Desert – Spelled with One “s”

The first time I ever entered a desert, there was snow on the ground.  Needless to say, I was surprised.  Probably like many other people, I had associated deserts with the near absence of rain.  I had even heard about a book entitled The Land of Little Rain, which is an early example of American nature writing about a desert region.  Admittedly, what I encountered on my trip was not rainfall but snow.  However, the precipitation's being frozen made it even more surprising because I had also associated deserts with high temperatures.  Nor could high altitude account for the snow, because we were very close to sea level.  My surprise was even greater because I had lived for many years in a southern U.S. city where it snowed only once every ten years -- and I had come even further south to get to the desert.

The next surprise after the snow was that the desert's ground was not sand, but instead more like a gravel parking lot.  My third surprise was how fascinating were the variety of plants -- much more than cacti!  And I was struck by the desert's open vastness.

As I've thought about it, I've decided it is appropriate that I should have been disconcerted by the desert. Deserts, after all, were not designed to meet our human needs, nor even perhaps our expectations.  That is why in the Bible, the desert, or the wilderness, stands as a reminder that God neither created everything for humans, nor does God do everything for the sake of humans. Nevertheless, wilderness is seen as having its own value to God apart from any utilitarian value to humans.  As one verse puts it, " [God] has cut a channel for the torrents of rain, and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain... on the desert, which is empty of human life."  (Job 38:25-26, NRSV).

Although the desert's being a counter to human-centeredness has been the primary lesson spiritual writers have taken from wilderness, there is also a more subtle lesson there.  That lesson comes from how severe landscapes are somehow able to bring forth a kind of growth in us as well, a kind of growth that lush settings cannot induce.  The contemporary Christian writer Kathleen Norris, in reflecting upon another type of sparse landscape wrote:  "A person is forced inward by the spareness of what is outward and visible in all this land and sky.... [W]hat seems stern and almost empty is merely open, a door into some simple and holy state."

This "opening" effect seems to occur in part because the vastness and quietness of the desert can evoke a stillness within us when we are on such landscapes.  A quiet reverence.  The opening of something new within us can also occur as we become more aware.  Each creosote bush or small juniper tree surprisingly sprouting in a terrain that at first seemed barren can make us more attentive.  Deserts may be short on rain, but they have their own world of life, both plant and animal.  Deserts may be short on precipitation, but they have had for humans many lessons to tell.

~~~

Have you ever taken a vacation to a desert?  If so, which one?  What impressed you most about it?

(The Norris quotation is from

Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, by Kathleen Norris, © 1993.)

“Listen to the Silence”

Grammatically speaking, it would seem to be a contradiction, an oxymoron.  How can you listen to silence if "silence" means the absence of sound?  And yet it was the first thing my wife said to me when we got out of the car upon arriving at Big Bend National Park in Texas.  Few other tourists had arrived yet for the coming weekend, and we were many miles from any city.  "Listen to the silence," she said.

And I knew exactly what she meant because I "heard" it myself.  I heard how quiet it was. The absence of even any distant noise from cars on any highways was what made it so striking.  The irony was that because there was nothing to hear, we were listening more attentively.

In our increasingly technological (and increasingly urbanized) lives, silence is counter-cultural, almost radically so.  We have so many forms of electronic entertainment and communication that we are almost constantly receiving or sending sounds or messages.  To be silent and to listen to silence is rare.

The more important question, however, is not why our silence is rare, but instead, why is it so important?  And why might Nature be a key to obtaining it?

Part of the answer is that silence is a door into attentiveness.  If a friend is talking to me, I can better attend to what they are expressing if I listen silently, rather than looking for an opening to inject the busy thoughts of my own mind.  In parallel with that principle, the 20th-century spiritual director Evelyn Underhill taught that to be prayerful, a person had to be attentive.  Silence and attentiveness can lead to prayerfulness.

Many objects in the natural world emit no sound.  Thus, to truly attend to them -- to "listen" to them in silence -- can be a good way of becoming meditative.  This is one of the gifts of Nature.

We might expect to find in Mother Teresa's writings only thoughts about her ministry to the poor in India, but she knew the secret of this connection between silence and Nature.  She wrote:

"See how nature -- trees, flowers, grass -- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon, and the sun, 

how they move in silence.  We need silence 

to be able to touch souls."

There is also a link between inner silence and appreciating beauty.  The symmetries, colors, and harmonies in Nature that we experience as beauty can be a window into the Divine.  However, as Henry David Thoreau reminds us:

"You cannot perceive beauty
but with a serene mind."

~~~

Is there some way you have of coming to a greater inner serenity?  What is that way?

(The Mother Teresa quote is from A Gift for God
by Mother Teresa, © 1975, p. 69.
The Thoreau quote is from

 his Journal X, Vol. 16, Nov. 18, 1857.)