Lent and the Desert of Modernity

Recognizing a holy hunger

The spiritual landscape of modernity has been likened to a desert. While in the past it was obvious to people that of course the world was saturated with the wildness of God, today people can go their whole lives without acknowledging a felt sense of the divine. In this parched landscape we have been taught to see the world as meaningless matter and ourselves as mere accidents of evolution. The result of this ideology is evident in the epidemics of nihilism, addiction, consumerism, and loneliness we see all around us. At times it can feel hopeless, but could the spiritual desert of modernity also offer a path to holiness?

In twentieth century art a theme intensified of something essential having been lost: “John Burroughs referred to the age as suffering from ‘the cosmic chill’; TS Eliot called it a ‘waste land’; Susan Taubes references ‘the absence of God’; Karl Rahner talked about a spiritual ‘winter’; and contemporary philosopher Michael Rea likes to use the term ‘divine hiddenness’ to describe the spiritual condition of modernity.”¹ Rudolf Otto summed it up by saying that modern man has lost his understanding of what holy is.

While pre-modern people organized their lives around holy places and holy times to “facilitate an ongoing encounter”² with the divine, modern people have few such delineations. Empty land and empty time are just resources to be utilized for profit, nothing is sacred anymore. As a result the world has flattened into a morass of sameness. And because yearning for the sacred is no longer seen as a natural human behavior that reveals something important about reality, but as a superstitious holdover from our unenlightened past, we increasingly turn to the things of the world to satisfy this longing.

Today there are more things to turn to than ever before, more movies and news and music and food and clothes and appliances and video games and drugs and shoes and cars and apps and holiday destinations and identities. Even faith itself has become a thing made flimsy, more therapeutic than transcendent. Our lives move ever faster and ever outward, skipping over the world like a pebble across the surface of a pond. As a society we have largely left behind the supposedly oppressive superstitions of religion, overthrown the traditions that we were told hindered individual self-expression, and we have access to more information and more stuff than anyone has ever had before, yet happiness did not follow.

Instead, a desert appeared.

So, in this desert, where is the path to holiness?

The path, I think, can be found in the realization that in all of the noise of modern life our innate longing for transcendence has not disappeared. All the things we consume - the movies and music and fashion and vacations and drugs and technology - have not truly nourished us. After all, “every soul is made with an infinite desire that only an infinite bliss can satisfy.”³ If anything, the desert of modernity has starved us of what we truly desire, revealing how flimsy the things of this world really are, and now the spiritual hunger we were told we should no longer have is more ravenous than ever. For something to be made so clear is a gift.  

“The desert of modern atheism provides the only space in which most of us are forced to encounter the transcendent… Our age has created an emptiness than in the serious God-seeker attains a religious significance.” - Louis Dupré⁴

The Gift of the Desert

The liturgical calendar resists the ‘sameification’ of the year, radiating the sublime through the ebb and flow of our daily lives. We fast and we feast, soberly contemplate and joyfully celebrate, moving cyclically through holy times until it forms the backdrop of everything we do. Every day, every week, every season signifies something different, something sacred, something that continually reorients us toward God.

Lent is the time of the year Christians commemorate the forty days Christ spent in the desert, praying, fasting, and resisting temptation before beginning his public ministry. As a time of contemplation and preparation for Easter, during these forty days Christians find various ways to put an increased focus on God, through prayer, fasting, alms-giving, and giving up luxuries as a form of self-denial. It is a time not for depriving the self merely for the sake of abstinence, but to pull away from the things of this world to better focus on God.

Pulling away from the things of this world has a long tradition within Christianity. When I think of this in conjunction with the desert, I think of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Christians of 3^rd and 4^th century Egypt, Arabia, and Syria who left the cities to seek out lives in the wilderness. These were people “who believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster.”⁵

Living alone as cave-dwelling hermits or in small proto-monastic communities, the daily lives of these desert abbas and ammas were filled with labor, prayer, and charity, with little food and few distractions. In the desert, the abbas and ammas understood that their attachment to the transient things of this world, so abundant in the city, was folly. “The proximate end of all this striving was ‘purity of heart’ – a clear unobstructed vision of the true state of affairs, an intuitive grasp of one’s own inner reality as anchored, or rather lost, in God through Christ.”⁶

Understood properly, then, modern cultural conditions can “provide the desert our ancestors had to seek out.”⁷ With its barren spiritual landscape, it offers us the gift of seeing the things of this world as the futile distractions they are. We can no longer fool ourselves into believing that if we acquire one more possession or take a trip to another trendy locale or do whatever it is we are being told this month is the key to lasting happiness. We long for so much more because there is so much more.

During this Lent I would like to give myself time to acknowledge the truth of that. To know that nothing in this world will ever satisfy the deepest longing of my heart. It is an easy thing to admit intellectually, but quite another thing to actually live. If you’ve read my book Drifts you’ll know my mind is an overwhelming place to be; it does not always take easily to sitting quietly in prayer. But that is what I feel I’m being called to do this Lent, to spend more time in stillness with God. Instead of countering the ceaseless chatter of my mind by reaching for my phone or a book or a podcast, I want to devote my time to seeing through the desert of this world, continually reorienting myself toward the one thing I truly seek.

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” – C.S. Lewis

If you are celebrating Lent, I would love to know what is on your mind going into this season. Please let me know in the comments below.

On My Bookshelf

Inspired by The Catholic Feminist, I thought I would add this “On My Bookshelf” segment to the end of my essays to chat about what I’m reading lately. (That’s my cat Samwise, by the way. He’s one of our four rescue cats and he’s a scamp.)

• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. This won the Pulitzer last year and my goodness how deserved that was. Set in 1990s Appalachia, where predatory pharmaceutical companies got a generation of people hooked on their supposedly safe pain killers, this novel follows a boy through the hardships and glories of his young life. This is the kind of book that leaves you feeling like you’ve lived an entire life with its cast of characters. It will stay with me for a very long time.

• Mysterion: The Revelatory Power of the Sacramental Worldview by Father Harrison Ayre. The sacramental worldview is at the heart of the Christian faith, though it has been increasingly forgotten. Father Ayre explains what it means to see the world sacramentally and invites readers to understand how transformative that can be.

• How to Grow a Garden in the Technopoly and Communal Digital Fast from School of the Unconformed. These are perfect reading in preparation for Lent, all about how to pull back from the trappings of the world in order to deepen relationships, strengthen community, and grow closer to God.

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• The painting is The Temptation in the Wilderness by Briton Rivière.

1. Jason Baxter, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: Recovering the Wildness of Spiritual Life, pg 57

2. Ibid, 33

3. Ibid, 9

4. Ibid, 42

5. Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert, pg 3

6. Ibid, 8

7. Baxter, 35