At the time when he was about thirty, a mature man with a career, likely a carpenter, with experience of life, including losing his father, Jesus left his home, his work, his family responsibilities. He traveled into the wilderness to seek a teacher who proclaimed that if the people repented, God would restore the nation.  

Inspired by this teacher, Jesus goes into the water to be baptized. As he rises from the water, the Spirit of God comes upon him. This experience propels him forward. He goes further out into the wilderness for a time of prayer and fasting, thinking and absorbing.

Wilderness had played an important role in his religious history. When Moses led his people out of Egypt, he led them into the wilderness. Promised freedom from oppression, they got a time of wandering in the wild lands. Promised a return to the covenant and land of their forebearers, they got a time of emptiness. They did not arrive in the promised land for years.

After the green of land nourished by the Nile, the land on the other side of the Red Sea would feel empty. But the wilderness is not truly empty. It is full of rock and earth. It is full of wild grasses and shrubs and trees that survive on their own without farmers to care for them. It is full of wild creatures who know how to live on little, who know how to find food and water in a place that looks barren to the eye of the person who is used to the village or the city or the lush, fertile lands nourished by a major river. Wilderness reminds the person who experiences it that you do not need all the stuff you thought you needed to live. Life can thrive in the wild.  

Led by Moses, the people left behind the life they knew in Egypt. They learned to live in this empty place. They met God in this wild place as God provided food and water, and the law that would ground their life and religious practice from then on.

That was not the first time the ancestors of Jesus encountered wilderness.  God summoned Abraham, God told him and Sarah, with their household and animals, to leave a lush, fertile land and travel to a new place. To get there they had to travel through the wilderness. 

They left the land they knew. They were cut off from the way of life they knew. They left everything behind. They made their way through the wild places, eventually coming to a new land.

This pattern Jesus lived. First, he left his ordinary life, travelling to the wilderness to find a teacher and his call. Then, he left that teacher and went deeper into the wild lands. He fasted, emptying himself, creating space for the new thing God was doing. When he eventually returned to the villages of Galilee, he did not return to the life he lived, but to a new path. The time in the wilderness changed him as it had changed Abraham and Sarah, Moses and all his people before him.

Neither of Jesus' ancestors chose the wilderness, but the wilderness time was an integral and transformative part of their journey. Jesus, on the other hand, chose that time apart and alone.

In our lives, we can choose to leave the comforts of home to canoe in wild places, to camp away from the kitchen that feeds us. We can choose to take time apart and see what lives on its own without human caretaking.

But sometimes a wilderness experience is thrust upon us. 2020 brought us Covid 19 and lockdown. This year also brought an eruption of anger at anti-black racism. Now in California, the Pacific coast, Siberia, wildfires are turning communities into wilderness, emptying wild places of life.

This year is forcing us into a new journey, a journey not chosen but required. I wonder, are we taking the time to reflect on the challenges, to consider what we need to leave behind, to ponder what we have lost that we need to recreate? And have we been open to the encounter with God that comes when we empty ourselves and make space?

Cathy Hird lives in the traditional territory of the Saugeen Ojibway