What did you go out into the desert to see?

It wasn’t until the half-hour before sunset that I understood what I needed to hear.

In the week right after Easter, I spent three days with a group of close pastor friends at Christ in the Desert Monastery. Placed gently below the cliffs on a high desert plateau of the Chama River, this Benedictine community in New Mexico remains a place of silence and solitude, carrying out its ministry of prayer and hospitality to guests. Our time there was to be a capstone on a cycle of retreats focused around the Lord’s supper and the hospitality of the table. 

I came into the week eager for the silence and solitude, excited to devote a few days to prayer and quiet conversation. The retreat coincided beautifully (and providentially) with my own prayer journey in recent months. I have sought to slow down and make more space for the Lord’s voice to me, teaching me surrender to his will and the ways he might lead me in using my gifts for his service. I brought a heart and ears longing to actively listen, to hear the Lord’s own speech in a way that rings clearly in silence and stillness. I wanted that – sought after it, eagerly desiring it. 

There has always been a part of me that is a closet mystic, longing for a felt, experienced connection to the intimate communion at the heart of my life and God’s life. The western wildernesses have previously been places for me to meet God in quiet and beauty. There is something inviting to me in the paradox of a small life in vast, wild spaces, and over the years I enter it more easily. It didn’t hurt that I’d just finished reading David James Duncan’s Sun House, a sprawling novel of life’s journeys both physical and spiritual/metaphysical. The book follows a cast of characters seeking the good, true, beautiful, and loving at the heart of the universe. Along the way they roam into mountains and river canyons, sifting through eastern and western traditions of ecstatic loves, including one Medieval Christian mystic … whose ecstatic poetry I happened to find that first night on the shelf of books in the common room of the monastery’s guest house. 

From Monday evening through Wednesday morning, we observed silence (unless spoken to by the monks) and joined in their services of chanted prayer through the various hours of the day. On Tuesday afternoon I took 90 minutes for silence and stillness in contemplation. I found an out-of-the-way seat on a second floor porch in the sun. My eyes saw only the multi-colored sandstone cliffs framed by a blue sky and a porch railing. My ears heard only the occasional lowing of cattle in the meadow, cries of wild geese on the river, or whistle of the wind. I sat there with Psalm 62 open on my lap, choosing verse 1 as my meditation: For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation. 

I wrote “God, I want to feel your great, deep, unfailing love for all creation and all your people. I don’t just want to know it intellectually, but feel it with my body and my heart – the overwhelming sense of your presence and your ocean of love, the unity of all things held together in Christ and poured out in grace so we overflow in praise. I’m not embarrassed to say I thirst for it: let me taste and see and bask in the beauty of the fire of your love.” 

The minutes passed without incident. I didn’t fall asleep, but I got colder as the sun/shadow line passed across my body and my breaths and heart rate slowed with the stillness. I attended to the craggy rock face that stuck out toward me and the birds around the whiter heights beyond its reddish crest. I listened. I tried not to think – just focus on presence, breath, stillness, returning to verse 1 as an anchor to pull back my mind when it wandered. I wrote a little. 

Nothing really happened. No great epiphany came; no flash of revelation; no overwhelming love. But I was present in a way I often struggle to be. A small part of me descended from the porch disappointed, but most of me was more glad than lonely, at rest and accepting. 

Later that evening, I made a cup of coffee after the Vespers service and walked along the river bottom in the quiet before Compline. The river rolled slowly in the failing light, and the geese left long trails as they touched down for landing in the water. As I turned back to the monastery, the sun was on the heights of the ridge behind it and I was struck by the sharp promontory of the lower layer of red-gold sandstone. From where I was standing, I could see just how much farther it jutted out southwest from the cliff face: it was much more sharp and solid than I had realized when I’d been sitting on the porch and facing it head on. Back then I knew then it must stand out somewhat, but not until I was down on the river, looking along it, could I appreciate how far that fin of rock ran out. From my afternoon perch I thought it was one thing; in the evening, from a different perspective standing by the river, I saw something so much larger. 

Things are what they are, and they remain the same. But when seen from different angles, you gain a whole new perspective. When I sat in the sunlight that afternoon, asking for a sense of the overwhelming beauty and sublime love at the heart of the Lord in all things, I longed for it. I believed it was there. To see the rock later that evening from the side was to see what was there all along, even if I didn’t feel it or appreciate it in a more visceral way at that earlier moment. What I saw was the mountain, but the mountain was somehow more as well. I felt that the Lord showed me that he is the mountain I am always seeking, even when I don’t see him or experience him the way I desire to. I was flooded with the reminder that at any given moment we see from a single perspective, not the whole. To be satisfied for the moment you are in, to be thankful for what you have, to seek God there and not somewhere else, some other time – and to know what you have in the moment is true, though it may not be fullest, deepest view from multiple perspectives… that limitation is itself a gift.