Early last year I had a crisis of faith. It came after a couple of weeks in the ‘Holy Land’ and it struck me while standing in the Church of the Nativity in the heart of Bethlehem – a Palestinian town that I adore. The crisis would have been invisible to those around me (I’m an introvert and process these things internally until I feel able to verbalise them) but it caused an internal sea-change in my faith. That change has led to a journey that is much scarier than the one I was on… and that’s a good thing.

Photo: Capture Queen on Flickr.

Prior to that time my faith was built around my set of beliefs. It was a building I understood, had meticulously constructed, justified and fortified. I was sure of it and therefore sure of myself. I had a clean and clear set of doctrines and understood how to express them. This was the core of my relationship with God and others. I was confident in it and it gave me confidence. I didn’t realise how shaky that building really was because I didn’t know the foundation was sitting on nothing. In the ‘Holy Land’ it crumbled.

I’m still processing what took place and looking back, what happened was a strange thing. The faith I had constructed crumbled, but God didn’t. It’s as if the two separated – not that I lost everything I believe. If I was to continue the metaphor of a building, the foundation fell apart and so the building shook, cracked and frayed but didn’t fall. You see, the issue was that the foundation was actually me, the building was the things I believe about God, life and faith. In that place I lost the sureness of myself and therefore the beliefs shook, so for a moment I stepped out of the building as it felt dangerous and unstable without the foundation (me and my ego). What I stepped into when I took that step out of the building was silence – the desert.- God.

Stepping into that silence created a hunger for it – a desire for union with God. It felt both scary and safe at the same time. I didn’t feel like I could step back into the building (my beliefs) so having a moment in the desert that had always been surrounding the building felt right. I just hadn’t really known it was there.

Since then I’ve felt ok to step back into the building. I’ve knocked out a wall so the desert is ever present with it’s sand blowing in and I have a regular practice of stepping out of the building to simply enter the silence and sit in the desert. I look at the floor and know the foundation isn’t me any more, it’s the desert. I’m patching up the building, replacing bits here and there. The bindings are more flexible and it’s being made to fit with the desert. It’s the desert I want now though, way more than the building, so if bits of the building have to come down and be changed, oh well, the desert remains.

It’s scary though. The building as it was felt solid. Whether than was an illusion or not, it felt safe. The building is now prone to flexing and moving a lot more as the desert moves and shifts ( for this metaphor ignore the parable of the person who built their house on the sand). I don’t ‘get’ the desert (God) so it’s scary, but it’s good. I’m not so sure of myself anymore. Both I and God are not the sum of the building – that’s simply something I use to live within the desert. The desert is vast, expansive and never-ending. It has the ability to bring us to an oasis, but also to subject us to the harshest conditions. The desert brings us face to face with our mortality and takes us beyond ourselves.

The desert is now my home. I have surrendered to it and continue to surrender to it though often the temptation exists to reconstruct my building as it was with the desert shut out. It scares me. It’s dangerous, unpredictable but deeply rich. My little shack in the desert is more simple than what it used to be, but it’s in the desert and that’s where it needs to be.