Make the Wilderness Part of Your Story
Moses, Thoreau, and Vulnerability
In Hebrew, the word that commonly is translated as wilderness is midbar. Often, translators use it for the word “desert,” because that’s the sort of wilderness common in the Near East. Hagar is exiled to the midbar when she’s mistreated by Abraham and Sarah—and this slave woman from Egypt is the first to name God in the whole story of the Bible: as one who sees. She is exiled to the wilderness, found there, and rescued.
Later in the story, Moses is in the wilderness tending to sheep as he sees a burning bush, and from it God speaks to him. In the wilderness, he hears his mission and purpose. He returns to Egypt and leads the people back to the wilderness, so they can also hear their mission and purpose, visited by the One Who Sees.
And the wilderness becomes a place of exile and formation. This is the way symbols often work in the Bible: they are not allegories, where one symbol means one thing. They have a multitude of meanings. Water can refer to life—as God provides water from a rock—and death, in terms of a flood or the symbol of baptism (a great example of both life and death). Darkness is both mystery and evil and yet a place God chooses to dwell. And wilderness is both exile and formation. Both a place where the people must remain, apart from their home, and a place where they are formed.
So the great thinkers on wilderness, the prophets, ferret out what God might be up to. They understand the self-definition God gives in Exodus 34 (to Moses, in the wilderness): compassionate and gracious, abounding in love and faithfulness, and the prophets begin to see this means God’s commitment not only to the Hebrews but the entire earth is not exhausted, but even better things are to come.
Make a way in the wilderness for God, the book of Isaiah proclaims in chapter 40. In fact, the wilderness itself will become an oasis, the desert (the common form of wilderness) alive with pools of water, olive trees and cedar, junipers, cypress, so that by the time the wilderness is mentioned again in chapter 43, the two ideas have collided: God is making a way through the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.
We begin to see this come true in the New Testament. Jesus goes into the wilderness for his own formation before fully initiating his work, spending a symbolic 40 days there just as Israel had spent 40 years in the wilderness. Later, when Jesus’s relative John the Baptist is killed, Jesus invites his disciples into the wilderness to rest and, most likely, remember John the Baptist. Mourn him. But the crowds see what he’s up to. They choose to follow Jesus and his band of disciples into the wilderness, and Jesus has compassion on them.
Interesting that the narrator notes the compassion of Jesus, when readers know that God is the one who self-defines by being compassionate.
And Jesus feeds a crowd of people with only a few fish and a little bread. This may not be a literal stream in the wilderness, but it’s certainly a tie to Isaiah; it’s certainly pointing to this prophecy of restoration even in the remotest of places. Or, at least it became so after the author had a chance to reflect on what was really happening, for Jesus didn’t say, “Let’s go to the wilderness and you’ll see symbolic streams of water begin to flow,” but rather just went and did it. This seems to be the normal operating procedure of Jesus, just as it seems to be the normal operating procedure of the God revealed in the Old Testament: act it out and let people reflect on what happened in order to understand it. No flashing neon signs. Rather, an invitation to think, to ponder, to pray, to meditate, to dig deeper.
To seek.
Our modern conception of wilderness is different. For one, at least Google images seems to believe wilderness is more about trees and mountains—including lakes and streams—than desert. Claiming there may be streams and trees in the wilderness is nonsensical for many Westerners: that’s precisely what wilderness is. Yet, it’s always a negation of civilization, of the protection we get from gathering with other people (for we get this protection even in modern times: hospitals, electricity, cell service, available food, available shelter, clean water). A wilderness experience is an unprotected experience. It lays bare our vulnerability.
Vulnerability seems to focus us, to point us toward what matters. At least, this has been my experience: a couple nights in the hospital a few weeks after my 40th birthday made me readjust my view of the many meetings and emails and ways I had of living that made these tasks the ultimate goal of my life, which of course they aren’t. But intermittent reminders of our vulnerability are a chance to ask what matters, and how I could’ve been so confused living in the crib of civilization, with all my needs and comforts provided for.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” writes Thoreau, or wrote Thoreau 170 years ago, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” For him, the experience of wilderness, even on Walden Pond, brought a distillation of life that we neglect in the day-to-day worries. We are caught up in “factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors” and “employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal.”
Vulnerability, we might say, strips us of the inessential facts of life, the factitious cares: we can engage it accidentally when everything goes wrong, or we can become intentionally vulnerable—and there are no more time-tested ways to do this than to enter the wilderness. Such experiences reform us. This seems to be the point of Israel’s desert wanderings: ostensibly, the generation in charge of fearing to go into the Promised Land needed to age out of their leadership, but the next generation was meant to be formed in a particular way—as a people vulnerable and dependent on God.
Wilderness, then, becomes those places where we are vulnerable—if we have the eyes to imagine it. Any place we go away from “home” and the safety and refuge of it. Our modern lives are insulated from vulnerability, with seat belts and clean vegetables and even air conditioning so we don’t experience too much discomfort. Wilderness levers us out onto the edge, reminding us of our vulnerability and frailty, which makes us drink deep from life rather than the alternative. We need periodic reminders of our lack of control to become people of spirit, of depth, of meaning, even of hope. We need periodic reformation.
Or, re-creation.
In the end, wilderness speaks to the paradox of life, and certainly the life that seeks after God. That is, we are filled when we make ourselves empty. We are strong when we are weak. We are most whole and alive, in some sense, when we make ourselves vulnerable. The root of the word is from the Latin; vulnus means wound. It’s opposite would be a sense of wholeness, health, life—even more than simply ensconced and protected.
The trick is to make the wilderness part of your story, whether you’re someone who likes camping or not. You already have practices of getting outside, whether for a walk or hike, whether for a weekend camping or weeklong exposure to the elements. And you surely have practices of discomfort, of feeling vulnerable. Creating. Entering conflict. Working out. Trying a new hobby.
What are your practices of leaving home? That is wilderness. You need these practices, like trees need wind in order to have healthy root systems. You need wilderness in the metaphorical sense. Risk. Vulnerability. Fear. Frailty. These help us live better lives, or at least they do for me. And joined with this in wilderness is the wildness itself, often seen most clearly in nature: the way the sun set the clouds ablaze last night, the way you can get to the mountains and see no person or signs of civilization for miles, the way you are small and the world is big and unsafe, but also full of wonder and wildness.
And we make our homes bigger not by hanging back and sitting in them, but by venturing forth, trying new things, becoming accustomed to vulnerability, increasing and filling the earth—or so it says in an old book.