The Desert Shall Rejoice and Blossom

When I first started teaching at St. Ambrose University, a colleague and I spent a term break at Big Bend National Park in southern Texas. It was my first experience in a desert, and I shall never forget it. Big Bend covers a huge area where the Rio Grande River makes a wide arc as it separates the U.S. and Mexico. The park is large enough to contain the entire Chisos Mountain range as well as a good deal of the Chihuahuan Desert.

Like most real deserts, Big Bend is stony, not sandy, and trackless. What look like paths are actually dry watercourses. If you follow one, you are likely to end up in a canyon with high walls – not the place to be if there’s a thunderstorm nearby. The water will come rushing down in a torrent, as large stones washed onto high ledges attest.

Deserts are usually dry places, of course. In some areas it may not rain for years. But when it does rain, really rain, the plants are ready. Some have waited as seeds; others as dry branches surviving under the scorching sun. When the rain finally comes, they burst into bloom. The seeds sprout, grow, flower, and create new seeds within a few weeks.

“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,” Isaiah writes,” the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing.” To see a dry desert break forth into blossom is like watching a miracle unfold – as miraculous as the eyes of the blind being opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped, and the lame leaping like a deer.

For millennia, people have gone to the desert to encounter God. John the Baptist was one of them. Yet the God John encountered was not the one he was expecting. He didn’t think that God’s chosen one would turn out to be his younger cousin, Jesus. “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” John asked through his disciples. In reply, Jesus told them, look at what I am doing. See what happens to the people who come to me. Then remember what the desert is like when the rains come, and you will know the finger of God when you see it.

It was a chilly January when I went to Big Bend, so I didn’t see any rain or flowers. But I did get to hear the remarkable silence, like the "sound of sheer silence" as one translator described God’s appearance to Elijah on Mount Horeb. It is a silence one can almost touch. Out of that desert silence, that midnight silence, God speaks. Out of that silence one winter’s night God spoke in the cry of a newborn baby, a baby who became a man that caused the desert to rejoice and the lame to leap for joy. Thanks be to God for the gift of that Child.