December 8, 2002
A little something I clipped from the New York Times about 32 years ago — I keep it tucked away in a certain book about biblical prophecy. Here it is, from the January 3, 1971 edition:
Charlotte, North Carolina — Leaders of the True Light Church of Christ, who had taught their 450 followers in North Carolina and south Carolina that the world would end in 1970, said today that they were "surprised" and "shocked" by the failure of the prophecy. Russel McLeod, an elder of the sect who resigned this 23-year job with the Camden, S.C. post office in June, said that he believed seeking a new job now would be "premature" because "I'm expecting some more developments." An 18-year-old member, Dennis Reynolds, said the prophecy's failure "hasn't put any doubt in my belief." "I can't give you no satisfactory explanation," said H. Flake Braswell, who uses the title Temporal Head of Christ's Church. Mr. Braswell said he had not yet decided whether to reopen the upholstery shop that he had closed a year ago in preparation for the end. He said that several other True Lights who had quit their jobs had told him that they were undecided whether or when to go back to work.
Alright. Not every prophet in the wilderness, or waiting on the roof of the house for the second coming, will be remembered favorably by history. Some are better forgotten.
The holiday season begins in Christian churches with a time called Advent, when inevitably you hear the story of the lonely prophet in the wilderness, John the Baptist. For the time being I'm not interested in what he was saying, because that had to do with another time and place, not ours. It's what he doing, and mostly, where he was doing it.
John the Baptist lived in an era of thwarted hope, stifled human possiblity. Cruel Roman occupation. He cherished the memory of Mattathias' guerrilla war 165 years earlier, those guerrillas who retook Jerusalem, purified and rededicated the Temple, rekindled the eternal light. Later generations had settled into greed and corruption. It was time for another liberation movement. There had been a series of failed Jewish uprisings against Rome. There was plenty of anger out there, much as there is in public life now. Bitterness, hatred.
John the Baptist made an announcement. Announced the arrival of a new era of history, the end of an old order. I think he got it wrong, and I will not lay upon his announcement the theological overlays of subsequent Christian theology. But I would point out just this: he was a reformer, an innovator. In a time when the old formulas, old answer to old questions, were wearing thin, he proposed the end of an order and the beginning of another. He recognized a change in human consciousness. He's not waiting for moribund institutions to respond, but he's directing his message to individuals.
Beyond this, his message was the same old outworn messianic stuff there had been too much of already, not much different from H. Flake Braswell's True Light Church of Christ. And what an absurd place to do it! No one, except an occasional nut, ever goes to the wilderness to make announcements.
John the Baptist was waiting, and his wilderness performance was a desperate act. The real John the Baptist was an apocalyptic messiah, the latest in a series of would-be messiahs who would gather a throng of people in the wilderness east of the Jordan River and then lead a mass movement back across the River into the Promised Land, reënacting the Exodus — at which moment God was supposed to overthrow Rome and restore the sovereignty of the kingdom of Israel. The Romans got him first.
But it's not the content of his message that interests me. It's the wilderness.
Apparently — so the scholars who dare to break with orthodoxy and say what they really think — so those scholars say — the Galilean philosopher-mystic Jesus may have begun as a follower of this messiah John the Baptist, and then broken with John, changed his mind. He completely reframed this ancient concept, Kingdom of God, Divine Commonwealth. After he broke with John the Baptist, he preached a Kingdom, a Divine Commonwealth that doesn't come in the usual way with armies or miraculous divine interventions; but more than that: A transformation of time and consciousness. It didn't take many generations for his followers to forget his most visionary innovation and return to the old concept of Kingdom. Soon enough there would be Constantine with his armies, and the Crusades, and ecclesiastical pomp and mitred bishops.
But it appears that this misunderstood Galilean teacher had a far more subtle, sublime, and transformative message about the Kingdom. And he got it — in the wilderness. That is where he went — symbolically at least — after his time with John; and that's where his understanding of life, and the world, and his own purpose in the world, was turned around.
What I'm interested in is this place where he went, where he everything changed for him. Because our times require vision, too. Our times require the activity of those who can break out of outworn conceptual patterns and habits of thought. They require the activity of those who have a sure sense of where they are in the movement of time, and with the clarity of perception and the courage to sail against the prevailing wind. That is equally true in our private and public lives. I remember when a commentator on National Public Radio called one recent year "the year that wouldn't go away," — a year when outworn ideas held on past their time and when discredited assumptions refused to let go their grip. In our public life we seemed lost. And all of our lives are affected by habitual ways of thinking and acting that do not serve us well.
So I take you to the wilderness, where John has made his announcement. John the Baptist was "the voice crying in the wilderness." Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Thomas all agree on that. It's almost the only time they ever agree.
What is this place? The locals knew it as a place of crumbling limestone and fine sand blown violently, constantly by incredible winds. There was no water there, only dry streams. In the winter it was as cold as the summer was hot. There was nothing to obstruct the merciless wind. It was a barren place of terrifying chaos. There was no one there but a few wild beasts.
In later times, I think the third and seventh centuries, attempts were made to domesticate the wilderness and live there. It never worked. The wilderness could not be controlled.
