“No man ever sets foot in the same river twice.”

I’ve lived in the desert all my life. Aridity has tended to vary in degree without necessarily wavering from a still, stalwart presence, like the waves over the burning asphalt which endlessly quiver yet always return. The season changes, but seasons never change.

Allegorizing the deserts of Holy Scripture is no monumental challenge, but perhaps some of their poignance lies in their naked simplicity, the bare material locations to which they refer. A desert is a season of sorts, but it is also just a place, synonymous with wilderness and antithetical to the Garden — the place where Providence is withdrawn. It’s a heightened experience of the same perennial want that follows all men always. Time is well captured in sand within a glass, because the sand can only flow one way. Time only decreases.

The desert has its own beauty, one that is peculiar and alien. She is silent, primordial, awesome in her dispassion, terrible in her ironclad indifference to the eternal violence of the sun. The desert suggests her own continuity in spite of her observers. Her inscrutable manner has defied the epochs antedating us and faces those to come with the same wizened resolve. The life within her pulsates through concealed veins, seeing with nocturnal eyes themselves unobserved, piercing the darkness that hides them.

Modern comforts make it ever easier to consider the desert as an enemy and not as truth. But the stifling fever and barren impotence of the desert echo the fearful role of the earth in human destiny, as the valley of dry bones, as the ultimate repository of parched and lifeless dust. The desert is the dolorous final embrace of the dirt. 

So much of what we consider the substance of who we are is distilled from where we are, and when. It’s a dirty trick of modernity that we often think we can abstract ourselves above circumstance, that we can reason out of bias and perspective. We are made from the earth to begin with, after all. Environment is the raw material from which the pattern of self swirls into being like a dust-devil, an intangible impression of soil animated by breath and every moment inspired into a new form, then collapsed utterly. 

Thoughts, words, relationships, memories, are all made of something. Consciousness builds them out of the mud bricks of reality, which thereby lend identity its hue. And the whirlwind is far from static. The mind always exists in its present moment, never yet what it is to be and never again who it once was. Perspective, knowledge, sensation is defined by redefinition. The only constant is change.

Faith is the conviction in the Promised Land unseen, that the desert is not eternal, but that the oases and springs and wells upon which we stumble from time to time are actually conduits to the deep current that undergirds even the very earth, the life that lies in darkness beneath the foundation. I have changed a great deal in the last two years, more than I am probably even capable of recognizing. My circumstances have changed much as well. 

Seasons never change. The desert always reappears, finds its way into our path. She stands to frustrate our sight, to force us to contend with faith, to thwart the maps we pour ourselves into charting. The desert that stands between us and the Promised Land is not merely unexplored, but is its own unexplorable repetition. I am no more the man as I was two years ago than I am the one I will be in two more years. But I am the man who has thought what he’s thought and written what he’s written these last two years. I am the man where I am, and I didn’t drop here from the sky. I came from the earth, just like everyone else.

Like the desert’s beauty, faith is sometimes elusive. He who thirsts is skeptical that he might live. But love is the vitality of faith, and faith that one has been loved gives hope that the deserts end as surely as they return. Faith is a laying hold of the Love which gives the whirlwind its shape, a seeing of the invisible integrity binding all its disparate matter in powerful motion toward a strange end. I’ve lived in the desert all my life. I know what I never knew before, and sometimes don’t really know what it is that I know now. Knowing what I will know is hopeless, except for faith. I believe that I will know, when the perfect comes. Without that hope, that glistening mirage on the horizon which just might be true, all the whirlwind change of thoughts and knowledge and consciousness would be unbearable. Who could carry the cross if God hadn’t carried it first?

I cannot separate what I write from the time in which I write it, and I should think that I have seldom made pretensions to the contrary. While this little reflection is a little more overtly personal than usual, I acknowledge heartily that every product of the mind is a product of the moment. This moment, the product of the preceding year, is (probably obviously, once stated) tinted by Cather, McCarthy, Dostoevsky, St. Juan de la Cruz — to name the more pronounced influences — and myriad others. We are what we eat. There is much I hope to explore and contemplate and far more for me to know and not know. I thank God for what I have been able to do so far and for whatever it is I will be able to do tomorrow. 

“Who has cleft a channel for the torrents of rain, and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain on a land where no man is, on the desert in which there is no man; to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and to make the ground put forth grass?” — Job 38:25-27 (RSV)

My sincere thanks to those of you continuing to read Being Kindled. Grace and peace to you in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Die Wahrheit ist untödlich.

Garrett L. White