My Own Personal Desert

And I say, “If only I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest. Indeed, I would run far away; I would stay in the desert.” —Psalm 55:6–8

Summer is a tumble: library books and toys sneaking into the far crevices of the house, an endless parade of snack requests even when the meal I’m preparing is only ten minutes away, another overstuffed dishwasher to unload, piles of grass-stained laundry to wash and cleaned clothes wilting in piles to be folded.

For the kids, summer is languid basking in the freedom from recurring commitments, a freedom which too soon becomes gnawing boredom, followed by predictable demands for parental attention. Soon they won’t want anything to do with us, I’m told, but right now attention is the currency of the realm. There’s hardly a moment they don’t seek it.

Desperate for time alone, I wake up ever earlier. I tiptoe carefully past their still sleeping forms to the chair where I settle in with muscle memory, early enough to watch the gray sky bloom pink as I clear my mind and come before God in silence. This daily haven of quiet, a vital reprieve from their demands, feels like water. I depend on it to have any hope of being with them in the chaos without combusting.

Inevitably, as I’m savoring my minutes of peace, just settling in to pray, the door creaks open and three small searching heads emerge, looking for a lap to plant themselves in.

My soul groans. My first instinct is an urgent desire to resist. And I would have, if they had not already made a beeline to their intended target, piling their sleepy morning bodies on top of me.

Turning them away now feels wrong, so I surrender. Any continuing prayer will be in between elbows to the ribs and requests for breakfast. So much for quiet communion with God. I guess my kids are stuck with the mom they have, not the super holy person I could become if only they’d leave me alone.

In an Austin City Limits concert film, Alanis Morrissette paces the stage in sneakers and a shiny silver shirt, grinning at an eager crowd. Everyone knows the song from the first harmonica riff. Moments later she’s wailing: “Why are you so petrified of silence? Here, can you handle this?”

On her recorded album, everything stops. Actual silence, mid-song. In the live performance, she pauses. But the crowd overrides the silence with screams.

“Why are you so petrified of silence?” Apparently, I am not the target audience for this song. I love solitude and silence! Quiet room, still house, time alone? Sign me up. After sweeping up another round of crumbs to the soundtrack of squabbling siblings, silence comes as a relief, a rare break for a line worker tackling a relentless conveyor belt of demands.

I am the target audience for Henri Nouwen’s gentle tsk tsk describing our temptation to envision the spiritual disciplines of solitude and silence as privacy, “a time and a place for ourselves in which we are not bothered by other people, can think our own thoughts, express our own complaints, and do our own thing, whatever it may be.”

A time and place to not be bothered by other people is my idea of heaven. But the spiritual disciplines of solitude and silence are not about assuaging my desire to be left alone, free from others’ claims on my time and energy. Alanis Morrissette sings on, “What I really want is some patience, a way to calm the angry voice, and all I really want is deliverance.” Same, girl, same.

What I really want is, ultimately, not to be left alone, but deliverance. To be a loving, hopeful, patient version of myself, not the mom who yells at her kids to leave her alone so she can pray.

From where shall such deliverance come? For many in the Judeo-Christian story, the answer has been: the desert. The desert is the site of preparation in countless familiar stories. Moses tending herds in the wilderness for a third of his life before the Exodus. God’s people wandering in the wilderness for forty years before entering the Promised Land. Elijah retreating to the desert to pour out his anguish, meeting God in the still small voice. Where was the proving ground where Jesus spent forty days alone resisting the devil before launching his public ministry? The desert, of course.

In the fourth century, when becoming a Christian was no longer likely to result in martyrdom, some devout Christians began to look elsewhere for sanctification. As scholar Bernard McGinn notes, the new model of sanctity was solitary. In comfortable Constantinian security, how will you purify your soul to meet God? Flee to the desert. Accept the harsh conditions. Weave baskets in your cell, awaiting the transcendent.

The unrelenting demands of domestic life can bring me to the end of myself as surely as can solitude and silence. What if I make these demands my own personal desert?

