Every serious soul walks, sooner or later, into a wilderness. The comforts are stripped away, the certainties dry up, and what remains is the naked question of what we actually believe when nothing else is holding us up. This sonnet honors that stripping, and the strange gift it turns out to be.
The Sonnet
The wilderness was not a place I chose, I would have kept the greener road instead, Yet here I am among the thorns and blows, Where every easy answer lies as dead. The old assurances I leaned upon Have crumbled in the dryness of this ground, The songs I sang before have somehow gone, The confidence I carried is unfound. And yet, within the emptiness, a thing Begins to grow that greener days had missed, A trust that does not need the birds to sing, A love that does not need to be well kissed. So bless the wilderness, though it be hard, The stripping is itself the tender guard.
Reflection
The wilderness is one of the great teachers of the spiritual life. Every serious tradition knows it. Israel walked forty years through it. Christ walked forty days. The desert fathers went into it deliberately, believing that only the stripped-down soul could truly hear.
We do not choose the wilderness, usually. It comes to us as loss, as illness, as the quiet collapse of the certainties that were holding us up. In the moment, it feels like abandonment. Only later, sometimes much later, do we recognize it for what it also was, the very ground where a deeper faith was made possible. What the wilderness strips from us was often what needed to go.
If you are in a wilderness season, do not despair of it. The stripping is real, and it is painful, but it is not without purpose. What remains when the surface has been taken away is often the truer thing.
