8 April 2025 - Tuesday 5th week of Lent
Homily
Throughout this Lenten season, the biblical readings, inviting us to conversion, have spoken to us of the experience of the desert, during which, for forty years, God formed and transformed His people.
There is an experience of the desert at the beginning of every great spiritual journey. After His baptism, Jesus Himself began this new period of His life with a solitary journey into the desert. Before Him, this had also been the experience of Elijah, passing through the desert of his own poverty, fear and weakness before reaching the summit of his encounter with God in the light breeze on Mount Horeb. It was the experience of Paul, who spent several mysterious years, about which we know almost nothing, in the Arabian desert after his encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus. And thousands of men and women, from the beginnings of monastic life in Syria and Egypt to the present day - not forgetting, of course, the great ascetics of the Jura (past and present!) - have gone to the desert to have this experience.
The desert is a very special place. In rich, moist soil, anything can grow. In the arid, parched soil of the desert, only a few hardy and resistant (or tough!) plants can grow.
The path of solitude can undoubtedly lead to dazzling mystical experiences such as that of Elijah or of Jesus after His baptism or on Mount Tabor. But, in general, the path of conversion offered by the desert is something much more prosaic, like that of the people of Israel of whom we hear in this morning's first reading. The Hebrews were fed up with the bland desert food, which was coming out of their noses. They rebelled against their guides, Moses and Aaron, who had found nothing else to give them and who really didn't seem to know where they were leading them. And there were all those snakes biting them.
This is a fairly accurate description of the monastic desert, where Mount Horeb and Mount Tabor are not necessarily frequent. The monastic desert, this monastic life which Benedict says is a continuous fast, consists of all the events of our daily life. We experience the desert in the very ordinary things of life, for example, through our failures - failures in our work, in our fraternal relationships, in our ascetic life. Or again, when we grow older, we realise that we no longer have the strength that we once had.
When we accept all these limitations, they bring us face to face with our deepest limitations, with our sin, with all the idols we secretly worship. And this is the first step towards conversion of the heart – a conversion that we cannot bring about by ourselves, but which we can only receive as a pure gift. (‘I will take the heart of stone out of your body and put a heart of flesh in its place.’)
When the Desert Fathers, in their writings, speak of their struggles against beasts, serpents and devils, these are simply images by which they describe those aspects of their hearts which Jung called our ‘shadow’.
When Jesus describes the reality of conversion, he does not use sweet and easy images: he refers to the two traumatic moments in life, birth and death. To Nicodemus, he says that one must be born again, and to the disciples he speaks of the grain that falls to the earth, which bears fruit only if it dies.
Armand Veilleux