In A Desert Way

Let’s say you’re in the desert. Most people wind up in the desert at one point or another. Let’s say you’ve been in the desert alone for months. And this is an imaginary desert, so let’s pull out all the stops. There’s nothing here. No scrub grass, no cactus, no tumbleweeds, no interesting rock formations where you can take a selfie pretending to hold them up. There’s nothing but white sand rising up to the horizon, blue sky from one horizon to another and one blinding yellow sun. At night you can barely see because it’s dark, and in the daytime you can barely see because of the glare. It’s worse than snow blindness. But anyway, there’s nothing to see. Your camel died a weeks ago and it’s just you out there, a mysteriously full canteen and some Cliff bars and your trusty hiking boots. It’s been this way for a very long time.

Now, let’s say that you see something on the very edge of the horizon. You think it must be some sand in your eye, or maybe the glare is making you see spots. Maybe this is the beginning of the end, and if you ever get out of the desert you’ll be stone blind. But the more you blink, the more the image remains. It has to be there. There’s something on the horizon. There’s a thing. There’s a thing ahead of you.

Now, you approach the thing. You still can’t see any features, just that it exists, and that is so comforting you forget to be afraid. It hardly even matters what the thing is– it’s a thing, and it exists, and you’ve been alone in the desert for months. And then– thanks be to God. You realize that the thing is moving as well. It’s moving toward you as you move toward it. You’re not just approaching a thing, you’re being approached by a thing. Something is coming to meet you.

You stumble forward, forgetting your exhaustion. A thing that moves must be alive, mustn’t it? If it’s moving, it must be alive somehow. Whatever’s approaching you is a living thing, or perhaps a vehicle manned by a living thing. There’s a living thing coming to meet you.

You’re running now. Why wouldn’t you? Who cares about tiredness or thirst, who cares about heat? You’re seeing something new. There’s another living thing in the desert. You can just begin to make out its features. It’s a nice tall vertical shape. It’s got funny appendages dangling at its sides. It’s shuffling through the sand on two limbs. It’s a human. The thing moving toward you is a human being, a real human being. God be praised, you’d nearly forgotten what a human being looks like. You wondered if they even existed anymore. There’s another human, in the desert, and the human is coming your way.

At the last moment you break into a sprint. You have to see this human up close. You have to touch them, if they’ll permit; you have to look into their eyes. You have to listen to their voice, a real human voice, and to hear their story– a real human story, a story like yours but different, a thousand times different and completely mysterious. You have to talk to them, to tell them how long you’ve been in the desert and how lonely you’ve been. The person is larger and clearer every second. You see skin tanned and weatherbeaten until it looks like leather, and you wonder if your own skin has become that way. You see exceptionally long hair, and wonder if your hair has grown out that long. You see hanging breasts that you would have thought unattractive before, skinny limbs, sharp elbows and knees. You see the face of a mystic, gazing all reverence and awe across the sand. This person is a woman, a saint, a hermit, Saint Mary of Egypt. She asks to borrow your cloak, and for you to listen to her story.

As you sit and listen to the funny figure wearing your clothes, you realize: it isn’t Mary of Egypt after all. It’s a very different person than you first thought. It’s the only Person, the Person who is always waiting just inside the temple, inside another person’s skin and soul. The Person is Christ.

I would like to offer a challenge. I would like to submit to you that you are in the desert. You always are. Everyone is. The desert is the state of being in this fallen world. We’re blinded, sometimes by our own darkness and sometimes by the Light that is too much for us, we’re suffering, and we are lonely. And every human being you approach in this desert is Mary of Egypt, and also Christ.

For most of us, our vision rarely goes beyond seeing a thing on our horizon and mistaking it for sand in the eye. We may never even notice the thing is moving; we certainly don’t rise to wondering at the mystery that a thing is human like us. And since we don’t notice that, we never come to the point where she greets us and asks for our cloak. We don’t give of ourselves to meet physical needs, we don’t stop to listen and share company. And so we never reach the epiphany, the recognition of Christ. Because it almost always works in that order and not the other way. First, you are attentive, longing for your visitation, squinting at the horizon as you trudge through the desert. Then you may see something you do not understand. Then, you recognize like crying out to like, a human to a human, a child of God to a child of God, leather skin and hanging breasts and tangled hair like yours. Then you offer charity, not just meeting material needs but providing for them by listening to their story. Then– then, the veil is lifted. Then you recognize the ciborium, and in it the Deity, the only One. You will never recognize the One if you don’t recognize the ciborium, and you cannot recognize the ciborium if you aren’t staring expectantly at the horizon.

And this is not a trick. This is not a con God plays on His children. God is God, and He cannot deceive nor be deceived. God sees only rightly and speaks only truth. It would be a sacrilege to repose the Eucharist in a shoebox or a jam jar or another piece of trash. God cannot commit sacrilege. He dwells in us, because He made us with that dignity. The reason you must seek Christ in people is that people are the precious chalice, the only vessel made to bear Christ. The person– all of us, you and me, every human being– we are His garment, because we are the only thing created to be worthy of Him. When you show reverence to your neighbor; when you watch for a fellow human being, when you offer your cloak to the one who begs, when you listen to the one who stops to tell you her story, you are not bending over backwards in a gratuitous act of charity. You are providing the minimum veneration due to the ciborium and the One it contains. If I prostrated myself when you passed by, if I spent all day and all night listening to you tell me who you are, if I gave my whole inheritance to the poor and went off into the desert to seek you, if I gave up my life to be tortured to death in your place, it would not be more than simple justice. Every time I fail to provide this justice, I sin.

Perhaps the desert would not be so lonely if we only kept our eyes open long enough to see.