Healing in the Desert
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
Ash Wednesday
CAC guest faculty member Belden Lane recalls a recent experience of finding healing in the desert:
My latest, most difficult path of descent, or journey into fierce landscapes, in these closing years of my life has had to do with the death of my son. Three years ago, John died of acute myeloid leukemia, one of the deadliest forms of cancer. He was 41, leaving behind his wife and a four-year-old daughter. After months and months of chemo, we had been assured that he was cancer-free. He’d rung the bell at the hospital, returned home, gone back to work, but two months later, the cancer returned and he was dead within a week.
Lane went to the desert, hoping to connect with John and in some way relieve the suffering he imagined John was experiencing at having his life cut short.
A year and a half into my grieving, I worried a lot about John. Putting myself in his place, I knew that I’d be angry as hell….
I undertook a six-day vision quest in the red rock canyons near Ghost Ranch with a few brothers from Illuman, hoping I could finally set John free from his anguish. But on the first night there, I fell apart sobbing against a canyon wall. I realized it wasn’t John who was arguing and cursing his way through some kind of purgatory; it was me. I hadn’t come to release John. John would have to come to release me….
By the time I got to the fourth and last night of fasting, I was expecting or at least hoping for some big encounter. That’s what you expect to get at the end of a vision quest. But as I waited for the long night, nothing came. I gave up hope of anything dramatic, which is perfect, of course. As I sat there, my mind wandered back to the hospital room on the night of John’s death. The end had come at three o’clock in the morning when he finally stopped breathing. I’d wanted to stay with him for the rest of the night. I hated the thought of strangers putting my son on a tray and wheeling him away into the morgue alone. I knew I should have stayed there until dawn, but … we were all exhausted. We went home.
And then it struck me.… On the ridge I could still do this. I might be over a year late, but I could still be faithful, waiting alongside John’s body, not turning away from his death. So that’s what I did, staying awake through the rest of the night, keeping vigil with John. Within an hour or so, I noticed … a full moon was rising over the ridge behind me, casting a soft slate gray light on the mesa’s rim, going down the mesa as the moon rose behind me. It was cold and death-like but beautiful, like the paleness of my son’s body drained of life as I was able to sit with him. It was also for me, at the time, the body of Christ, as it were. John, Jesus had come to assure me with [the mystic] Julian of Norwich, was fine. He was more than fine….
I was blown away that night. The desert had come for me again, been there for me, the place where God has come so often in my life. I struggle with John’s loss to this day, but in the deepest place of my soul, I’m at peace knowing that this most recent path of descent in the desert has only carried me deeper once again into love. Amen.
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INSPIRATION
It is my Lent to break my Lent,
To eat when I would fast,
To know when slender strength is spent,
Take shelter from the blast
When I would run with wind and rain,
To sleep when I would watch.
It is my Lent to smile at pain
But not ignore its touch.
It is my Lent to listen well
When I would be alone,
To talk when I would rather dwell
In silence, turn from none
Who call on me, to try to see
That what is truly meant
Is not my choice. If Christ’s I’d be
It’s thus I’ll keep my Lent.
— Madeleine L’Engle, “For Lent, 1966”
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Individual Contemplation Question:
Where in your own grief or struggle have you been more focused on releasing someone else — or fixing someone else’s pain — only to discover that you were the one who needed to be released? What does that reversal feel like?
Group Contemplation Question:
L’Engle says “It is my Lent to break my Lent” — to surrender the spiritual practice you would choose for the one that love actually requires. Where is your community, your relationships, or this season asking you to stay present in a way that costs you something? What would it mean to call that your Lent?
