By day four the hunger pangs subsided.
And in their place another kind of hunger emerged.
I’d been in this secluded Pacific northwest wilderness for half a week with nothing but the clothes on my back and the knowledge and skillset that was now being put to the test. It was called Survival Week, the culminative rite of my nine-month deep nature connection training. I arrived at this juncture of my journey because I had experienced a spiritual dryness. The contemporary form of the church was no longer keeping my spirit green. I sought solace in an ancient rite hoping for what Thoreau called “the tonic of wildness” to water my dry roots.
And that night while tending my small fire, I experienced what I can only describe as a numinous warming in my heart. And I remembered. My biblical ancestors experienced this same ancient rite. They too had known the feeling of hunger and loneliness in wild spaces. The fire of God’s presence was now made manifest in my own isolation from the world. I spent the rest of that night doing something I had not yet done since arriving days earlier. I prayed. Apart from foraging on a few wild edibles, I was already fasting, so prayer only made sense. I must have prayed the Taizé song Veni, Sancte Spiritus a thousand times that night. And as I awoke the next morning, the weariness had dissipated. My hunger, gone. No longer was this to be a test of my physical ability to survive, rather my ability to thrive in the Spirit. In this threshold space of testing myself and intentional cultural deprivation, my life’s vocation was given new meaning. My body had absorbed the wild tonic and my spiritual roots replenished by the Spirit of God. And I will testify that the man that emerged from the forest a week later, was not the same one that went in.
Wilderness Immersion in Scripture
Throughout scripture, we observe the role that wilderness and desert settings play in the formation of God’s people and leadership. In the Hebrew scriptures, we have examples of Moses, and Elijah, who embark on forty-day wilderness journeys where they encounter the sheer intensity and the sheer silence of the living God. And in the New Testament, wild spaces provide the kindling that is needed to sustain the fires of ministry and mission. Nowhere is that more evident than in the lives of Jesus and his cousin John. In their ministries, they model three types of wilderness immersion experiences:
• An extended length of time for preparation
• A shorter length of time for rejuvenation
• An ascetic life of subsistence and cultural deprivation
When Jesus is driven into the Judean wilderness east of the Jordan River, he models for us the first example of wilderness immersion. For 40 days and nights he undergoes both a physical and spiritual initiation which the sole purpose is to prepare him for his mission and ministry. In addition to the spiritual temptations documented in the synoptic gospels; I imagine him constructing a simple lean-to or finding sanctuary in an outcropping of the rocky hills. I see him using a dry reed and spinning it between his hands to get a fire by friction. And perhaps just as his hunger pangs would have kicked in, he is tempted by the Adversary to turn stones into bread. Not entirely unlike my own survival experience, it starts out as a time for testing one’s skills of self-reliance by enduring the elements of creation. Yet the further along one goes, it gives way to the reliance upon the Spirit amid isolation. As I tell my wilderness survival campers, it’s about proving yourself and losing yourself. It is during this kind of primal encounter that one’s awareness is heightened. With nothing to distract the mind, one is forced to pay attention to the spiritual undertones that they might have missed otherwise.
The second type of wild immersion experience takes place during Jesus’ ministry. These ventures into the wild are short retreats that likely were only for a few days. In doing this, he shows us that wild spaces are not only for testing, but now also has a contemplative dimension to them as a place of solace for prayer, fasting and renewal. Other than for prayer, the text does not say what other sabbath practices he might have engaged, yet it was important enough for the Gospel writers to include it. And it is the form and methods found within this type of encounter that we have included in our spiritual practices. A contemplative retreat is the most familiar form of immersion experience that we engage in today. And like Christ, its purpose is to renew and affirm the vocational call of ministry.
Then there’s Jesus’ cousin, John ben Zechariah (aka the Baptizer). His wilderness experience is neither an extended foray for preparation, nor is it a retreat for renewal. For John, it was for the duration of his ministry (somewhere between 3-6 years, if not longer). The context is solely in the wilderness areas around the Jordan River valley. The landscape was the prophet to the prophet and where the word of God came to him. His diet and attire would be considered minimalist by today’s terms. His was a lifestyle of ascetic subsistence and a more direct link with Israel’s desert prophets. Outside of the desert monastic tradition, this type of immersion experience is rare in the history of the church, yet is it possible that it is being reimagined in the 21st century?
On the Edge
What the wilderness immersion experience draws to the surface of the soul are our edges. Edges are transition spaces, sometimes literal and other times metaphorical, where we face a crisis of limitation that breaks us from the normal pace of our lives. These are not comfortable places, they are spaces where we encounter trials, loss, and grief.
On Jesus’ edge lived the Adversary, from which he was tempted. John’s entire ministry was on the edge of Judaism. And yet these types of longer ‘edge’ experiences are not intentionally part of our own faith formation or even leadership development. We flirt with edge encounters when we go on a short retreat but for a truly transformative experience, we need to look at the longer immersion experience. How long?
Eco-psychologist, Robert Greenway observes that during wilderness trips, “it takes people four days to start dreaming nature dreams rather than ‘busy’ or ‘urban’ dreams.” And to him that “recurring pattern suggests that our culture is only four days deep.” I’ve known this to be true because I’ve experienced it in my own life. Longer immersion experiences reboot our biological and spiritual programming to our original Edenic setting.
I wonder if there isn’t a space for the more of the ‘preparation form’ that Jesus models for us in his forty-day experience or even a longer ascetic model of John? What if it were an integral part of the training of pastors and ministers? I could see the Messenger headline: First-year Bethany Seminary student undergoes 40-day wilderness encounter to test their calling from God. It’d make for good entertainment by today’s wilderness survival show standard. I’d subscribe for sure.
And what about John’s desert ministry of cultural deprivation? In her book Christianity, Wilderness and Wildlife, Susan P. Bratton asks the question, “Does some portion of the church need to voluntarily undergo cultural deprivation to provide clear vision for the remainder of the body?”
Cultural deprivation is just one type of edge experience. Is It safe to say that the church has not been good at cultural deprivation in and of itself? Bratton says that we need them now more than ever to “safeguard against cult personalities, national superiority, middle-class values and various forms of systemic oppression.”
For John, the symbolic sense of his being the one who announces the coming of the Messiah, meant that the Jordan River would be an edge space for people to repent, just as the Jordan represented the threshold space into the Promised Land from the Exile.
Our Edges are the new Wilderness
For many of us, 2020 was extraordinary to say the least. I’m wondering if it isn’t another kind of wilderness (edge) sojourn for many. Except that now the edges are not created so much by external landscapes rather as we navigate our internal terrains. Isolation shifts our focus and awareness from ‘out there’ to ‘in here’.
What are we finding in here? Our hearts. Our souls. What happens when we experience the production deprivation? We find other distractions. As we cringe at the words quarantine or isolation, we must remember that their etymological roots are tied to “forty days.” Extreme isolation in our edge spaces are supposed to make us more ascetic, not more self-indulgent. Yet as we are forced to our edges, we experience discomfort with the disruptions of our life’s need for control.
I see people emerging from edge experiences too, such as racial justice, who have something to say to the rest of the church. We need people who are dealing with their edges to speak to us. And we need to listen to their stories on the edge. The whole point of an edge experience is that what emerges afterwards looks nothing like what went in.
(Written for Church of the Brethren Messenger Magazine Jan/Feb. 2021)
