Back to the desert again. At this point Jesus and I ought to have a rewards card. Spend forty days in the wilderness, get the forty-first free. But today Ignatius sends me back into Matthew 4 differently. I am not supposed to dissect the temptations or figure out what Satan represents or produce another profound theological insight before finishing my coffee here at the kitchen island. Today I am asked simply to use my senses. See it. Hear it. Smell it. Taste it. Touch it. Basically, Ignatius wants me to stop writing the review and actually watch the show.
So I close my eyes and try. The first thing I notice is how quiet the desert must have been. Not necessarily peaceful quiet. Empty quiet. The kind where there is nothing to distract you from yourself. No phone buzzing. No rehearsal beginning. No conversation waiting. No music underneath the scene telling me how I am supposed to feel. And as a musician, that may be the strangest part for me. I am accustomed to a soundtrack. Music helps me interpret life. Give me three chords and a modulation and I can usually figure out what emotional neighborhood we are living in. But the desert doesn’t seem to offer Jesus any underscoring. No orchestra swells when he makes the right choice. No eleven-o’clock number when he tells the Tempter to get lost. Andrew Lloyd Webber apparently had the day off.
There is just wind. I hear it scraping across the rocks. I feel sand against my skin. I imagine the heat during the day and the cold once the sun disappears. I taste the dryness in my mouth and smell dust and sweat and earth. And Jesus is not floating three inches above any of it. His feet hurt. His stomach aches. His skin feels the weather. This is God experiencing the world through a human body, and perhaps that is what catches me today. Christianity has sometimes taught me to distrust the body, overcome the body, deny the body, rise above the body, as though holiness means becoming slightly less human. Yet here is Jesus experiencing God while completely inside his humanity. Hungry. Sweaty. Tired. Dust between his toes. Apparently incarnation is far less glamorous than the Christmas cards suggested.
And then I notice something I didn’t notice the first time I prayed this story. The desert changes. The sun moves. Shadows lengthen. The temperature drops. Stars appear. Morning comes. Then evening. Then morning again. The landscape that first looked completely dead begins revealing tiny things I missed because I was staring at the temptation. A scrub plant holding onto life between rocks. Tracks from some small creature that crossed during the night. The sky changing color at dawn. Wind rearranging the sand. The wilderness is not actually lifeless. It is simply alive in ways that require more attention. Well, damn. Maybe that is why Ignatius keeps asking me to pay attention.
And somewhere in this prayer, because apparently Ignatius of Loyola and Dolly Parton are now co-directing my Spiritual Exercises, I begin hearing Light of a Clear Blue Morning. What makes the song hit differently here is knowing that Dolly did not write it while everything was wonderful. She wrote it while emerging from a difficult transition, leaving something familiar and walking toward a future she could not completely see. She later called it her song of deliverance and freedom. That changes the way I hear it. The clear blue morning isn’t cheap optimism. It isn’t someone standing safely on the other side yelling back, “Cheer up, honey!” It is the song of somebody who knows what darkness feels like and nevertheless begins to see something changing on the horizon.
And suddenly I can see Jesus near the end of those forty days. Maybe it is early morning. The rocks are still rocks. His stomach is still empty. His feet still hurt. Nothing about the geography has changed, yet the horizon has. There it is. The light of a clear blue morning. Not noon. Not everything completely illuminated. Morning. That liminal moment when darkness has not entirely disappeared but light has begun making its claim.
I think I have lived a lot of life in that hour. There have been deserts I did not choose and transitions I certainly would not have written into the script. Relationships ending. People changing. Grief arriving. Watching people I love become different versions of themselves. Churches and communities that were once home becoming places where I no longer quite fit. Plans changing without asking my permission. Seasons when I knew something had ended but had absolutely no idea what was beginning.
And maybe I have spent too much time thinking the presence of wilderness meant I had somehow wandered off God’s path. Yet Jesus is led into the wilderness. That matters. The desert isn’t evidence that Jesus missed God. Somehow the desert is part of where God is taking him. I don’t particularly care for that revelation, Jesus. Could we perhaps return to the tap-dancing paralytic? That was more fun.
But maybe some seasons of life are not problems to solve. They are landscapes to cross. And perhaps the grace isn’t that God airlifts me out of them. The grace is that eventually my eyes adjust enough to notice the horizon. That makes Dolly’s song feel almost like prayer. Because “everything’s gonna be all right” does not have to mean everything is going to return to the way it was. Maybe that is the mistake I have sometimes made with hope. I have treated “all right” as restoration of the old life, the old relationship, old certainty, old version of myself, old plans. But morning never restores yesterday. Morning creates another day. Oh. There it is. Maybe hope is not believing that God will give me my old life back. Maybe hope is trusting that there is still life ahead of me. That feels different.
I think about the moments over these months when I have unexpectedly felt alive again. Laughing harder than I expected. Walking through New York. Sitting in a theatre when the lights went down. Hearing a song in a restaurant and realizing I was singing along. A conversation that lingered. A kiss that made fifty feel suspiciously like twenty-five for a minute. Sitting at this kitchen island and suddenly recognizing God in something completely ordinary. None of those moments erased what came before them. They didn’t fix every grief or answer every question. They were simply light appearing on the horizon. Little clear blue mornings.
Maybe this is what the five senses are teaching me today. I can become so focused on surviving the desert that I stop noticing what is happening inside it. There are still things to see. There is still music to hear. There are people to touch and embrace. There is food to taste. There is laughter. There is beauty. There are moments when something that had gone quiet inside me suddenly begins humming again. Maybe resurrection begins long before anybody notices the empty tomb. Maybe it begins whenever something inside us that we thought was dead begins responding to life again. A laugh. A song. A touch. A friendship. A desire. A moment of wonder. A morning when you wake up and realize yesterday didn’t hurt quite as much. A moment when you catch yourself making plans for the future. A moment when you think, almost surprised, I want to be here. Those might be some of the holiest sensations there are.
And maybe Jesus leaves this desert carrying something more than victory over temptation. Maybe he leaves knowing what it feels like to be fully alive in a human body, to hunger, ache, fear, endure, notice, choose, and keep walking toward whatever comes next. He does not escape his humanity to become holy. He inhabits it. That may be what I want from these Exercises too. Not to become more spiritual at the expense of being human. To become more alive. To taste things. To notice things. To laugh loudly. To sing along. To let affection matter. To allow myself to want things again. To recognize when something beautiful is happening without immediately asking how long it will last. To stop treating ordinary life like the waiting room for something more important.Because perhaps the great spiritual danger isn’t temptation at all. Perhaps it is moving through this beautiful, ridiculous, heartbreaking, holy life without actually being here for it.
So tonight I imagine myself standing beside Jesus & Dolly as the desert sky begins changing. Neither of us says much. I don’t need another lesson. I don’t need him to explain why deserts happen or what every difficult season of my life was supposed to teach me. Some things do not need explanations nearly as much as they need companionship. We just look toward the horizon. Dark blue becoming violet. Violet becoming gold. And somewhere, because God apparently knows exactly how to speak my language, I swear I can hear Dolly. Not loudly. Just enough. The light of a clear blue morning. And for once, I don’t need to know what happens next. I can simply stand here long enough to watch the light come. Maybe that is faith. Maybe that is hope. Maybe that is what it means to be alive. And maybe “everything’s gonna be all right” doesn’t mean everything will be easy, restored, explained, or exactly as I planned. Maybe it simply means: There is still morning ahead.
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