennia is disregarded, and the ancient hunting rights of native people are reckoned a form of poaching. Habitats are preserved for a few charismatic species in the mountains and the canyons, but in the swamps and plains and marshes many small and ignored species are allowed to die off as industry and its effluvia invades their environments. Because we have preserved small spaces of wilderness, we can congratulate ourselves for having preserved nature writ large, even if this is far from being the case. And we focus our environmentalism on trying to protect uninhabited places, and ignore the environmental catastrophes happening in our cities and towns, which disproportionately affect poor people.
Jesus’s experience of wilderness was very different from this, occurring in different categories than the sublime and the frontier. Maybe, for forty days, he felt spacious and free. But it must have been a disorientating freedom, a freedom that broke apart understandings of selfhood and definitions of space, that brought the stars into the gaping mind and pressed the concern of memory into the shape of the desert landscape. An astounding alteration of understood reality. Maybe fractal is the right word for this experience of wilderness. A thing seen, and as soon as the imagination can grasp it, subtly changed and glinting with other changes. Always leaping away from the imagination and the mind, fracturing it, reconstituting it, refusing to let us rest. If it is an experience of spaciousness, its the spaciousness that comes from looking at the stars and knowing that each star contains a squirm of flaring gasses and hides a multitude of planets and moons which, in turn, teem with multitudinous life. Looking at those stars, all that is-ness, and knowing that they exist in the vacuum of space, that vast and terrifying void. So much spaciousness that the mind cannot contain it, and a freedom that seems predicated on our insignificance, rather than our greatness.
And yet, there in the wilderness, Jesus must have also met a Thou. In Martin Buber’s classic formulation, to stand in an I/Thou relationship is to fully encounter something other than yourself. To know it in its totality but not know how you know. To understand that it is not something that can be used. It can only be related to. If Jesus meets God in the wilderness, he encounters God as Thou, not a subject for our speculations, or a proof of philosophy, or a case to be made against despair, but a full personhood that cannot be atomized into separate movements or parts.
Forty days of encounter with this Thou. Forty days! For those of us who only know God through caught glimpses and intimations, it is impossible to understand what a forty day encounter with God’s totality might be like. To do nothing but breathe God, speak to God, touch God, think God for forty days! I cannot grasp it. It is beyond me.
I have only hints. Some memories of poetic freedom by a river or while hiking. The intimations I glean when I sit at my desk to write. The daily preservations of my disciplines and ascetic choices. This is not Jesus’s wilderness sojourn. But it is a discovery of the divine within daily life. As true nature can be discovered, in William Cronon’s words, beside “a small pond near my house where water bubbles up from limestone springs to feed a series of pools that rarely freeze in winter and so play home to waterfowl that stay here for the protective warmth even on the coldest of winter days, gliding silently through streaming mists as the snow falls from gray February skies.”