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Daily reflections for Lenten Easter, written by Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI.

The idea of the desert has played a prominent part in the spirituality of all religions. The desert is the place where we feel our smallness, where, stripped of all that normally buoys us up, we feel how lonely, helpless, fragile and mortal we really are.

Great religious persons have always understood this, and that is why so many of them, Jesus included, often went physically into some desert to place themselves into a womb of emptiness. And this kind of desert, as we know, is not just a physical, geographical thing. It is also a place in the soul.

More particularly, it is that place in the soul where we feel most alone, insubstantial and frightened. This feeling of loneliness brings with it, too, a sense of helplessness and dependence.

In the desert, alone among the barren sands, painful realizations break through. Everything I rely on can easily disappear. It’s fragile, I’m fragile. I could disappear.

We have no real maturity until our souls are shaped by that realization. The desert, letting emptiness work in us, is what regestates the soul. It remolds the soul, lets us be born again, adults still, but now aware, aware as we once were as small children, that there can be no life and meaning outside of acknowledging our littleness and reaching out, as do infants, to a great providence and a great love, outside of us.