David Denny and Tessa Bielecki direct the Desert Foundation, an informal circle of friends who share a love for desert land, people, and spirituality. Bielecki shares how she fell in love with the spaciousness of the desert:  

I grew up in New England, a countryside of lush green hills, singing streams, and verdant forests of oak and maple. In springtime I picked bouquets of wildflowers and in summer romped through the tall grasses full of daisies. When the trees turned crimson and gold in autumn, I gathered bundles of leaves and pressed them between the pages of my beloved books. In winter I built bonfires, skated on the ponds and went tobogganing down the steep hills.… 

I first saw the vast magnificent desert of the American Southwest in 1966 and have lived there since 1967. It was love at first sight, the most dramatic epiphany of my life. It felt like coming home—to myself. I recognized the outer landscape as a mirror of my inner soulscape.  

The desert is the homeland of my heart. I don’t find it barren as many do. I find the desert spacious, a perfect embodiment of what my Buddhist friends mean by sunyata, infinite spaciousness. My spiritual path is cultivating a heart as spacious as the desert: wide open to every direction of the compass, wide open to every creature that walks, flies, or crawls through it, wide open to every change in the weather: darkness and light, sun and rain, aridity and dew, heat, cold, and wind.  

St. Teresa [of Ávila], who grew to become my best friend, called the human soul an interior castle. “Let’s not imagine that we are hollow inside,” [1] she wrote. “The soul is capable of much more than we can imagine.” [2] This infinite and noble spaciousness is what I learn from the desert. [3]  

For Denny, the desert is not “deserted”; it can lead to peacemaking and a fullness of life.  

Peacemaking happens best when we develop a way of life that includes an understanding of desert spirituality. That is, in addition to being geography and spirit, the desert, as I’m fond of saying, has traditionally fostered hospitality, respect, and dialogue with the stranger. This spirit arises from various aspects of the “desert”: a freely chosen dedication to humility, interfaith dialogue, and simple, ecologically sustainable living….  

For many people, the desert is a place to avoid, a place of banishment or grief, or simply useless and vacant. In English, when we say that a place is “deserted,” we usually mean that we find nothing significant there. But the Arabic verb ashara means to enter the desert willingly, for there, according to The Sacred Desert by David Jasper, “If one knows where to look, there are springs and wells of water and places of life.” [4] That’s why Isaiah 35:1 so aptly describes the heart of the universal desert experience: The desert and the dry land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. [5] 

In the climax of the classic courtroom movie, A Few Good Men, the prosecutor demands to know the truth and Jack Nicholson’s character, Colonel Jessep, famously shouts back, “You can’t handle the truth!” Maybe he was right. Maybe most of us have a difficult time accepting the truth when it’s presented to us directly. Emily Dickinson, the famous poet, seemed to think so. She said, “The Truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind.” Therefore, rather than speaking directly, she advises to “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”That perfectly describes Jesus’ teaching style. Of course, he spoke the truth, but he rarely spoke it directly. Instead, he told it slant—indirectly, subtly, and often hidden in a story that some people missed entirely. This week we are beginning a series exploring the parables of Jesus, but in order to understand these stories, we must first acknowledge the enormous gap between Jesus’ context and our own; between the way he taught the truth and the way we do. Our modern, post-enlightenment culture expects clear, direct teaching. This is evident by what passes for acceptable preaching in most churches. We want a sermon to include three points (preferably alliterated) and practical, unambiguous applications. We hope to walk out of church on Sunday with more clarity, not more questions, about life and faith. If the pastor manages to do that we feel satisfied. If we regularly leave more confused than when we entered, the pastor should start updating his resume.Jesus’ first-century Jewish context was very different. It was, of course, a pre-modern culture that embedded wisdom into stories more often than it delineated truths with bullet points. This is what causes us to misinterpret and mishandle Jesus’ parables. Our instinct is to break his stories into their component parts and attach a clear meaning to each piece. We treat them as allegories or force them into a modern, didactic framework.The uncomfortable fact is that Jesus offered very little practical instruction in his sermons (at least as we measure practicality today), and he never preached a popular American “how-to” message. Jesus was not a straight talker. Instead, his stories were designed to challenge his listeners’ assumptions and surprise them with unexpected, even offensive, revelations about God and his kingdom. Sometimes Jesus even intended to confuse them. More often, however, his parables began with an object, circumstance, or relationship that his audience was familiar with, and then he surprised them with a twist that turned their assumptions upside down.Dr. Gary Burge, a New Testament professor, describes Jesus’ stories this way: “They are like a box that contains a spring—and when it is opened, the unexpected happens. They are like a trap that lures you into its world and then closes on you.”As we look at Jesus’ parables in the coming days, be prepared to have many of your assumptions about faith and God turned upside down as well. DAILY SCRIPTURE ISAIAH 29:15-21  MATTHEW 13:10-17  LUKE 18:31-34 WEEKLY PRAYERFrom William Temple (1881 – 1944) O God, king of righteousness, lead us, we pray you, in the way of justice and of peace; inspire us to break down all oppression and wrong, to gain for everyone their due reward, and from everyone their due service; that each may live for all and all may care for each, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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