[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Deserts

It snowed a little last night, only an inch or so, but enough to 
refresh the snowbanks and turn them dazzling white under a blazing 
high-winter sky. I should be sick of snow by now -- we've had a lot 
of it, this winter -- but oddly, I'm not.

I got a break from winter when I went to northwestern Arizona to deal 
with my late sister's house. I spent a full week in real desert. It 
was odd going out in sneakers and a sweatshirt in mid-February, odder 
still to see kids wearing flipflops instead of heavy boots.

It was odd being in desert -- real desert. I'd never done that before.

Except for 12 years in the Midwest, three of which I was too young to 
remember, I have spent my entire life in the northeastern quadrant of 
North America, most of that in southeastern Ontario. I am utterly 
familiar and comfortable with the sort of waste spaces that this part 
of the world contains, mostly scrub timber. I have stood at the edge 
of the Real North, Sudbury, knowing that it's an 18-hour drive to the 
Manitoba border, and except for a few towns, most of that's just 
woods and the occasional moose.

I know in my head that north is just as potentially dangerous as 
desert, especially in summer, when the mosquitos and blackflies can 
eat you alive. I know in my head that winter is just as dangerous as 
desert. I'd experienced that on my way to Arizona, running into lake 
effect snow on my way down to the airport at Syracuse. For those of 
you who don't know lake effect snow; it's like walking into a wall of 
white where the road disappears completely, while the big transports 
roar past you undeterred and terrifying. It's scary.

It's just that northern dangers are the ones I'm familiar with. They 
are comfortable dangers. I know how to handle them. (Get off the road 
and wait the snow out somewhere warm.)  The desert struck me as 
dangerous and utterly foreign. The mountains, while beautiful, were 
barren and looked as though they scraped the sky raw. I'd never been 
in a place where you parked anywhere in the front yard because it was 
all gravel and sand. I felt as though I'd been dropped into a lunar 
barrenness, and it was very odd. Odd and disquieting, although I 
could see its beauty.

I tried to think, during my time in that landscape, that this is what 
the Bible really speaks about. The words we rely on come from a 
culture firmly rooted in a landscape like this one, where finding 
green pastures -- such an ordinary part of *my* landscape -- is 
indeed almost miraculous.

Jesus would have walked in a landscape that looked far more like this 
one than like my landscape of woods and snow and water. "Living 
water" means more here, where water is life itself, than it does in 
my landscape of rivers and great lakes, where fresh water is in 
careless abundance.

We bring to Scripture whatever knowledge we have, and sometimes 
that's close to the experience that Scripture narrates and sometimes 
it isn't. There's a lot in Scripture that I didn't get until I got 
hands-on with a month-old Shetland lamb and experienced that 
quivering, half-fearful, half-trusting, liveliness and curiosity. I 
don't think I got "make straight in the desert a highway for our God" 
until I saw Arizona.

But I also bring Scripture into my own landscape. Jean Brebouef, 
17th-century missionary to the Huron people, wrote tenderly of the 
newborn Jesus, wrapped in ragged rabbit skins and laid in a lodge of 
broken bark. "Make straight in the desert" might, in my landscape, 
mean making a way through the toughly beautiful Canadian Shield, or 
through beaver-dam swamps and scrub timber, swatting away the blackflies.

Or it might mean making a way through the tough thickets of a spirit 
bruised almost to extinction, because there are deserts in the heart. 
I know; I've spent time there too.

It shocked me to hear plans to build tens of thousands of homes in 
the Arizona desert; what on earth would that do to the aquifer? Odd 
that someone who lives a stone's throw from a river churning in spate 
worries about water, when the desert locals simply assume that enough 
will be there. We'll see who's right.

It was good to get back to snow. It's a nuisance sometimes, but I'd miss it.