Journey Back to Eden.pdf - St Mark Coptic Orthodox Church Chicago

98 JANUARYferent path, and every day the external signs will always keep youinterested.Not here. It’s all the same. While I am walking a great deal, Ihave no external stimulation to make the walk the occasion of mymeditation. The emptiness, the barrenness, has the cumulative impactof driving me inward, making me reflective and introspective.But being so here is different than being reflective in my owncountry. Here, my reflection is easily prevented from becoming externalized.When I am meditating in my country, I can look aboutand find things all around me on which to affix my interior dispositions,on which to hang the thoughts that are inside me. There’snothing here onto which I can project the interiority of my soul.The desert represents the province of God on the edges of theempire of men. But ultimately, for us, it represents the territorialclaim that God has, even within the illusory claims made by men.And that’s what I am slowly discerning as I walk through thedesert: that in the end, the garden and the oasis, the farm and theorchard, all the watered lands of the earth are proximate to andprone to become a desert. The secret, hidden identity of the earth,wherever it is, is a desert locale.In the second creation account in Genesis, God begins his creativework not in a watery chaos but in an earthly desert out of whichhe causes a spring to flow. I now see that unless God continuallycauses the springs of life to well up, all the world will eventually revertback to a desert. Every kind of territory, every kind of environmentwill become a desert almost overnight if certain vital, continuousforces are not brought to bear, such as the ongoing rain, theyearly floods of rivers, and the currents of wind that always bring climaticchange and refreshment. Without the vital work of the Spirit,without the vitality that he brings to life through constant change andmovement, the world would become a dead world, a desert world.God’s authority over life and death, God’s capacity to bring life, ornot, is in a certain sense represented by the emptiness of the desert.The desert is at once a threat because we cannot control it but,on the other hand, it generates great exhilaration because it puts usin the presence of the One whom we cannot control, the forcewhich we cannot manage, the name which we cannot speak. It is apowerful means of placing us in the presence of God. It reminds usof our littleness, of our helplessness in the face of the Creator, evenin the face of the created.