Our Inner Wilderness

Lent is supposed to be the time when we think of Jesus in the wilderness.  And the wilderness belongs to us.  It is always lurking somewhere as part of our experience, and there are times when it seems pretty near the whole of it.  Most people’s wilderness is inside them, not outside.  Our wilderness is an inner isolation.  It’s an absence of contact.  It’s a sense of being alone—boringly alone, or saddeningly alone, or terrifyingly alone…

And so, we are tempted of Satan [in our inner wilderness].  Tempted to give up, to despair.  Tempted to cynicism.  Tempted sometimes to cruelty.  Tempted not to help others when we know we can, because, we think, “What’s the use?”  Tempted to banish from our life all that we really hold most dear…

This then is our Lent, our going with Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted.  And we might apply to it some words from the First Epistle of St Peter: “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal which comes upon you to prove you, as though something strange were happening to you.  But rejoice, in so far as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.”

– from True Wilderness (1965), by Harry Abbott Williams, monk (1919–2006)