The desert lays bare our heart; it sweeps away our pretexts, our alibis, our imperfect images of God; it reduces us to the essential; it places us before our own truth, leaving no possibility of escape.

The desert lays bare our heart; it sweeps away our pretexts, our alibis, our imperfect images of God; it reduces us to the essential; it places us before our own truth, leaving no possibility of escape. This can be beneficial to faith itself. For it is then, at the very heart of our misery, that the marvels of God’s mercy are manifested. At the heart of our “gravity” is “grace”, the extraordinary power of God “which is effective only in our weakness”… Though it traverses desert paths – which may resemble those over which the temptation to atheism can lead – the experience of the contemplative is not negative. The absence of the transcendent God is also, paradoxically, His immanent presence.

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