Even family obligations, it appears, didn’t slow them down. Antony of Egypt (ca. AD 250–356) became ward of his young sister after their parents died. As Athanasius of Alexandria tells it in The Life of St. Antony, less than six months later he walks into a church and hears the Gospel reading, Jesus telling a rich man to “go sell all that you have, and give it to the poor; and come, follow me and you shall have treasure in heaven” (Matt. 19:21). Antony takes it literally. He leaves the church and promptly donates his property, over two hunded acres, which was to provide for his sister, whom he drops off with some nuns. How nice for him. He eventually winds up in the desert, where he practices the ascetic life alone for nearly twenty years, becoming one of the most well-known Desert Fathers.

What’s so special about the desert? Belden Lane writes evocatively about this in The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, describing the power of places so fierce and empty that we can “experience the necessary risk” to “enter the abandonment” necessary to meet God, the ultimate source of deliverance. For “God can only be met in emptiness, by those who come in love, abandoning all effort to control, every need to astound.” 

And how do we do that? Through the climate of the desert, of course. Attempting to abandon our efforts to control by our own efforts always backfires. But in the desert, we are weathered. Here great forces of silence and solitude carve away what Christian mystics have called the false self, just as wind and rain carve desert canyons. In the arid expanse of the desert, the false self, the self that depends on external affirmation for identity and assurance, withers. Subject it to the desert climate for long enough, and it just might die.

The desert is the way of deliverance, because the desert is the way of death.

But the core paradox of Christianity is that death is a beginning. Wilderness is preparation for salvation. The way to gain life is to lose it. The way to be fruitful is to die. In being emptied, we meet the God who is the true source of identity, belonging, and purpose, and we are filled. I may not want death exactly, but boy do I want what it makes possible.

So, what are solitude and silence really for? Not a space carved out where I am in control. Not a reprieve from my hectic life. No, what solitude and silence are really for is fullness of life, by way of death to my false self.

Photograph by Be.Pe / Alamy Stock Photo.

Shall I pull an Antony? Drop my kids off with the nuns and head to a desert? As appealing as that might sound at certain moments, I doubt God is calling me to abandon my children en route to holiness. Any transformation will have to happen in the context of the life I’m living, responsibilities and all.

But without solitude and silence to chisel away the false self that resents my children’s interruptions, how do I become the kind of person who no longer snaps at her children when they interrupt her solitude and silence? How do I – in my shoes, not Antony’s – pursue God in the desert? It took Antony nearly twenty years with no kids. Sometimes I can’t even get twenty minutes alone.

Maybe that is a clue. The desert driving people “beyond all efforts to control,” inviting “the abandonment … necessary for meeting God”? That sounds a lot like parenthood. Could parenting be my desert?

Maybe you’re a caregiver. Maybe you’re working two low-wage jobs. Maybe your commitments steep you in crowds and noise. Could our inability to be alone actually invite the same death to the false self? Deliverance comes not from “a time and a place for ourselves in which we are not bothered by other people,” as Nouwen put it, but from surrender to being bothered by God, whether that’s through silence or through an unfulfilled longing for it.

In this we’re in good company – not the way of Father Antony this time, but another anchorite. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux found her desert not by escaping the obligations of humanity, but by surrendering to them, submitting to interruptions God brought her way. Her life also lacked ample space to pursue her desire for communion with God in silence: 

When she finally found an hour or two to devote to the job, she applied herself in the following spirit: “I choose to be interrupted.” If a good Sister then came by to ask her for some little service, instead of coldly sending her away Thérèse made the effort to accept the interruption with good grace. And if nobody interrupted her, she considered that a charming present from her loving God and was very grateful to him.

If I cannot have actual silence and solitude, I can find in the very constraints preventing this an opportunity to surrender. The unrelenting demands of domestic life can bring me to the end of myself as surely as can solitude and silence. What if I make these demands my own personal desert? What if I choose, as a spiritual practice, to stop resisting? What if surrendering to the mundane I long to escape is the seed of what I want most?

Another early morning, another interruption. This time I’m pushing through a strength training routine, sloughing off the holiday lethargy. Again the door creaks open and in peers my youngest, face soft with sleep. I nod in assent to the entrance she would have made anyway, and she curls up on the couch to watch me sweat, offering commentary that is mainly an excuse to repeatedly say “Mama,” assured of an answer.

As sleepiness shakes off, she moves to join me. I set aside the weights and switch to her favorite Taylor Swift song. I meet her outstretched arms, take her hands, and we dance.