Walking on the beach is not like walking the desert.
On the beach, the grains of sand under your feet and between your toes feel like a meandering massage that’s free of charge. The ocean wind hurtling down the beach fills your nostrils with the invigorating scent of the salty waves. Those waves sooth your ears with the ceaseless symphony of tide-tuned swells crashing gently into the land of sun and fun. When the sun begins to set, it fills your eyes with the sight of daylight dying in glorious shades of red as it disappears, sinking slowly into the cyan deep. And as the ocean of starlight slips into its place, now robed in Tyrian hues, the scene floods your eyes with such wondrous beauty that your heart overflows with awe.
We go to the beach because its magnificent pleasures are easy to absorb and its challenges relatively small and infrequent. It’s no surprise that we want our experience of the interior life to be like walking on the beach. And it’s sometimes much like that experience.
But our interior lives are frequently less like a walk on the beach and more like the wandering of the Israelites in the desert for what seemed like an interminable amount of time, constantly stumbling into trouble.
During their desert sojourn, the Israelites worried about having enough water and bread. They yearned for the meat they had enjoyed in Egypt. They feared for their safety in the land of potentially hostile peoples, having no fortresses to protect them. Death often seemed very close at hand, and they felt powerless and vulnerable in their knowledge of how much they lacked.
In the same way, we so often walk the interior desert worrying about our next meal, anxious for our family’s safety, and longing for the promised land of abundance and safety. It’s painful to carry around the awareness of how close we are to death and the knowledge of how our many imperfections keep us from saving ourselves and our families from terrible suffering.
Weighed down by these heavy burdens, walking the interior desert feels like a Sisyphean trudge up the face of a massive dune, our will to go on gradually worn down into the tiny brittle shape of a grain of sand.
Then, as we reach the top of the dune only to find our eyes filled with myriad massive dunes stretching to the horizon, like the Israelites we might be tempted to despair at the thought of walking across the seemingly endless wasteland.
But just as God was there with the Israelites in their times of need in the desert, God is ever with us in the interior desert. God provided the Israelites with water when their thirst became too great for them to bear, and he provided us with the living water that wells up to eternal life when he sent his Son to us.
In the desert, God provided the Israelites with bread from heaven in the form of manna and flesh to eat from the birds he sent as food for the hungry. In the interior desert, God has provided for us the Eucharistic banquet, which is the new bread from heaven and the flesh of the Son which sustains us unto eternal life.
In the desert, God himself was the fortress and shield of the wandering Israelites as they lived in fear of death. So too in the interior desert, God himself protects us from the attacks of the evil ones who seek to make us wander onto the path to our soul’s destruction.
We can safely trust in God’s great love, leaving despair in the dust. The challenges of the interior desert remain, but so does his loving care for us.
God didn’t lead the Israelites through the desert to give them a pleasant day, but rather to give them a land flowing with milk and honey. And God leads us through the interior desert to give us something greater than even the most magnificent day at the beach.
Our God leads us through the interior desert to give us endless days to enjoy the boundless ocean of his love.
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Photo by Sergi Ferrete on Unsplash
