First Tuesday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
The Israelites Understood Wilderness
by Angela Reitsma Bick
I came across a google doc in my files the other day called “Christmas in our Bubble!”
Don’t be fooled by that exclamation mark. It’s not true enthusiasm but a stubborn attempt to force some cheer onto our family’s plans for December 25, 2020.
In those days, Justin Trudeau had issued a decree that every Canadian was to stay in their homes. This was the first Christmas that took place during the pandemic. And everyone either followed provincial guidelines or did not. So we went up to the town of Cobourg to visit my parents and to celebrate with loved ones from far and wide. But Canada-U.S. border restrictions for all non-discretionary travel kept more than half our family from travelling at all. Some of us were sad or worried; some of us were mad. No one felt all that joyful. In short, it was a weird Christmas. All the traditions that give meaning and shape to the season were undone. Every Christmas bubble was its own little wilderness.
As part of our research for Blessed are the Undone, Peter and I interviewed 28 Canadians who used the language of deconstruction to describe their journey of faith. All were raised in Christian households and were deeply invested in their church communities before becoming ‘undone.’ As part of the interview process, we asked questions about each person’s faith roots and then looked for patterns in the experience of losing those roots, which had given meaning and shape to so much of their lives. In other words, what happens next – after cognitive dissonance or failures of the Church have left you feeling emotionally and spiritually distanced from your faith community? What happens after church hurt has sunk your canoe (in the metaphor of our book) or you’ve run aground on inflexible doctrine such as biblical inerrancy?
You enter the wilderness.
Dusty, holy ground
By definition, the wilderness is uncultivated and inhospitable. Curiously, however, the word can be used in two nearly opposite ways. It can be used negatively to describe a neglected and forlorn wasteland, or positively by implying a pristine area untouched by human activity. That same double meaning was present when the people we spoke with described what it’s like to leave familiar communities of faith behind and enter unknown territory. It’s a shift both terrifying and full of possibility.
“To me, changing my mind feels like walking into a big, largely empty space that seems to go on forever,” one woman said. “Sometimes I picture it as a golden field or a scenic meadow. It is beautiful, and I love the freedom of standing there, soaking in the incredible openness. I am excited to go out, explore and discover. Sometimes it feels like exactly the right place to be.”
“At other times fear takes over,” she continued, “and that big open space is scary – it is huge, and I dread getting lost. I don’t know where to head and I don’t even see any foot-worn paths to follow. I feel dreadfully alone and I grieve the mirage of security I once knew.”
Scripture gives us many similar stories of wilderness wandering, both voluntary and involuntary. It took the Israelites 40 years to soften their hard hearts and heads enough to gain entry to the Promised Land. For 40 years, they survived on God’s daily provision and were given no clue as to what the future held. The Israelites understood wilderness.
Psalm 90 is called ‘A Prayer of Moses,’ interpreted as something he wrote during that 40-year period, while living – and leading – in the wilderness. Some biblical scholars believe it was written after his siblings, Miriam and Aaron, had died, and Moses realized that his own sins would keep him in the wilderness for the rest of his earthly days. These circumstances might be what give Psalm 90 strong Ecclesiastes undertones, what with its description of God turning mortals to dust, our lifespans being akin to how long grass survives, and all the trouble and sorrow that gather in the few years that we have.
If Ecclesiastes is a book about deconstruction, as Rabbi Michael Fox says in A Time to Tear Down and a Time to Build Up: A Rereading of Ecclesiastes, maybe Psalm 90 is too. It has some familiar, post-deconstruction despair. “If we survived the ten plagues and escaped captivity and were led miraculously over the seabed,” Moses seems to demand, “but are not yet in the Promised Land, where are we? What was the point of all that?” We might wonder: “If I did the hard work of leaving a toxic faith community, went to therapy and have begun to forgive, why isn’t the way forward more obvious?”
Maybe the answer to that depends on whether we view the wilderness as a desolate empty space, a scenic meadow, or something in between. In Psalm 90, Moses sets our tiny lives alongside the eternity of God and concludes that the very brevity of life gives it richness. In fact, mourning what we have lost makes everything we have more precious. Even awkward Christmas celebrations in pandemic bubbles.
To see the goodness of the gifts of God in Eden is easy. Can we recognize them in the post-fall Eden, too? In all the weird corners of our broken lives? When what was familiar is gone and when the future is not visible yet. “Teach us to number our days,” Psalm 90 says, “that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”
It’s a deconstructive Advent lesson from Moses, ancient student of the wilderness, who learns at last to pray for mercy “that we may rejoice.” Even without the Promised Land on the horizon.
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