18 February 2024 Mark 1:12-15
There used to be a Great American Desert.
It wasn’t the Mojave Desert, the Sonora Desert, or the Great Basin. Today what used to be called the Great American Desert we call the Great Plains. It is some of the best farmland and grazing land in the world.
It was called the Great American Desert back then because it was considered unsuitable for habitation since it lacked trees. No trees meant no fuel. No trees meant no shelter. No trees meant the land had nothing to offer, and so for decades after its exploration by Lewis and Clark, it was left alone, just to be itself.
Thomas Merton said that this is what made the wilderness so valuable: “The wilderness had been created as supremely valuable in the eyes of God precisely because it had no value to men. The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted by men because it offered them nothing. There was nothing to attract them. There was nothing to exploit.” God chose the wilderness for the Israelites to wander with Moses because it was the kind of land in which they could learn who they really were: “The desert is therefore the logical dwelling place for the man who seeks to be nothing but himself – that is to say, a creature solitary and poor and dependent on no one but God…” (Thoughts in Solitude, p. 4-5).
The Great American Desert might have been a similarly rich spiritual place, but of course it did not remain the Great American Desert. Starting with the Transcontinental Railroad, people conquered the Great American Desert, making it bountiful, and profitable. Great cities like Chicago, St. Louis and Las Vegas became laboratories of commerce, even showplaces for vice, and so we learned another feature of the wilderness: “First, it is the country of madness. Second it is the habitation of the devil…. Thirst drives men mad, and the devil himself is mad with a kind of thirst for his own lost excellence…” (Thoughts in Solitude, p. 6). The desert has spread continually, even up till now, when everything is desert, “a sterile paradise of emptiness and rage” (p. 8). Even the virtual world is a kind of desert, a place mad with its own cleverness, and howling with rage at any who do not see things in exactly the way the cyberspace demons do. People, especially young people, throng to this desert, not to do battle with the devil, but to collaborate with him. They go there to yell more than listen, even though the yelling frightens and demoralizes, at the same time that it entrances them and keeps them from turning away.
In his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, St. John Paul II wrote that “life is always at the center of a great struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness.” We are surrounded now by wild places that are now, as they have always been, the habitation of the devil. For that reason, the tools of our struggle against “the cosmic powers of this present darkness” are not knives or guns, podcasts or legislative agendas, but the “whole armor of God” – Truth, Righteousness, Faith, Preaching, Faith, Salvation, and the Bible (see Ephesians 6:12-15, see also F. Bauerschmidt, No Lasting City, p. 33). These are the weapons the devil fears because he has nothing like them, nothing to resist them. His only hope is to tempt us not to trust the things he fears the most.
The desert shows us who we really are.
The desert shows us the kind of fight we are really in.
The desert shows us the weapons we need to fight the good fight, and win the good fight, if only we will trust the weapons at hand.
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