Memorial of Saint Agatha, virgin and martyr

A wilderness in Montana

“Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.” 

In Saint Mark’s gospel the wilderness is a safe place of rest and renewal. That might not seem odd to us today, with our romantic notions of nature and our fear of public places in the city; but it was certainly counterintuitive, if not counter cultural, at the time.

In Jesus’ day, the city was the place of safety, where one was surrounded by friends, family and fellow citizens. There were no wild beasts, roving bandits or foraging armies in the city.

But Jesus went into the desert after he was baptized, and “was with the wild beasts.”  Remembering Saint Luke’s and Saint Matthew’s account of Jesus in the desert, and his conversation with Satan, we might suppose Saint Mark intended the same thing. But as we read more about Jesus in the wilderness we find that he often goes there, not to contend with Satan but to rest and pray. In fact Saint Mark’s wilderness sounds like Eden, where Adam and Eve spoke familiarly with animals and enjoyed the produce of their gardening.

In today’s gospel Jesus led his little band into the wilderness to rest a while. Although the crowd followed him, wanting to hear more of his teaching, and he relented – we should recognize our own need for rest and recuperation, R&R.

The psalmist says, “The Lord gives to his beloved in sleep. (Ps 127)” Belonging to God is not all about doing. It’s mostly about receiving.

It’s especially about learning to recognize the simple gifts that God gives so generously: prayer, time, breath, silence, friendship, water, food and so forth.

Somewhere along the way we learned to amp up everything. A juicy apple is not good enough, we want sugar, distilled and intensified and injected into our foods. Wine is not strong enough, we want spirits. Water isn’t good enough, we want coffee, tea or soda. (Or, if worse comes to worse, bottled water.) Air isn’t good enough, we want tobacco smoke, or marijuana. Music isn’t good enough unless it blasts your ears into insensibility. Marriage isn’t enough, we want pornography. It seems every pleasure we have has been intensified by technology. Often, experiencing these extreme pleasures, we become addicted, forfeiting our humanity in the process.

We leave these things behind when we go into the wilderness with Jesus. He shows us the delight of his own company first, and the pleasure of our company. We learn what it means to “enjoy yourself.”

Going with Jesus, we can sing with Marvin Gaye, “How sweet it is to be loved by you.”