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Into the wilderness5/28/2023 My time with the plant, I realized, was a Visio Divina, a contemplative way to pray in which we “see with the eyes of the heart.” This “seeing” and emptying our minds gives God the chance to break through and inhabit us. All sorts of words, images, and feelings came to me as I looked at the plant. For most of the time I sat there, I could not take my eyes off of a particular plant, a blue-green shrub clinging to the rock. There were so many shades of sand and rock and even pops of vegetation I had not noticed before. My earlier monochromatic impression of the landscape burst into color. I would not want to be stranded in this desert, but as I looked across the Wadi, I saw stark, unpredictable beauty. The land, it turned out, was its own text, its own teaching, its own wordless prayer. I did not bring retreat reading material with me or have a prayer agenda. We continued to walk on the path next to the Wadi (a streambed that is dry much of the year) and then split up to find separate places to spend time alone. Our foursome had hoped to enter the monastery to spend time in the chapel with the icons, but the monastery was closed to visitors. The monastery was first built around 500 CE with several destructions and reconstructions since. After parking our car and saying, “No thanks” to the Bedouin invitations for a donkey ride, we walked down a steep path towards the Greek Orthodox Monastery of St. But for four hours, it was a magnificent place to get still and escape the distractions of everyday life. The desert wilderness is a hostile, ungenerous landscape for a lone 40-day pilgrim. From the road, the rising dunes and hills look like sand, but they are mostly rock. And it is not fine-grained sand-dune desert. It is desert, hundreds of square miles of it. The wilderness where Jesus went is so different. When I read “wilderness” as a child, I thought of the deep dark woods of Grimm’s fairy tales: dense thickets of trees, creepy and gnarled branches out to snag me, mythic beasts ready to eat me…. George’s College drove to the wilderness of Wadi Qelt on Friday for a four-hour Advent retreat. Our goal in the wilderness was not forty days, nor a run-in with the devil. When the Bible uses the number 40, it’s a saying that means “a long time.” So we don’t know exactly how long Jesus prayed and fasted, but it was beyond human ability to endure.And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness for forty days, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. Oases can provide water, but Jesus spent 40 days fasting and praying, receiving revelation for His ministry. Most of the land around the baptism site is wilderness. This wilderness is not as dry as are the Arava or the Negev, even farther south, but wilderness, still. Jerusalem is very hilly and not very lush, but when you go over the hills to the south or east, you are in a desert wilderness, the Judean Wilderness. This is when the winds turn and come in from the Arabian Desert to the southeast. That is, except for about 50 days each year when there is a sharav or hamsin. The humidity hovers around 50%, which is nice, and it’s always cool at night with breezes blowing in from the Mediterranean Sea. Jerusalem weather is actually not so bad. Jericho is an oasis, but the area around it is part of the Judean Wilderness. The location of Jesus’ baptism was a tributary of the Jordan River near Jericho, just north of the Dead Sea.
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