The Wilderness Encounters with Divinity

Solitude and infinite majesty dispel any notions of self-sufficiency.

From its edge, I stood looking out over the Judean wilderness. In the summer evening, maroon shadows spilled across the hills. The desert was empty of man.

Two thousand years earlier, Jesus had fasted and faced Satan in this arena. Few New Testament passages are more familiar than that 40-day sojourn, and as I looked out into the crucible of sand and rock, I recalled other, lesser-known gospel accounts of Jesus venturing alone into country perhaps not as remote as this, but still mountain and desert beyond the outskirts of villages:

“And he withdrew himself into the wilderness, and prayed” (Luke 5:16).

“And … he went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God” (Luke 6:12).

“And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone” (Matt. 14:23).

“And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed” (Mark 1:35). Or, as related in Luke 4:42, “And when it was day, he departed and went into a desert place”.

On these occasions, Jesus was not seeking simply a refuge from the crowds, though wilderness could provide such a sanctuary (as recorded in Mark 1:45 and John 6:15). Rather, Jesus was here using the mountain and desert for a purpose the gospel writers make explicit: prayer. The country beyond the edge of civilization was the setting Jesus chose for prayer.

These verses provide more than topographical color or a bridge in the gospel narrative. They offer, I believe, a clue to prayer and the way wilderness—both first-century Judean and twentieth-century American—can serve as a house of prayer.

I had a hint of this long before I became acquainted with the New Testament. While I would have been unable to invoke a scriptural passage for support, my days in the wilderness had shown me that there, in mountain, forest, or sandstone canyon, prayer flourished.

I was slow to see why this was. I recall numerous trips through back country where I was simultaneously tremulous and exhilarated—overcome, as C. S. Lewis once wrote, of numinous awe, with “wonder and a certain shrinking.” It was a rather benighted state. I would irregularly break the silence with laughter, then glance hastily about to see if I had startled any fellow backpacker.

One autumn night as I lay in a sleeping bag, I identified what it was that for years wilderness had been stirring within me: it was a sense of my own vulnerability, of my own fragility and transience. This perception had a profoundly disquieting effect: it dislodged my notion of self-sufficiency, replacing it with a sense of dependence on God. Pride gave way to prayer. This was caused in part simply by the solitude and silence of the wildeness. Theologian Henri Nouwen has written that in solitude “a rebellious heart turns into a contrite heart.” And where can extended solitude—isolation from distractions and the daily centrifugal forces that keep us off balance—be so readily encountered as in the wilderness?

On hiking trips I have taken alone, often into the desert canyons of the southwest, prayer has become a virtual companion. I have walked for miles past cliffs of burgundy sandstone, the walls suspended like 500-foot-high tapestries embroidered by waterfalls, and come across no one for days. I have found myself praying on scores of occasions in that solitude, prayers of petition for my continued well-being, prayers of thanks for my sight and mobility. Normally merely dutiful and absentminded, my prayers in the wilderness have become expressions of impassioned clarity.

But prayer is also triggered by another gift of the wilderness, even more important than solitude: fear. It is fear of broken terrain and unknown wildlife beyond our ability to control. It is a fear that breeds awe and reverence: healthy, judicious, pride-puncturing fear. A wilderness traveler walks through country so finely crafted or terrifyingly gargantuan that any lingering agnosticism can burn off as quickly as a morning’s skiff of frost.

A friend often recites to me a litany of dangers lurking in the back country, a list headed by “rattlesnakes,” urging them all as good reasons for staying home. But it is precisely that uncertainty, that possible peril, that distance we walk away from electric lights and hospitals that is the value of wilderness. We do become fearful. Our well-being is precarious. We enter briefly an arena where illusions of self-sufficiency become unraveled. And it is in this state that we are inclined to turn to prayer, to listen to someone beyond ourselves. It is not that God reveals himself more clearly in wilderness. It is that there, in the ringing silence, we are more likely to hear him.

This is the critical distinction between wilderness and the tamer, pastoral nature of gardens or parks. All nature may offer hints of God’s handiwork, but only in the wilderness is there terrain whose scale reduces us to awe. The remaining pockets of wild country remind us that we are not the Creator.

God’s use of wilderness as a stage for humbling has deep Old Testament roots, the Sinai wandering led by Moses being a single, epic example. For 40 years, the ancient Hebrews found their sustenance each morning on the desert floor. There was a portion of manna for each person, but it was impossible to store. And what was God’s stated purpose? To instill in the generation raised in the desert a sense of complete, and daily, dependence on him. Delusions of self-sufficiency fared poorly in the Sinai.

I recently heard a minister preach with irony on our contemporary dependence on God, offering as one example the “hospital phenomenon,” his title for the dramatic metamorphosis undergone by parishoners entering the confines of a hospital. He said he was consistently startled by the speed with which patients, their mortality underscored by sickness, placed themselves in God’s hands. Casual faith, he noted, became passionate.

All of us can cite examples of this. But surely there is something ungrateful about waiting for disease or other crises to remind us how completely we rely on God. That is like the sailors in Shakespeare’s The Tempest who cry out, “All’s lost! To prayers, to prayers. All’s lost!”

And this is where wilderness enters in. By its landscape and solitude, by the fear and awe it summons up, the wilderness ignites prayer when we are upright on our two feet in gratitude, and not on our knees in despair.

I have been surprised by the number of pastors and Christian laymen I’ve met who have neglected the importance of wild country. They—who should have recalled that wilderness was historically the place of covenant between man and God, that it was the mountain and desert to which Jesus repeatedly chose to withdraw for solitude and prayer—have tended to view wilderness as merely a metaphor instead of an actual spiritual reservoir that can still be visited.

Just as Jesus retreated alone throughout his ministry, so there is value in our making similar sojourns whenever possible. Such a venture is not without difficulties, particularly for those who live far from wilderness areas, or who are physically disabled. Fortunately, the number of programs designed to make the wilderness available to inner-city residents, as well as persons with handicaps, are increasing. People heretofore prevented from visiting forest, mountain, or desert can now personally examine John Muir’s exuberant claim that “while God’s glory is written all over his work, in wilderness the letters are capitalized.”

In recent years, my journeys into the back country have slowed somewhat. Commitments, I tell myself. Family. But at least once a year I don hiking boots and cross the threshold, letting evening find me camped beside a stream. In the lavender twilight, while waiting for the stars to come out, I occasionally recall conversations with acquaintances who believed wilderness was “unproductive” and “outside the market economy” and, as such, dispensable. I would respond quickly, citing a host of reasons why the wilderness should be preserved. I would bring up its value for recreation, for wildlife and watershed, for psychological growth and biological research.

But now I would add another reason, to me the most compelling, why the wilderness should be prized: its spiritual value; its ability to trigger prayer by instilling in us a fearsome and grateful sense of dependence on God. The remaining islands of wild country provide a setting where, amid the awe, silence, and solitude, we can gather our spiritual bearings. The wilderness remains for us, as it was for Jesus, the God-given house of prayer.

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