Living Amid the Wilderness of Our Lives.

Have you heard that tale about the rabbi who one day, while wandering through a wooded wilderness, discovered he was lost? For three days and nights he was unable to find the way out. Exhausted, he ran into another man and said to him, "My friend, I'm really lost. I have searched and searched for a way out -- but all I find are paths leading deeper in. Can you show me the way out?" The second man sighs, "Well, I confess I too am lost. But look, why don't you come with me? Perhaps we can find out way out of this wilderness -- together."

Wilderness stories grow out of real life. Wilderness echoes the common human experience of living with things as they are -- while waiting for things as they ought to be. Wilderness stories can be told around campfires and Conferences anywhere and be understood. That is because the human story is a wilderness story.

Wilderness is usually defined as geographical, thought of as the place touched, known, charted by few, if any. Once it was the forbiddingly deep places of the earth, today it is the forbiddingly deep places of space. But wilderness is more than place. Wilderness is also found in thought and feeling, in the inner experience of being human -- a state of existence. The wilderness I describe is located in the beautiful, yet bleak, ambiguities of having/not having, of knowing/not knowing, of living/dying. Sub-consciously we admit familiarity with this inner wilderness each time we say, "I don't know" or "I wish" or "I wonder if". Each time we sense distance between what is and what ought to be we are experiencing the wilderness.

And yet, why is it that in matters of Church (faith) we are reluctant to admit familiarity with wilderness. Is it because we think we can tame it? Being People of The Book we ought to know the wilderness story of The Exodus -- about a group of wandering Semite tribes, in search of food, caravanning down the eastern Mediterranean coast into Egypt, where they find not only food but slavery. They get freed. They are on their way to a Promised Land. But first there is a very long wait in the wilderness.

We are so quick at softening and perfuming the truth about the wilderness that we seldom get a clear sense of the way things really are. There is that within us which knows that life is wilderness -- but there is also that within us which tampers with that truth. There is an indistinctive denial of both death and wilderness. We would very much like the wilderness to go away. Do you know how we try to get rid of it? We try to deny it exists. But wilderness is a condition of life characterized by such ambiguities as: knowing/not knowing, having/not having, being there/yet waiting, sensing/not sensing.

So how can we live amid the wilderness of our lives? It is with imagination! Imagination -- that is what stimulates the human spirit and can lead to fullness of life in the wilderness. It is evoked by a Promise that there is a time and place which has not yet come to be, but which will. The Promiser is God -- the "I Am Who I Am", Emmanuel -- God with us. Imaginative people live in the wilderness on Promise. The Promise is not an escape or denial of the wilderness. I remind you that The Promiser (Jesus) is born in the wilderness, lives and dies in the wilderness, and is resurrected in the wilderness!

Imaginative people, like John, on Patmos, know what a new future looks like. It takes the shape of a "…calf and a young lion growing up together, and a little child leading them." It is a future in which "…the cow and the bear shall be friends, and their young shall lie down together." The imaginative ones, nurtured by Promise, can see light in darkness, and life in death.

Imagination evoked is free to picture a new creation -- a new heaven and a new earth. It is free to employ both fact and fantasy, and to do so without fear of either. Imaginators can see the inner, invisible meanings in facts. Imagination is neither an escape route, no another wilderness denial in disguise. In fact, imagination is even an element of the wilderness itself! Imagination reaches into future and brings its possibilities into the present for the imaginative life and faith go hand-in-hand.

As Christian believers are called to remember the entire human story and, in response to Promise and Promiser, imagine every human possibility. Imagination -- that is what delights in every story and song, probes every fact, listens and speaks in every language, skillfully using every tool -- every gift the Spirit adjures us to use. Imagination calls us to look up and see how near the Promise and the Promiser are. They are/can be, whatever their lot in life, even in the face of death, fully alive. Those who can imagine -- they can hear the call into the wild which is a call even more wild than the wilderness itself.

See you Sunday.

E. Taveirne