The unifying image of today's liturgy is the desert. Our first reading outlines the ritual enjoined upon the Jewish people; this is the manner in which they will give thanks to God for their deliverance from Egypt. But that deliverance was not accomplished without the desert experience. The forty days Jesus spent in the desert echoes the forty years his ancestors wandered in the wilderness. And the forty days of Lent are of course synonymous with the forty-day sojourn of Jesus. Lent is the Church's desert, its locus of preparation and testing, a time of stock-taking and repentance. Unless we identify our emptiness, we will not recognise our need for God's fullness.
The desert is a place of temptation and terror. It is described variously as the abode of wild beasts, the destination of scapegoats, the devil's playground. The image of the desert represents different realities for different peoples. Ghosts, banshees and devils have all but banished from our culture. They do not hold the same terrorising power over us as they did in our grandparents generation. Rural electrification exorcised them. But, as Mr. Adams said about another type of malignant shade: "They haven't gone away you know." Most writers today would say that the devils and ghosts have been internalised, modern man finds the desert within him. We have internalised the desert. There is common agreement that this present generation is as harried and haunted as any of their ancestors. Superficial sophistication may mask this relaity but it cannot change it. It is place of great loneliness, a place of testing. There the individual is shorn of all social props, deprived of the gimmicks and gadgets that distract us daily. We are thrown back on our own resources, forced to confront our unvarnished selves.
My work brings me into regular contact with young people. I like the contact. I enjoy their lively company immensely. Contrary to the common caricature, I find them respectful and almost too diffident and mannerly. But two things they cannot abide: silence or being alone. They are terrorised and frustrated by silence and solitude. I have often raised this matter with them, and they will readily agree. They have been assaulted by the ghetto blasters, entertained by television and stimulated by computer games ever since they were infants. No wonder the disco is the high point of their socialising: there all five senses are assaulted simultaneously. The struggle and solicitude involved in desert experience of today's gospel is alien to them. We should not be in the least surprised that they find Sunday Mass insufferably boring.
But the desert cannot be avoided. It can be kept at bay for a time, perhaps. The dark desert is as much part of us as our right hand. The wastelands are within. It is within that the metaphorical beasts now roam, it is within that chasms of emptiness open up before us, threatening to devour us. Early this century T.S. Eliot expressed this truth in his "Choruses from 'The Rock'":
"In all my years, one thing does not change.
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
Forgetful, you neglect your shrines and churches;
The men you are in these times deride
What has been done for good, you find explanations
To satisfy the rational and enlightened mind.
Second, you neglect and belittle the desert.
The desert is not remote in the southern tropics.
The desert is not only around the corner.
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you.
The desert is in the heart of your brother."
We neglect and belittle the desert at our peril. We can resort to short-term expedients to still the beasts that roam within. We can anaesthetise them, dope them or distract ourselves from them. Luke tells us that Jesus was offered such short-term solutions. His hunger could be circumvented by the magician's charm. Stones would be turned into loaves of bread before his eyes. Jesus immediately recognised this as a hollow promise. The human being is not one-dimentional. The hunger of the human being runs much deeper. There is more to man than meets the eye. The promise was in fact a distraction, not a solution.
Having rejected the magicians empty charm, the carrot of power was dangled before him. And, in what surely must be the closest biblical parallel to the satellite dish, Luke tells us that the Devil, "in a moment of time, showed him all the kingdoms of the world." He promised: "I will give you all this power and the glory of these kingdoms." The trappings of power must have their attraction. In fact, the Jewish psychiatrist Victor Frankl held that "the will to power" was one of the four basic drives that fired every human being. But, as Frankl discovered in the German concentrations camps, the "will to power", the temptation to dominate others, was the most corrupting drive of all four. It transformed otherwise insignificant men into cold, cruel monsters. But, despite the temptation, Jesus stuck to his own vision of power as service: "The Son of man came to serve and not be served."
Frankl identified a human drive that is superior to self-preservation, propagation, or power. He called it "the will to meaning". This consists of the human need to make sense of our own identity and of our role in the world. In his famous maxim, he held: "If man has a 'why', he will tolerate any 'how'." In other words, if we have a reason for living, the circumstances in which that life is lived is secondary. Jesus in the desert came to grips with his identity, with his vocation. He confronted the darkness within, wrestled with his wild beasts. He came to terms with the fact that the way of life he was about to embark upon would be difficult and, ultimately perhaps, fatal. However, he emerged from the desert with a clear vision of his vocation and an unshakeable confidence in his Father's love for him. This was sufficient to sustain him on the journey.
The servant is not greater than his master. We will all, inevitably, whether Jew or Greek, be forced one day into our own personal desert, whether through illness, unemployment, depression, broken relationships, addiction, compulsion or betrayal. We will be called upon one day to wrestle with one or other of these wild beasts. If we have the strength to confront them with the eyes of faith, if we spurn the short-term expedient, we will emerge to greet an Easter dawn.
Home