Epiphany 5 B

Mark 1: 29-39

February 3, 2008

Not long ago, I heard an interview with those who had produced the documentary Man On Wire, the story of Phillipe Petit, who in 1974 had walked on a wire between the two towers of World Trade Center. It described all the preparations he and his co-conspirators had to make (what he was doing was, after all, illegal), the calculations they had to make for the swaying of the towers in the wind, and the response he made to the police officers who de-briefed him after his walk. When he was asked why he would attempt such a thing, he looked puzzled and said that if he sees two towers, he has to walk. What came out of this interview was a picture of man of talent who could not avoid doing the very thing that would land him in such trouble, so deeply is it a part of his identity.

It is hard not to think of this image at the beginning of Jesus' ministry in Mark. He too appears suspended, caught between the crowds that are gathering around him and the good news of the kingdom he has been sent to proclaim, as “that is what I came out to do”, he says. He has already cast out an unclean spirit in the synagogue, to the amazement of everyone present, and by the time he has healed Peter's mother-in-law, the crowds begin to gather. When he tries to retreat by himself to “a deserted place”, he too is a hunted man, this time by his disciples, who tell him, “everyone is looking for you”. We are reminded of the desert as a place of solitude and healing, where “the angels waited upon him” after his temptation, but he is denied that rest and opportunity for prayer. The crowds in the neighboring towns, which are always a source of his movement in this gospel, push him on toward proclaiming the good news, in spite of the cost.

It is easy in our own lives to feel suspended between all we do, our roles as engaged parents or grandparents, young people who are trying to learn about who they are, or those of us who work in a world that seems weekly more baffling. We shuttle back-and-forth between meetings, soccer practice and a host of other demands on our time. “Everyone is looking for you” is the watchphrase of our times, and as we approach the end of the Incarnational cycle, it is hard not to feel its pull on us.

In this season of God made manifest, there are a multitude of opportunities to see God in the other, in the small and the large things we do in our lives. If we take the time to look, we have the chance to see the face of the living God all around us, from our neighbor next door to the person on the street corner to the pictures we receive from an orphan across the world. We seek this God in a multitude of guises, but such a search is more difficult, as starved as we are for the time it takes to encounter the God within ourselves, the God we find in the depth of our own interior lives. We feel drained by the demands placed on us by all the roles which we occupy, when we have to be so many things to so many people; what we often lack is a way of approaching the one in ourselves for whom everyone is searching, to seek in ourselves the image which makes us alive to the opportunities to find him in the world around us. It is time spent in that interior desert that allows us to proclaim the message we are all given, by word and example, in all we encounter in our world.

Catherine Doherty, champion of the poor in the last century, wrote about those lives given to many others and their causes, and who were seeking this desert, this solitude, in themselves; she likened it to the growing of something inside us, the preparation of what we are to bring to birth into the world from nurturing this thing taking root in ourselves:

You must understand that the desert begins in your heart. It is not a place, a geographical spot. It is not first and foremost a house or a room. It is within your heart. A woman goes about her daily business with the only difference between her and other people being that she is carrying a child. She carries that secret life round within her, and the mystery of this, which applies to both men and women, is that it is totally there whatever the external circumstances.

It was recognized by the founders of the monastic traditions, when they literally found their way out of the desert, that in order to see the God made manifest in each other, they had to cultivate something called stability. It meant not only the commitment to remain in one place, but to nurture a place within ourselves, in the certainty that if we cannot find God where we are, we cannot find him anywhere, because the kingdom begins within us. Indeed, we cannot be who we were created to be, we cannot meet the calls of the world, without searching out this God deep within us.

I believe it is this reason that Jesus cannot begin the work he is given to do without spending time in the desert. It is a place from which his ministry begins, the calling of the first disciples, the casting-out of the unclean spirits, and he does not attempt it without starting from a place where the angels wait upon him. It is from that place, hunted as he is, that is able to cleanse lepers, heal paralytics, and call others to this work of the kingdom, work that begins in the knowledge that the message is not that of a local healer but one who, despite his efforts to keep it quiet, is turning the world upside down.

We would hardly be human if we did not feel that we were on a tightrope from time to time. If your life is anything like mine, you have more commitments than there are minutes in the day. But our ability to be aware and alive to the kingdom coming into the world is deeply related to our ability to see the manifestation of the God inside us, the part of ourselves we nurture in the stability of our own hearts. Indeed, everyone is searching for us, but all we have to do is be attentive to that voice of the desert within, and then watch and see the kingdom being born into the world.