The Cross and the Desert

White Sands dust storm, New Mexico

And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan,

and was led by the Spirit into the desert...

Luke 4:1

There seems to be two poles in my life with God. They are the Cross and the Desert. 

The Cross is self-sacrifice through suffering for people and for the world. The Desert is selflessness through annihilation in God, through emptiness. These two are not the same thing. The Cross requires engagement with the World, the Desert requires disengagement from it. The Bible says in many spots that Jesus liked to withdraw from the crowds to solitary spots to pray. I don't visualize him as praying for individuals during these times, or even praying for himself, but in fact being in communion with God. This kind of prayer does not ask, it already has what it seeks. 

The Cross is easy to understand, if difficult to practice. It is basically loving your neighbor, even if that means pain and difficulty. There is no trouble in loving your neighbor when it is easy, there is no Cross in that. The Cross comes in when you have to love your neighbor even at great personal cost. I am being led to the Cross a great deal lately, with my mother's sudden illness, pretty much everything falls on me. No one else is able. But like I said, understanding the Cross is not at all hard in theory anyway, so I will leave it at that. Easy to understand, not easy to do.

The Desert seems to be leading me in a totally opposite direction, away from the world, away from myself. I once thought that an actual solitary place would be helpful, like those that Jesus liked to retreat to, but really the Desert is everywhere and nowhere.

I was sitting outside a few days ago, after being at the hospital every night for five days tending to my Mom who had a sudden and debilitating health emergency. I was absolutely exhausted: beyond being at the end of the rope, there wasn't much of the end left either. It was breezy, and I sat in the back yard watching a strand of my hair wafting back and forth in front of my face in a hypnotizing manner, and suddenly I was there. I was in the Desert, and I had gone away.

The Desert is silence. It is not literal silence, it is human silence. It is the absence of human BEING in a sense, you are no longer aware of having a self. We spend all our lives running away from silence, building lives and self-importance and our own version of "meaning", trying to make a noise. We are in mortal fear of silence, of the Desert, because we have been running from the Desert since before we were born. The Desert is the place where you meet God, and you can either meet that place with profound relief or with mortal terror. You can either dance with God or run from Him. Words are futile, it is emptiness, fullness, solitary and communion. The Desert cannot be categorized, it is beyond human existence, it is the opposite of it. There is a refreshing total absence of everything human. In the Desert, you are a spectator of God, you bear witness, but you are not. And yet you are with everything. You can only describe it with synonyms of emptiness, because it is empty of human evil and conceit.

And yet as a living being in the world, the Desert and the Cross have no conflict and in fact are inseparable. Jesus' words in the New Testament seem to partake equally in the Cross and the Desert: in practical love and in mysticism. I am not sure you can do the Cross without the Desert entirely, and if you could do the Desert without the Cross, you would no longer be a human being and no longer be in this world at all. The Desert informs the Cross, and gives it the power to do what it does.

God in the World is the Cross. God in Himself is the Desert. We are of both.

I've been through the desert on a horse with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain
In the desert you can't remember your name
'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain 

-"Horse with No Name", the band America