Repairing The Breach

There is the wilderness of the heart - that place within each of us that is only ours, that carries our tears and heartaches, our hopes and desires. The heart is a wilderness that can break into our lives as a crushing reality when we lose someone we love to death or divorce or disease or dementia. There is the wilderness of the mind - the doubts we harbour, the fantasies we fight to deny, the questions that haunt us in the shadows of night: “What is my life about?” “Who am I?” “Does anyone care?” There is the wilderness of our broken lives - be it violence or addiction or secret lives about which no one knows. There is the wilderness of fractured relationships - be it our parents, our children, our siblings, our colleagues, our vocations. These are the wildernesses of the kind that leave us yearning for freedom and liberation and release. In these the barren places when we realise that salvation is what we truly desire, not a ticket to heaven ‘salvation’, but a stream of living water in the desert salvation. A cut-through-all-the-crap salvation. A life- before -death salvation. This is about hearing that word spoken into our hearts that we cannot speak ourselves – “You are free, you are forgiven, you are mine.” We search for this living truth in our desert experiences because in the wilderness we realise, finally, we are unable to save ourselves, even if it takes “40 days of being famished”, however that looks like inside your skin. For in the wilderness, all the usual strategies we use to provide ourselves sustenance and life are shown up as inadequate; that might include good things: our work, and our friends, and our clear thinking, our achievements, and they might include not so good things: food, adrenaline, material goods, being angry, being nice to everyone; whatever it is, in light of the wilderness, all quasi-sources of life simply don’t go far enough, they don’t transform us, they don’t cause us to die and rise again, they don’t bring hope when all hope is gone. Direction - Carol Aust 31