If you want to know where it was, you won't find it in an atlas of maps. The gospels were not written to be history; they are sermons exploring human depths. They're full of loaded words, like "wilderness." You'll remember the Exodus journeyings in the wilderness, or Jesus being tempted in the wilderness.
You might know the place I mean. The inward place where you may feel you have been; or maybe you feel that you are there now. The barren and forbidding place of terrifying inner chaos. Within the human soul there is a wilderness that persistently refuses to be controlled. It's a wilderness whose existence we don't like to admit. We would rather present ourselves as "fine, thank you; quite together, thank you." And in control. We don't want to admit our wilderness, the darkness of our night, where we wander sometimes very lost. Where forces that we cannot control, or even understand, control our lives and our times. We will not admit those powerful forces within our personalities, and within our corporate life, that explain more about us than the things we're aware of consciously.
We want everyone to think we're entirely rational. That's just not so. The evolution of life brought human consciousness, and human consciousness floats precariously like a thin film on a sea of unconscious forces within us. The wilderness of our hidden memories, terrors, ecstasies, potentialities, flashes of insight, fears, dreams. The things that move and motivate us are not seen, not unless we look beneath the surface of our selves. And if we do not enter that hidden ocean below the surface, and face it, it will always control us, and it can destroy us.
You could say it's a place of empty nothingness. You could say it's a place of naked being.
Naked being and nothingness. Terms used by ancient mystics.
That Galilean teacher went to this place where John delivered his message and he received a whole new conception of things out there. John the Baptist had finished his sermon and left. And this Jesus from Galilee stayed, by himself, in the wilderness, explored it farther, more deeply. It provided him with a direct way of knowing unmediated by the conventional wisdom and by the authorities who determined what both the answers and even the questions were. It gave him both personal authenticity and integrity. It's a place that lies not far from us and there are times when we need it, when it calls to us. And always some part of us needs to be in this place.
But how can we speak of this place of naked being?
We must first think in terms of what is not there in the wilderness.
In the wilderness you will not find the Very Important Authorities on things — authorities on the meaning of life, the nature of the universe, the way to live individually and communally. They were back there in Jerusalem in their spacious carpeted offices. You do not have, and cannot lean upon, the usual ready answers to things. You may not even have the usual questions. You can't assume a thing.
No authorities. No anybody. You don't have anybody else around. You're really alone, which has the following effect:
You can let go your outward ego, your public persona, that veneer of yourself in which you are both packaged and encased,
and, of course, protected. Let it go gradually. He went far enough in and stayed long enough for even his thick ego to dissolve some. Here's what it meant for him:
Nobody around to expect him to think or respond in a particular characteristic way. No need to stick to opinions for which you're famous. There's nobody there to impress with your consistency.
In the wilderness there was nobody to recognize him on the street, nobody to expect anything in particular of him. So he had no positions to defend. His thoughts didn't have to be conducted from the outer rim of himself. He could attend to a deeper quality of knowing.
Now another thing you don't have in the wilderness:
The background noise of our frenetic outward lives is not there.
Except for the wind, it's very quite. We hear things we long to hear and things we don't wish to hear.
And in the wilderness there isn't much visibly going on at all to distract us or delude us. When we enter a wilderness period in our lives it looks like nothing is happening because our life energy has been recalled to move inward and to put together new parts of our human experience from the inside out, and we can't see that.
So we say it's a place of darkness. And it is a spiritual fact that it's often during the most outwardly darkened, depressed, and low periods of our lives that the most dramatic germination is going on within us, as the inner seeds of our selves begin to open up and grow. But you don't see the evidence until later, just as you don't see what a seed's been doing in the ground until later.
We might feel empty. And blessed are the poor in spirit.
In the wilderness of naked being, the mystics said that their experience of nothingness was sometimes so great that they experienced the absence | even of God, and that | was as it should be. The 14th century mystic Eckhart said, I pray God to rid me of God.
He went into the wilderness pretty sure about his religion. I once went into a wilderness with ideas of God and the universe that I was real sure about. I came out of the wilderness without them. I once felt an emotional comfort in a God I later found to be my oppressor. Eckhart said, Quit flapping your gums about God. The most beautiful thing you can say would be to remain silent, he said. I used to work for a church that expected its ministers to get in a certain quota of references to God and Christ per hour. Be careful of easy words, so habitually spoken. As soon as it is spoken there goes off in the head and brain and memory a chorus of buzzers and bells and sirens as a million images, assumptions, judgments, and eternal verities kick in.
The wilderness is a place of letting go, and waiting, and trusting the processes of life. Trusting that just as the universe itself was born out of emptiness, so new reality and new life is born out of emptiness and darkness.
The wilderness is a place of cleansing and letting go, a place sometimes purified with tears washing away the veneer, the vanity, the falsity, the pettiness, and the selfishness.
The wilderness is where you may come to the unsettling realization that
you are no longer what you were
and that
you are not yet what you will be.
The Next Thing in our lives, the new reality that comes, may come painfully. The wilderness is not just emptiness. There are wild beasts out there. Strong winds, raw existence, naked being. Things frightening to contend with.
