In the course of it, I noted:
Deserts are, in the Old Testament tradition, places where we can feel far from God while, in fact, finding he is very near to us. Israel spends time there. So does Jesus himself. So does Paul after his massive encounter with the Risen Christ. Desert times can be incredibly valuable spiritual times.
A reader responded:
No disrespect to your message to your reader, but I do disagree with your setup. The wilderness has very often been associated with meeting God in the Torah. The burning bush wasn’t in Pharaoh’s palace, nor did Elijah get fed by raves in that new place downtown. God was not happy that David wanted to build a Temple and do away with the moveable Mishkan.
I think you are misreading me and we are not disagreeing. I agree that deserts are associated with meeting God. They are also associated with feeling far from God, which is not the same thing. Israel bitches at Moses for leading them out into the desert. The psalmist complains of being in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
That is the paradox of the desert in Scripture. It shows us a God who is “close to the broken-hearted” (Psalm 34:18), a God who, weirdly, inspires psalmists and who literally speaks through them by his Spirit as they write complaints about feeling utterly abandoned by him. Indeed, psalms of complaint are among the most common form the psalms assume and one of them, Psalm 22, is on the lips of the one who closer to the heart of God than any other human being–who is indeed the heart of God–as he cries out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
This strange paradox we see foreshadowed in israel’s desert experience of feeling far from God while in fact he is drawing closer to them than he has ever been is played out in the lives of Christ’s disciples too. It is at the heart of St. John of the Cross’ spirituality of the Dark Night of the Soul. And it is why I have always found deep consolation in this passage from THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS:
So you “have great hopes that the patient’s religious phase is dying away”, have you? I always thought the training College had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. has no one ever told you about the Law of Undulation? Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation — the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life — his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dulness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.
To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite. Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself — creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.
And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little over-riding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs — to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
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