The Wilderness - time for silence

 

1^st Sunday of Lent – Eucharist – 26.ii.23

 

(Genesis 2.15-17, 3.1-7; Romans 5.12-19; Matthew 4.1-11)

 

I’m always grateful when people give me feedback on things I’ve done, said preached or written - especially if it’s positive feedback. Recently someone (not a regular churchgoer here) was telling me how she’d been intrigued  by an article I’d written in our Parish Magazine about going on retreat. I’ve just looked up again what I’d said:

One of the best things I have done recently is to have gone on retreat… Sometimes you just have to recognise what you shouldn’t do so that you can clear the decks and do nothing.

Actually not quite nothing. To go on retreat is to make a deliberate effort to make space. You might have ideas of how you’ll use your time, especially if you think you’re going to read lots of books or write down your most profound thoughts. But that’s not the point. The point is to find stillness and space - and let things happen within that space; let God have the chance to speak - which is a very good reason to stop talking ourselves!

Mine was a retreat specifically for clergy - but anyone can go on retreat. We knew that meals would be in silence, and we weren’t going to talk to each other, however interesting we might have been. No television, and there was a notice that we wouldn’t be given a WiFi code to access the internet. So four days of silence, joining in the regular prayers of the Friars in Alnmouth, walking, reading books I hadn’t expected - most of all making space for God. It might not be for everybody - but we all need time to stop, listen and be open for something beyond planning.  

 

Today, on this First Sunday of Lent we remember the time which Jesus gave to prayer and fasting in the desert right at the start of his public ministry. Before he goes about preaching and teaching, before he speaks, Jesus has to listen. The hymn we sing gets that:

            Forty days and forty nights,

            Thou wast fasting in the wild,

            Forty days and forty nights

                    Tempted, and yet undefiled. 

In Lent we remember those 40 days which Jesus spent, fasting in the desert, led by the Spirit, praying that he might discern God's will. We don’t read this Gospel just so that we can look back on Jesus’ time in the wilderness and seek for inspiration by recalling it. We don’t read it so that we can be encouraged by his resistance to temptation. St. Matthew and St. Luke go into quite a bit of detail about the three temptations resisted by Jesus - and his dialogue with Satan. But if instead we look at St. Mark’s account, probably the earliest telling of the story we find there’s no telling of the temptation to turn stones into bread, to chance God’s arm by leaping from the parapet of the Temple, nor to fall down and worship Satan in return for dominion over earthly kingdoms. That’s not to say that they don’t happen. But because Matthew and Luke take up so much space in telling their story, perhaps they lose the perspective that we need. Mark - on the other hand - is sparing in his telling of the story: merely that Jesus was in the wilderness for forty days, that he knew the reality of temptation - and that he found himself in the midst of wild beasts and angels.

So, having read St. Matthew’s Gospel account today, I want to direct you to St. Mark’s version, right at the beginning of his Gospel: Mark is saying that Jesus went into the desert to fast and pray and so that he could discern God’s will. He tells us that the Spirit drove him there. And Mark doesn’t tell us what Jesus did once he got there. He was simply there. And stuff happened to him, like the temptations - and finding himself with beasts and angels. We make sense of this wilderness time by putting it in the context of what has already happened to Jesus at his Baptism, when he is acknowledged as God’s Son, and then what follows, as Jesus preaches the coming of the Kingdom and the urgency of responding to it. In between there’s simply that space of forty days - empty time in an empty place.

Wouldn’t you love to get away from it all? So many of us say that. But would we want something so extreme as that time spent by Jesus in the desert? I’ve just gone back to Sara Maitland’s book, which has the title, “A Book of Silence.” It’s a memoir of her experience in seeking silence - a journey which has taken her from “an unusually noisy childhood,” as she puts it, through gregarious years of challenge and excitement as a student, through family life in that least peaceful of places, a Vicarage, eventually to her establishment as a hermit, living at first not far from here in Weardale and now on a remote moor in Galloway. Her quest has been for silence. She writes:

We all imagine that we want peace and quiet, that we value privacy and that the solitary and silent person is somehow more ‘authentic’ than the same person in a social crowd, but we seldom seek opportunities to enjoy it. We romanticise silence on the one hand and on the other feel that it is terrifying, dangerous to our mental health, a threat to our liberties and something to be avoided at all costs.

I’m sure she’s right that the quest for silence requires real commitment, and we shouldn’t under-estimate the demands that silence can make upon us. Before I undertook an eight-day Individually Guided Retreat, I was required to fill in a questionnaire - and there was a warning that if you hadn’t had previous experience of at least four days of silence you should not sign up. It’s when you find yourself on your own and in silence that you find not merely the opportunity for peaceful reflection, but also all the disturbing voices speaking which otherwise you can ignore amid the frantic hurly-burly of life the way we normally live it. Those things that wake us up in the early hours and won’t let us get back to sleep. The things that we try to put off, shirk and shake off… they all crowd in on us. If we want to let the silence do its work we have to confront the darker parts of our life, the responsibilities which can never be escaped, the fears which need to be owned so that they can be effectively confronted. Is that what is happening as Jesus - 40 days in the desert - finds himself a prey to temptation and surrounded by “wild beasts”?

Sara Maitland writes:

I am convinced that as a whole society we are losing something precious in our increasingly silence-avoiding culture and that somehow, whatever this silence might be, it needs holding, nourishing and unpacking.

What can we do with this season we call Lent? The 40 days Jesus spends in the desert take him to the place of empty spaces, away from the distractions of life's busy-ness, to seek God, to listen to his heart, to learn what truly is to be God's will for his life's work. They’re a space which will prepare him for his public ministry. That’s the point of Lent for us. It is not a time simply for deeper devotion or spiritual refreshment so that - once Lent is over - we can go back to our old ways. It’s a time to explore what it means to be Christ's disciple, to learn more about our Christian calling and more about ourselves, so that Easter may find us changed, ready to meet the risen Jesus, discovering that he has already found us.  We need to look at ourselves to ask where we are going and why. We need to recognise again that ours is a journey worth making.

Fr. Gerard Hughes – author of the book God of Surprises, which we once used for a Lent course - suggests that,

"It is a very useful exercise to take a piece of paper, divide it into two columns, one headed 'Events which bring me to life', and the other 'Events which deaden me', then scribble down whatever comes to mind. Keep the list, and add to it whenever another item occurs to you. If you persist, the list will lengthen, and you may discover that you give more time and attention to the things which deaden you than to those which enliven you."  

We need to look into our hearts. What are the things which drag us down? What are the things that can move us on? Do we just try to get by, holding on to what we have got, but seeing it inevitably decay? Or do we take risks in living and loving so that we might grow?

Sara Maitland writes that in her quest for silence,

I wanted to explore my own spirituality and deepen my growing sense of the reality of God, and the possibility of that reality. Within all the major religious traditions… there is a shared recognition that silence is one very effective tool for spiritual development.

If only we’ll take the chance and the opportunity… It’s after his forty days in the wilderness that Jesus finds angels ministering to him. And he emerges from the desert able to declare, "the kingdom of God has come!" The Christian task is to share that proclamation. Let’s use this season of Lent to look into our hearts to find God at work. Let’s use our opportunities for silence to recognise more clearly what is really real.