The wilderness year: Dana Littlepage Smith embraces the place where we wait, pray and act for change

‘In wilderness we become vulnerable enough to need the shelter and compassion of each other’s regard.’

In the wilderness of my kitchen, I place a rock to remind me of my friend in Colorado. She has placed a stone on the altar for her parish; they will look at it via a video link as they journey through Lent.

For those of us lucky enough to have computers, I wonder how these video links best serve us in the wilderness? And what is wilderness? Is it a place where I may loosen the stronghold of my compulsions? That second cup of coffee I reach for, wanting to feel the sap rising (Anglo-Saxons used the word ‘Lent’ to remind us of light’s lengthening in spring).

Is wilderness a place within me? Where the dead branches of habit want to be hewn away? Where the old narratives and perceptions, which never did serve, can be placed in the fire or breathed on by Spirit?

People throughout time and space on our planet have understood the need for vision, quest and wilderness: from sweat lodges to the sundances in which the first-nations people of North America have honoured Spirit in the wilderness.

The rapacious and consuming culture which swept across the USA was so threatened by the acts of self-sacrifice and endurance that these dances contained that they were outlawed across the Great Plains.

The Jews have known wilderness from Moses to Abraham: forty years of desert and quest. Abraham looked across the desert knowing his foot would never step into that promised land.

As Martin Luther King Jnr intuited on that night of the 3 April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee, before he was murdered: ‘I’ve been to the mountaintop… I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.’

Is wilderness a dynamic place of terrible tensions, where a black American can become president but where George Floyd can be killed in broad daylight as he tells a police officer he cannot breathe.

Jesus knew the road into wilderness; he walked in the well-trodden way of his people.

I love the wilderness dwellers of the Old and New Testament. In desolate places we meet other outsiders, widows, and unwelcome women. We see the sex-workers, the voiceless, the wounded, the thirsty, the starving, along with the widow Elijah visits, the woman at the well, the woman who brings nard to anoint Christ the beloved…

Is wilderness a place where we wait, where we pray and act for change? How might I inhabit the wilderness of Clapham Common and the desolate cell where police constable Wayne Couzens awaits trial for the murder of Sarah Everard?

How is it to dwell in wilderness of the abused and the abuser, in those the wild places of truth, seeking truth and complicity?

Is wilderness the place of ultimate paradox: of flesh and of spirit; of my decaying body and of love’s intention?

I live in the wilderness of blindness and seeing: personal and communal.

I imagine wilderness as the place where I die and where I walk with Lazarus, still stinking of dank, and where darkness is transformed into another light.

In this past year, we have all walked a wilderness of some kind. An astonishing 2.78 million people have died from the coronavirus. Healthcare workers, suited-up like intergalactic voyagers, have walked into the wilderness of hospital rooms to say farewell for family members, lost in a wilderness of separation.

When Christ stood in the Jordan to be baptised by his dear cousin John, perhaps he was standing in that fierce wilderness of radical acceptance. That tide that will sweep into the place of temptation and aloneness for forty days, then into an old garden of olive trees and wild violets, before he walks onto the wastes of Skull Hill and into a tomb.

Yet before he stepped into that way, a voice spoke reminding him ‘You are my beloved in whom I am well pleased’.

I wonder if wilderness is meant to remind us that we are beloveds. Be loved, be love. Do this in remembrance of me…

Some say that in wilderness we become vulnerable enough to need the shelter and compassion of each other’s regard. In our wilderness of this year of virus, we have stared out in hope from our little Zoom squares on screen.

Wilderness is demanding. Yet it may also be a place of manna, of comfort and of sustenance. The psalmist sings of sweet honey from the rock of wilderness.

Perhaps wilderness may be that place where I lay down my fear and defences, my compulsions, my requirements – perhaps even my belief.

May I remember the Beloved in the wilderness, along with the wildernesses we inhabit. May we walk carefully and cheerfully through one another’s wildernesses, tendering each other along the way.

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