65. What is in the Desert?

Dearly Beloved,

Some years ago I was carrying out a conservation project on a rare goat antelope in the northern mountains of the Sultanate of Oman together with local Muslim men. These are desert mountains, hot, broken, precipitous and difficult and we would normally walk for three days looking for this animal or traces of its presence. One evening, after a particularly tiring day, my companion Hamid and I found ourselves in a in deep ravine in the shadow of mountain peaks; shadows within shadows, a place we had never visited before. As we settled down to sleep on the hard ground Hamid said a prayer to keep the small but deadly carpet vipers away. In the cool of the day these snakes are attracted by human body warmth. The prayer contained a reference to Jesus and Mary. When he had finished he said “now the snakes will not come, unless God sends them”. I thought of the De Profundis, “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee oh Lord (Psalm 130):

We settled down for the night in this dismal place but instead of darkness falling the sky started to glow red and the glow got steadily brighter. Then there appeared a lone pale cloud which moved across this sky from the East and it was clearly the word for God in Arabic script . I pointed this out to Hamid who immediately started to pray, and whilst I initially said prayers too I eventually followed the example of the disciples at Gethsemane and slept. When I did awake several times in the night he was still praying.

Whenever the desert is mentioned in the profane, mostly urban, tales entitled The Thousand and One Nights it is referred to as the place where “there is nothing save the presence of God”. John the Baptist came out of the desert full of the spiritual power to baptise; Jesus was led there by the spirit and tested for 40 days and Christianity owes much to the Desert Fathers who lived in or on the edge of the desert and thought, prayed and wrote. To the desert we owe some of the most profound thoughts, not to say controversies, about the action of God in the world through the Holy Spirit. 

In the desert man is stripped of his worldly pretensions but the Holy Spirit is nowhere so clearly manifest as in the nothingness of the desert. As John (3;8) says “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goest; so is everyone that is born of the Sprit.”

As for Hamid I like to think he was rewarded for his prayerful persistence that night with he gift of 24 children by three wives (at the last count).

Peace and Grace,

Paul.


Saint John the Baptist retiring to the Desert.
Giovanni di Paolo  c.1430.  
The National Gallery, London.




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