Hope in the Desert

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And he fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread." But he answered, "It is written, 'Humans shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.'"

(Matthew 4:1-4)

My flight began its long descent into Las Vegas. It was midnight local time -- 3 o'clock in the morning on my body's time -- and waves of exhaustion and emptiness swept over me as the plane shuddered toward the ground. From the air, the lights of the Las Vegas strip came into view -- lights upon lights that glared and blinked and flowed around skyscraping casinos, monuments to greed and the American desperation to beat the odds and strike it rich.

I leaned back from the window, and the view changed. Suddenly the lights of Las Vegas were transformed into a kaleidoscope of rainbows. Some imperfection or distortion in the glass, I surmised, had split each glaring light into a wondrous spectrum of color. The myriad of rainbows intersected and danced across the glass, and I was reminded that I had come with different eyes and a different hope.

I carried with me a clear image -- an image from the days before the war, which seemed so far away now in early March. It came in fact from January 14, just 48 hours before everything changed. It was from an evening steeped with hope, when 8,500 of us streamed down Massachusetts Avenue from the Washington National Cathedral to the White House with candles to pray and plead for peace.

That night the parents of 3-year-old Korey Hulteen Masters had told her we were marching to the White House "to tell George Bush to use his words instead of fighting." When we arrived, and the huge throng of police on foot and motorcycles and horseback kept us from getting too close, Korey stood up in her stroller and shouted through a torrent of tears, "But I came to tell George Bush to use his words!"

I thought of Korey that night as I touched down in Las Vegas. The scream of frustration that she had articulated so passionately had been trapped in my throat for seven weeks. By Ash Wednesday, it had become a silent cry of despair and defeat.

That night the allied forces bombed the Amariya shelter in Baghdad, killing hundreds of Iraqi women and children. That same night, a malfunctioning civil defense siren wailed eerily over Washington, DC, sending the city into a panic about a terrorist attack.

I stayed awake late into the night after our Sojourners Ash Wednesday service, kept awake by other sirens -- sirens of police cars or ambulances, sounds of a drug raid or another shooting in the neighborhood. I tried to pray, finding it difficult to know just what to pray for.

A ground war that would have brought enough U.S. casualties to dampen the euphoria, enough to turn the nation against war? Who could be so callous as to wish for the unending stream of body bags quietly slipping into Dover Air Force base?

A quick end to the war, with a minimum of casualties? Of course. But now, in the aftermath of the "quick war," we endure what we feared all along -- the technology vindicated and undoubtedly billions more dollars poured into "smart" and "successful" weapons, ready to be arrayed against whoever the nation next proclaims as "enemy."

I built an altar that night, beneath my collection of images of "Madonna and child" from places around the globe -- from South Africa, the Soviet Union, Appalachia, the Navajo Nation, and the streets of my own city. I spread out the Palestinian scarf that Jim had brought me from his pre-Christmas trip to the Middle East. I added stones and sand and candles, images of desert and light.

I built my altar as an act of faith in a time of gnawing emptiness. And I made a decision that night as I knelt before it -- when the words to pray wouldn't come -- to keep a fast through Lent. It was a discipline I had never embraced before -- an act to stave off a spiral of despair, a choice when there seemed to be no other choice.

THREE WEEKS LATER, I went to the desert. The 10th anniversary of the Nevada Desert Experience took me to Las Vegas and then 65 miles northwest to the edge of the Nevada Test Site, where the nation explodes its nuclear weapons.

U.S. troops had undergone desert training exercises just miles from this same spot. In the barrenness there, I knew that a Desert Storm that had thrown its fury across the Arabian sands had done the same to my soul.

The war had already been officially over for a week when I arrived in Nevada. I had thought initially that the end of the war might give me reason to break my water-and-juice fast. But in the aftermath, the nation's arrogance and euphoria -- and the complete blindness to massive Iraqi suffering -- simply turned my fast from a "fast for peace" to a "fast of repentance."

The "40 days of Desert Storm" drove us into 40 days of wilderness, into powerlessness, into the desert just as Jesus was driven into the desert. It seems to be no coincidence that this storm descended on us during Lent.

My own wilderness, the unknown territory of fasting, has brought a sharpness of vision, a feeling of looking at the world differently -- and a deepened sense of the presence of God. When physical strength gives out, the assurance of God's sustenance has taken powerful hold. In my despair, I have needed such a sign. But even in the fast, I remained closed to part of God's power.

I could not escape it in the desert. After a liturgy at the edge of the test site, I went off to be alone. I went to a place where there was just me, and the gravelly sand, and the occasional Joshua tree with spiny branches outstretched like arms toward God.

There, like other pilgrims to the desert have for centuries, I fell to my knees and discovered an emptiness beyond any I had ever known. For the first time in weeks, I was able to weep, to allow my tears to spill and water the barren earth.

And I found, in pouring out the despair, that there was room for something I had been closed to since Ash Wednesday. There, on the 24th day of my fast, I was fed by the words of a gentle God and found hope: "Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert ... to give drink to my chosen people" (Isaiah 43:18-20).

Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.