Photo - David Webber
It was a special spot embedded in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains. It was a hot spring nestled in a cliff on the edge of Sheep Creek. My Dad and I lived in a shack without running water, so we went there every Sunday for our weekly bath. Even when it was 35 below (Celsius) and the snow was three feet deep, the hot spring maintained lush green vegetation and warmth for a few metres around, an oasis in the icy desert of winter.
We would sit in that water, Dad and I, with icicles hanging from my hair and from Dad's beard because he didn't have any hair, letting the hot sulfur water soak away every bit of dirt and stress on and in us. There was something about the place that had the power to make even an atheist whisper the word, “God!” It was the best of wilderness: silence, solitude, beauty, refuge. It was that kind of a spot. It never occurred to me that it was anything else, until one Sunday we picked our way down the cliff on the trail that led to the small pool in the rocks, disrobed on the edge of the snow, lowered ourselves into the steaming hot water with a delicious sigh and gazed across the icy babble of Sheep Creek straight into the face of a fresh cougar kill.
The mule deer doe was less than an hour dead. Steam was still coming from the chest cavity that had been opened as if by a surgeon's knife. There was no sign of a chase or struggle and very little blood. Cougars are nothing if not efficient. My hair bristled. I felt so vulnerable sitting naked in that little open hot spring. All the years I had been soaking in the beautiful pool it never once occurred to me that danger lurked in the shadows.
But that is precisely the nature of wilderness. Eugene Peterson points this out in his book of reflections on the life of King David, Leap Over A Wall. From my own personal experience, wilderness is the place where beauty and ugliness kiss, where refuge and danger dance, where a sky is baby-eyes-blue one minute and demon-eyed-black the next, where a black bear is a bumbling clown and in the snap of a finger becomes a deadly predator, where being lost is only one step away on a familiar hike. Wilderness is where I am vulnerable like no other place. And because of this, it is where the possibility of God becomes a necessity.
It's no accident that in the Bible, wilderness has been where God has most often been encountered and people of God have most often been formed. In the Bible, wilderness seems pregnant with epiphany and revelation. It seemed so for Abraham, it seemed so for Moses, it seemed so for David, it seemed so for Jesus. It seemed so for the people of God who followed them too. I know it is so for me.
I am no Hebrew scholar but I like reading books by those who are. A recent reading caused me to look up the word for wilderness in my Hebrew dictionary. In Hebrew, the word is 
(midbar) and it means wasteland, barren wilderness, i.e., a relatively large tract of sparsely inhabited land, or virtually empty of habitation. But it also means “mouth,” i.e., a part of the body that is the instrument of speech. From the biblical perspective it seems to me that wilderness is both. Wilderness is physically a natural barren land, empty of human habitation (and please don't ever allegorize it to mean a “spiritual wilderness,” at least not in my presence). Wilderness is also the mouth of God, the place out of which God speaks.
What takes years to happen in the human-controlled environment of settlement is speed-shifted in the wilderness. The special grace of wilderness is that it is a catalyst for revival and spiritual formation. In the wilderness, in its beauty, quiet, splendour, solitude, emptiness, order and majesty … God proclaims himself powerful Creator-Redeemer-Sustainer. God is everywhere before my eyes and in my face and in my head. In the wilderness, with its potential danger, sinister threats, real risks, even sudden attacks … God proclaims me impotent subject. My human vulnerability is everywhere before my eyes and in my face and in my head. In the wilderness, there is absolutely no doubt that I am out of control and that God is in control. And when I get to the end of myself like this, I quickly come to the beginning with God, a real beginning, a beginning where God can reveal and speak, a beginning where I will look and listen. Wilderness for me is a real place of epiphany and revealing Word.
Apparently, wilderness is not for everybody; at least not everybody would choose to be there. And for many of us who do choose to be there, wilderness is solely a place for hunting, fishing, hiking and other recreation. As recreationists we tend to go to great lengths to expunge wilderness of its inherent dangers while trying to maintain all of its beauty to serve us. Consequently, wilderness isn't so much experienced as a place of tension and therefore an extraordinary place of human need and God revealing himself in the face of that need. But for those of us who intentionally choose to enter the tension of wilderness — the tension between its splendour and its peril, between its simple peace and menacing danger — the wilderness is filled with special grace. Indigenous peoples knew this in their ancient religion and would intentionally enter wilderness on their spirit quests. It never ceases to amaze me how so-called pagans could pick up intuitively what Christians of the last couple of hundred years missed right in front of their eyes. It never ceases to amaze me how present-day Christians quickly dismiss out of hand what people of faith in Scripture and people of faith in history have understood as being crucial. The grace of wilderness is not only hugely significant in Scripture for everybody from Abraham on down to John the Baptist and Jesus, but what on earth do we think was going on in the desert with the Essene community and the Qumran community at the time of Jesus? And what do we think was going on with the Desert Fathers who spawned the Christian monastic movement from the wilderness some 200 years later? All of these, like the patriarchs of our faith before them, had discovered the grace of God in wilderness and intentionally sought that grace by withdrawing there in faith.
And this is what all this has to do with you and I. There is powerful grace from God for the life that intentionally enters real wilderness, in faith. God will meet us there and do amazing things with us there. God always has … God always will.b
