Like Water For Wandering
Navigating the Wilderness of the Soul and Finding New Life in the Valley of Struggle
“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward He was hungry.”
“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.””
Another Brand of Wilderness
Heading out into the wilderness in search of understanding like some vision quest, may seem like an old literary or cinematic trope. Nevertheless it works in stories because the basis for this idea holds up in real life. Our wilderness is sometimes a literal one, a landscape we put ourselves into in the hope of finding challenges, intense contemplation, spiritual focus, creative inspiration.
Other times, these deserts or wild lands are regions inside that call out to us, reminding each person about the places within that remain unassailable to outside forces, by the repetitive and mundane, by everything apathetic, mechanized, and inhuman. We can go there, sometimes in body, at other times, in thought and spirit only, to push our minds and hearts toward new understanding, toward better problem solving, toward a greater revelation of each other, toward maturity and wisdom.
“We are constantly bringing knowledge back from the world to our inner selves. But it is our struggle with it, our wrestling with existence that clarifies its scope and meaning.”
The Cost of our Spoils
There are revelations whose petals only unfold when we've done a certain kind of work on ourselves. And there is a more nuanced and more compassionate view of life and of others that grows in us when we walk into the unknown. Ignorance may be a blissful hotel room, but it isn't somewhere you want to establish a homestead. Wisdom is always waiting to be found, winking, flirting, calling out to us, her voice on the wind. But she isn't an easy lover. Her presence will change you; and while the change is always good, it may not be comfortable. Like any great companion, though, the rewards far outweigh the cost.
One of the costs of obtaining wisdom is experience - years spent navigating all the complexities of the world and of human bonds. The other is a great deal of intellectual and emotional struggle. We are constantly bringing knowledge back from the world to our inner selves. But it is our struggle with it, our wrestling with existence that clarifies its scope and meaning.
I want to say briefly that struggle in this context is not what many of us often think of when we hear that word, which is an entirely antagonistic fight with something, with someone or some force. It isn't about enemies facing off to "win." Struggle is also about wrestling with something to know it more intimately. Anyone out there reading this who's been married a while understands what I'm saying. We struggle with our husband or wife because of love, because we want to know them better, deeper. We struggle with and side by side to sharpen one another, to untangle old sorrows and lies, and to illuminate for one another our true faces.
The Value of Scars
There is an ancient story from the Bible about a man named Jacob, who, while in the wilderness, found himself visited by a "man" who wrestled with him all night until at last this man touched Jacob's hip and crippled it permanently. The man later revealed Himself to be God. Whether this was God Himself taking the form of a man or an angel representing God's will, is unclear. But the power in this account cannot be overstated.
God gives Jacob a new name, Israel, which would be the name of an entire nation. Jacob, taking a cue from God, then renamed the place where this cosmic encounter took place. The passage reads: "So Jacob called the place Peniel,[b] saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.” It is said that Israel means "He wrestles with God," and Peniel means "Face of God." I love how each of them presented names that were profoundly intimate. They encountered one another in a way that went beyond our usual human interactions. It was a knowing that directly accesses and changes the mind, body, and spirit at once.
It is interesting that this encounter left Jacob with a perpetual limp, a sign or scar, so to speak, that would never let him forget what had taken place that night. This is not unlike our struggle toward meaning, the wrestling we do with our biggest questions and our greatest fears. It is our struggle toward the acquisition not only of knowledge but of meaning. And this struggle we do in our own wilderness has the potential to redefine (rename) each of us. The more of these revelations we uncover, the more accepting we become of the bruises and the limps we sometimes receive from our wanderings.
“Some of the most concentrated sustenance lies in two disparate but related places, near the core of our being and far outside on the periphery, two realms that ask us to invest a great deal more of ourselves in return for giving up their secrets. ”
In Rooms
Life is rarely what it seems, not because it is fundamentally evasive, but because much of its deeper realities are hidden, folded between layers of objective reality and subjective experience so innumerable and complex, that one will never see the end of their garments. It is, then, not so much that life isn't what it seems, but that it is so much more than what it seems.
Information is easy. It's everywhere. Understanding, though, takes time. Information comes to us these days whether we want it to or not. It invades our physical and psychological spaces through every device and access point that now holds our fleeting attention.
Understanding, or wisdom, not just info or data, requires the mingling of knowledge with contemplation and experience. Much of life is accessible by normal, or common, means, the everyday affairs of mankind. But some of the most concentrated sustenance lies in two disparate but related places, near the core of our being and far outside on the periphery, two realms that ask us to invest more of ourselves in return for giving up their secrets.
