Our Lenten Theology as Reflected on the High Altar: The Desert Tableau

Dear Friends,

Our Anglican heritage requires that we observe a faithful Lent. This charge and many others are reflected in the words of the Nicene Creed, “We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.” As Episcopalians we are bound to the traditions of the early church, and to the “observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word” (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 265). Let me stress that one’s practice of Lent should never become morose or self-abasing or—worse yet—a rote, faux-solemn forgoing of pleasures. We ought to approach Lent as an opportunity, not an obedience. After all, it is meant to be the church’s springtime, a time when a repentant and empowered people emerge out of the darkness of sin’s winter to be resurrected with Christ on Easter.

As part of setting ourselves apart and marking the season of Lent, we will display the desert tableau again this year on the high altar. The desert encapsulates an ideal that has found expression for centuries in the life of the church. It not only represents a physical location but a spirituality: “It speaks of the hidden life, of endurance, of testing, of simplicity, of self-abandonment, of the silent prayer of the spirit. It bears witness to the absolute priority of God.” The desert tradition originates in some of the oldest of Judeo-Christian scriptures. The long years of the Exodus were a period of testing and discovery. God had heard the Hebrews’ cries of despair and brought them out of servitude in Egypt, but it had taken four generations and 40 years of wanderings in the desert. For the people of Israel, the desert was a “great and terrible wilderness, an arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions” (Deut. 8:2). But it was in the wilderness that the children of Israel found their identity as a people, their law, their God.

The desert was also the crucible in which the prophets Elijah and John the Baptist were forged. Its stark purity annealed their passionate and single-minded search for God, the uncompromising quality of their obedience, their prophetic call to repentance, and their words of judgment. The revelation of all these witnesses found their full expression in the person of Jesus. The temptations in the wilderness were for Jesus a period of testing and discovery that readied him for his ministry. “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights”(Matt 4: 1-2).

As the Very Rev. John Moses wrote in his book, The Desert: An Anthology for Lent, Jesus’ time in the desert “speaks of the abandonment of everything in favor of nothing; or, to be more accurate, of the abandonment of everything in favor of God—and God alone.” Jesus allowed himself to be tested. If we are serious about following him, we will do the same. In its solitude and simplicity, the desert spirituality represents the absolute priority of the spiritual life. It can be a tomb. It can be a cradle. It can be a wasteland and a garden. It can be death and resurrection, heaven and hell. The physical desert has become a symbol of the experience of God-forsakenness, emptiness, abandonment, nothingness. Thomas Merton, making connections between theology and life, tells of the necessity to go down into nothingness if we are to receive God’s gift of hope.

My hope is that you will engage with our desert spirituality, and that you will begin by joining us for Ash Wednesday on March 9 at 12 p.m. This will be the beginning of a soul-nourishing Lent—a journey we will travel together. I promise you will be rewarded in more ways than one come Easter. “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom. For waters shall break forth, the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water” (Isaiah 35: 1, 6b-7a).

Faithfully, Dana+

i Moses, John, The Desert: An Anthology for Lent, Morehouse Publishing 1997, p. 12.
ii Ibid, p. xi (preface).
iii Merton, Thomas, The New Man, Burns and Oates 1961, pp. 2-3 (as quoted in The Desert: An Anthology for Lent, p.11).