The things you hear when the noise of our outward lives is silenced are raw sounds, not processed, packaged or frozen, not painted over or veneered. Sometimes we hear even above our noisy lives.
For me once the wild beasts and driving winds and blowing sand that mark the wilderness presented themselves to me in dreams, breaking into my consciousness out of the primitive sea of unconsciousness. That barren and forbidding place of terrifying chaos inside. When the desperate facade of | who I pretended to be could not contain the inner necessities and potentialities crying out for fulfillment. I tried my damnedest not to hear until I would wake screaming, exploding. I had to turn. Change my direction, come home to myself. I have met a few who could not heed the voices in their wilderness. In clinical training in mental hospitals I spent many hours with men and women who, denying the parts of themselves who approached them in sleep, now had visits from the same figures during their waking hours, whose inner messengers, denied, became demons.
Now I don't get awakened by dramatic dreams; now I have to cultivate quieter disciplines for seeing and hearing, like journal-keeping and attending to subtler signals, subtler dreams. But the inner wilderness is still there, with its voices, speaking truly in the events of life, speaking authentically and honestly in images, feelings, and intuitions that I have to go to my inner wilderness to meet. Eventually, you learn to find your way around it, get acquainted with its rude inhabitants, don't have to feel so lost there.
When John delivers his message in the wilderness, there's a bit of an interruption in the routines of the people in the old city, because we're told the whole region went down to hear him. They've all been called away from the urgent routine of filling rush orders, conducting important meetings, typing priority letters, making appointments on time, laboring over an overdue job:—
it all has to stop
to go hear an announcement in the wilderness.
No one wanted to go there. They feared it the way we fear the quiet moments when we can hear the noise of our own craziness and feel the hurt of our own brokenness.
His message was crude. He said their life routines were destructive to the core. He called them a brood of vipers and told them to repent, which means to turn or change direction. Such language. What's wrong with "Ladies and gentlemen"? Our inner messengers speak a raw language. They speak of how we are moved by fears that are not real | and unmoved by ones that are. They speak of hard realities and unrealized possibilities.
They speak of our misguided moves or failures to act. Our conflicts and guilt. Our inability to conceive of life in any new or creative way.
In the wilderness, you see the issues of life portrayed in bold strokes. In the wilderness you can see the trivia of life unmasked and the great issues of life in perspective. You can see all of the hidden selves of yourself that have awaited your return from exile.
In the wilderness we may receive, also, images of the social structure within which we live.
We may feel the conflict and inconsistencies between the dictates of our most inner humanity and the structures of life about us. We begin with a sense of conflict. We brood on the images, enter into critical reflection. We may find ourselves in an adversary relationship with the larger society, or in some other role as a creative participant.
Our inner wilderness may lead us ultimately not into withdrawal from this world, but into a fuller, more meaningful engagement.
In our private and our public lives, our task is to grasp the reality and the truth perceived in the wilderness and give it form right here in this aching world. Give it form in a lifework. Give it form in the way we care and give love. In the way we commit our time and energies.
Spirituality is not found in flight from the world
And the wilderness we need is within.
In the midst of this world and these lives of ours we must learn to penetrate things | and find what is real and what is false. Listen to the voices in our public wilderness. Listen to the voices in your wilderness.
177-179, selected
I stood helpless before an alien world; everything in it seemed difficult and incomprehensible. One thunderstorm followed another. My enduring these storms was a question of brute strength. Others have been shattered by them. . . . But there was a demonic strength in me, and from the beginning there was no doubt in my mind that I must find the meaning of what I was experiencing. . . .
I was frequently so wrought up that I had to do certain yoga exercises in order to hold my emotions in check. As soon as I had the feeling that I was myself again, I abandoned this restraint upon the emotions and allowed the images and inner voices to speak afresh. . . .
In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me "underground," I knew I had to let myself plummet down into them, as it were. I felt not only violent resistance to this, but a distinct fear. For I was afraid of losing command of myself and becoming a prey to the fantasies. . . . After prolonged hesitation, however, I saw that there was no other way out. I had to take a chance, had to try to gain power over them; for I realized that if I did not do so, I ran the risk of their gaining power over me. . . .
It was during Advent of the year 1913 . . . that I resolved upon the decisive step. I was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears. then I let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged down upon dark depths. I could not fend off a feeling of panic. But then, abruptly, at not too great a depth, I landed on my feet in a soft, sticky mass. I felt great relief, although I was apparently in complete darkness. After a while my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, which was rather like a deep twilight. Before me was the entrance to a dark cave . . .
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, in the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness.
And he went into all the region about the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance and forgiveness of sins. As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet:
"The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord, Make clear a path."
But Herod the Tetrarch, who had been reproved by him, shut up John in prison.
And Jesus . . . returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit for forty days in the wilderness.
Why have you come out to the countryside? To see a reed shaken by the wind? And to see a person dressed in soft clothes, like your rulers and your powerful ones? They are dressed in soft clothes, and they cannot understand truth. From Adam to John the Baptist, among those born of women, no one is . . . greater than John the Baptist. . . . But I have said that whoever among you becomes a child will know the Kingdom and become greater than John.
Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirrings of life and hope.