This exchange is almost always negotiated in a few particular rooms, namely space, silence, solitude, wandering...and even a measure of boredom. These dwellings often don't exist for us as external habitations. Even when we desire and plan for it, we don't always get the freedom to pursue solitude and contemplation right when we want. More important to our moral and spiritual development, is that these spaces can be navigated in the mind and soul alone between the very common, daily activities we shuffle through. It is about a choice, the choice to take this pathway within, the one that looks a lot more difficult but leads to a far better place.
Moving toward a greater understanding of ourselves and of our world sometimes means stepping away from it to one degree or another so that we might see it more clearly, see it from an angle we hadn't considered until our mind was given enough space to stretch out and inhabit what it wasn't capable of before. This isn't simply about disconnecting from the world; but it's a wonderful thing whenever we get the chance to do so. It's about exploring the vast landscape of the soul and applying what we've taken from life to that which is eternal inside us.
Filling or Fulfillment
There is a funny thing about life. While it may be presently hampered by its inseparable bond with entropy, it is also guided by another principle, an obsession with abundance. Most of the time this is a good thing. But life will do whatever it can to fill the various vacuums of reality. And in the lethal presence of our addiction to stimuli, noise, and self-repression (which is the fear of self-identity, truth, reality, and personal responsibility - the fear of being seen without costume or veil), this desire to fill empty spaces, can, instead of nourishing us, simply fill our rooms with whatever borrowed and broken goods are within reach.
Taking this idea back down to earth a bit, when we avoid allowing ourselves to explore some of the more painful, ecstatic, exultant, and difficult parts of life and of being, we will fill rooms that were originally carved out for deeper things, with whatever we can find lying around.
This indiscriminate outlook toward the fulfillment of our need for understanding, this tragic but often understandable apathy toward the call we carry to dig up purpose and meaning from our days, leaves us ill-equipped to handle heavier loads when life inevitably brings them our way. And believe me, just when you declare that life couldn't send anything heavier your way, it will. It has no reservations about that challenge. You'll want to be prepared in mind and heart as much as possible.
It also quite often leaves us unready to recognize or joyfully take part in more profound relationship opportunities when they happen to find us. Missing out on a job is one thing. Missing out on or mishandling love or friendship is a whole other kind of pain.
“So many portions of life, revelation, and relationship, are only accessible when we roam the unfilled spaces of our existence and contend with questions that are not easily answered.”
The Weight and Value of Struggle
Whether it beguiles or frightens us, so many portions of life, revelation, and relationship, are only accessible when we give ourselves enough inward stillness and focused thought to wrestle with difficult realities, when we roam the unfilled spaces of our existence and contend with questions that are not easily answered. Easy questions are fine, and their answers usually help us survive and find various comforts. But while these sustain the body for a time, they do not sustain the spirit. They do not feed the minds or souls of men and women longing for fruit that doesn't spoil and water that never runs dry.
We've always been easily distracted and averse to struggle. Some of this is mere survival. But our struggle in this life is unavoidable. It also happens to be our only gateway to a richer, more fulfilling existence. The key is to struggle well, with purpose and intent. It is to struggle toward revelation, not simply to bat away annoyances or alleviate the weight of existence. We have to carry this weight, these heavy objects, eventually; and we will do so either by choice and clarity of will, or by default, which only leads to weariness.
Early on, what we find when we first venture into the questions that haunt us the most is a heavier load to carry and a lot more questions. When we make the choice to move through, instead of around our troubles, we welcome every ounce of the fight into our room. When we look at our most difficult questions directly, instead of dodging and hiding all the time behind distractions and emotional repression, we invite the full weight of our search to take a seat at the table each of us keeps within.
This is where the real work takes place, where great swaths of broken, dying, or wasteful material get removed from our being and where a deeper manifestation of pure joy, joy unfettered by artifice or transitory and temporal concerns, can bubble up within each of us no matter what life may bring.
The Path is Worth it
Our deserts are usually not literal ones. Our wilderness may only be the internal extension of our struggle with all that goes on around us. But it is our willingness to wrestle - not simply with our demons, which is a fight for our life, but with angels, which is a struggle not against, but toward a greater definition of life and being. There are questions that arise from moving through the wilderness of the soul; and these questions are answered by drinking the invisible waters found only in the heart of a desert.
Going to those places in search of wisdom is no small thing. It can be terrifying, namely for the way it holds an unbiased and frightfully accurate mirror to ourselves. But it also sets us on a road toward a new understanding of what it means to be human, what it means to love powerfully and unselfishly...what it means to forgo a more comfortable existence in favor of a scar and a limp...if that limp is a side dish to a main course that reshapes who we are, one that gives us the name we were born to carry.