Thirsting for Peace

In Time of War, Go to the Desert

This is the seventh inning stretch of Lent. I pray it will be the bottom of the eighth for the ongoing Middle Eastern hostilities. The world is so weary of war.

The whole wilderness way, Jesus didn’t have so much as a cricket snack or a sip of sap. This week must be the part where your tongue sticks to the roof of your parched mouth and you’d drink your own urine if you dared.

Your sandals are rotting off of your blistered feet. The briars attack your heels with their bullhead thorns—the same stickers I once feared as a barefoot girl in the Yuma, Arizona desert. Even rubber flip-flops (we called them zorries) were no match for the dried bullheads that hid like landmines. Waiting to strike.

And we’re no match for the new terrors unfolding across the world. The new “excursion” as it’s been called, worries me so much that I fear the desert will eat us all alive. I keep praying for rescue from this gathering danger. But maybe I’m only muttering to myself like some madwoman.

So here we are in the cruelest part of Lent, when you fear that the world is ending over some stupid decisions made by wannabe kings in the dark of night.

I used to wonder if Jesus talked to himself those forty days. Maybe he did or maybe the skinks and the dung beetles were company enough for a day’s journey. I mean, after the devil was done, did our Lord have some choice words for Old Wormwood? Or was Jesus so freaking tired by that time that he shrugged and just kept on walking?

Today I’m tired too. And thirsty, longing for the sweet waters that show up at the most unexpected times. Those balmy breezes feel so far away now, just around the corner but too far away.

I wanted the journey to be refreshing and unhindered, not a care, land of plenty. I thought I was lucky to be born when I was and where I was—a privileged white girl sailing through life with a nice family and on the radio, The Beach Boys having fun, fun, fun.

The Red Scare was winding down (Dad never did finish building that bomb shelter) but then Nam intruded and we marched and promised to blow up our TVS (RIP Country Joe). We managed to miss the Big One while little forever wars took our youths and gave them IEDs on the sides of desert roads.

And when we finally saw what we thought was peace, it tiptoed away.

So here we are in the cruelest part of Lent, when you fear that the world is ending over some stupid decisions made by wannabe kings in the dark of night. Water is life in that part of the world, and in every place on earth. Water and oil—they don’t mix, you know. Tell that to the king.

But the hardest part is imagining intrepid Jesus, by now staggering, weak and maybe asking if this forty-day thing was a really bad idea. Maybe wishing a different journey lay before him, a better choice made possible by taking the freeway instead of a road less travelled.

I wonder if Jesus wished he was by the river, the one where the current changed the bends after the rains, an old river flowing with new water, new life. The river that can’t stop itself from refreshing and creating and loving even as it carries all the sorrows ever known.

In the desert where I grew up, the only river was an irrigation canal, artificial but wet as water anywhere. We played there, cooling our sunbaked feet in the trickle, sailing paper boats from here to who knows where. When our mothers weren’t looking, we even bent down like camels and drank. And it was sweet.

Jesus must have known that love and sorrow are part of the same river. Those awful days in a desert taught him how the whole world weeps beside the fallen ones, the foolish ones who thought wars or excursions might be an answer. To what, the dead now ask in their eternal sleep, schoolgirls and brave soldiers and sobbing women in the burning desert cities.

The suffering can’t always see their way to love but everyone understands a cool drink on dry cracked lips. We all know the miracle of helping up someone who has stumbled or catching the unfortunate before they fall.

As Jesus set his sunburnt face toward Jerusalem, the wilderness showed him scarcity and lack to build up compassion, suffering to show him the inner workings of love. Jesus must have understood that suffering and love are the tides that pull and push us, molding us to become more kind, more loving, more peaceful.

I don’t know if the Middle Eastern deserts have bullhead stickers, but I’ll bet their thorns are twice as sharp, especially when fashioned into a crown. Jesus had to avoid stepping on them as he journeyed through his wilderness.

Yet he must have also kept picturing the river ahead.

The living water was his gift to us, and we can give it away to anyone else who thirsts. Who knows, maybe waves of that water will crash upon the shores of peace, so no one else dies in the fighting.

This then must be the river that we give to one another: our journey through the wildness of our time. A journey that leads us out of sorrow and into the headwaters of love.