Ashes to Ashes: Entering the Desert

"The desert represents a stripping away of our attachments, so as to make the fundamental things appear. In the desert, there are no distractions or diversions or secondary matters. Everything is basic, necessary, and simple. Either one survives or one doesn’t. One finds in the desert strengths and weaknesses he never knew he had." 

~ Bishop Robert Barron

I have been living in the desert for a long time. As of this month, it's been three years.

Don't get me wrong. I don't actually live in a real physical desert. I live in a suburb in a house a good 1000 miles from the closest desert. The desert I've been living in is the desert of depression. The quote above comes from the first of Bishop Barron's daily Lenten email meditations. In it, he talks about how our Lenten journey of 40 days is a reflection of Christ's sojourn through the desert just prior to His earthly ministry. Having never been in an actual physical desert myself, I can only imagine what that feels like to your body to endure that kind of extreme climate. Emotionally though, I know exactly what it feels like. 

For me, depression takes a toll like that of the desert wilderness. I've struggled with depression for some 27 years now, but none of my sojourns through the desert have ever lasted more than a few months. When this current episode of depression began, it was in February of 2013 and I had no idea what lay in store for me. I had no reason to think that it would be any different from any episode before it.

What I didn't know is that my journey would take me into the darkest, most barren, most wild parts of the desert of depression. Those called apathy, anguish, betrayal, abandonment, heartbreak, numbness, bitterness, rage, despondence, despair, and death. I just had no clue at all that it would be so painful and go on for so long. 

Pain and suffering do, as Bishop Barron says, strip away everything else. You can't focus on anything but the most basic of things -- eating, sleeping, bathing, and sometimes, just the act of breathing in and out. When you're in this desert, it's not about looking at the scenery or making some great discovery, it's about finding your way from one oasis to the next so that you can survive. You may have come into the desert loaded down with many great concerns, but very quickly those fall away and you begin to realise what truly matters. You come to understand that your focus must be on survival. And the longer you journey through this desert, you do begin to see your strengths and your weaknesses. The desolation and difficulty starkly reveal everything in a way that is clearer and more refined than it would be in the normal world.

So what have I learned in the desert?

Well, one lesson I've been learning of late is that I need to stop telling myself that I must be strong and that hiding when I'm in pain -- rather than being vulnerable with others -- makes things easier for me and for others around me. The reality is that trying to be strong when I lack the capacity to do so and hiding from others when I'm hurting only makes things worse. For me, this is a weakness that the desert has revealed. I struggle with really trusting others because I've had my trust betrayed and violated so many times. That struggle with trust causes me to tell myself that it's better for me to just grit my teeth, be strong, just white knuckle it and hide until the darkest darkness is lighter. It's taken me most of this time to realise that this is a weakness, although thanks to Pendragon's help, I've been working on getting better at being vulnerable and telling others when I need help. 

I've also learned that one of my strengths is obedience, in particular, obedience to God. I would have never thought this about myself. It's not that I'm the rebellious sort or some kind of wild and crazy person who has no concern for rules or anything like that. It's just that I've never really thought of myself as "obedient." To be honest, this is the first year since this desert of depression began that I've even considered giving up or doing anything for Lent at all. For the last three Lents I've told myself, "I'm already giving up a lot with this depression. It's hard enough without having to give up or add something to my already really difficult life. Surely this is penitential enough." Part of the reason I felt like I was rebelling though was because I was angry at God. I still have some anger toward Him that I am trying to work out, but it's much better than it was just a year ago. But anger and even disinterest aren't the same thing as rebellion and I'm apparently much more obedient to Him and His will than I've ever given myself credit for being because I'm still here and I'm still following Him. I'm also trying to add the task this year of doing something spiritual each day. I think Bishop Barron's email meditations may be part of that, but I might do something else if the Holy Spirit nudges me.

The other thing that the desert has revealed to me is that when it comes to faith, feelings are no barometer of reality. To put it more simply, feelings are fickle and do not indicate in any way the presence (or lack thereof) of God in a person's life. In some ways, having an intense emotional experience of faith can give us a false sense of reality when it comes to who God is and whether or not He is present. When we "feel" God's presence or have a "sense" of Him being near, it can be an intense shock to the system spiritually when the circumstances of life or the actions of others blind those senses to a point where we can no longer connect with Him on an emotional level. We are left in the darkness of the desert, seemingly alone. But as scripture tells us in many places, He is always with us. That promise can be hard to swallow if the whole of your experience has been some kind of emotional connection to God and you are suddenly devoid of that connection. It may seem like a cruel kind of joke to be seemingly left all alone with your pain and suffering, but this desolation of the spirit is when we learn to connect to God in new ways, to find Him in the desert amidst the rubble of our pain, to see the tracks of His footsteps and the traces of His fingerprints etched in the aridness of our suffering and ache. 

This sojourn through the desert -- when we are forced to discard the unnecessary, have our weaknesses laid bare and our strengths revealed through fire, and scrabble to survive -- is a gift. If we are willing to see it, a gift that promises a greater strength of will, a greater understanding of ourselves, and a more mature, deeper faith in Christ. With that in mind, each year on Ash Wednesday, we enter into the desert with Christ to pray, to fast, to give of ourselves to others, and to allow the desert to reveal in us that which needs to be discarded so that we can survive and more closely follow Him.