A few years ago, I was out in Palm Springs, California for a conference. I have been out there numerous times, and if you’re not familiar with the Palm Springs, it is in the Sonoran Desert in Southern California, nestled right next to the San Jacinto Mountains. It is truly a beautiful place, especially in the spring, and the mountains rise sharply out of the desert floor from an elevation of around 400’ up to almost 11,000 feet at the summit of Mount San Jacinto. They are a rugged chain, very rocky and the lower elevations covered in brush and cactus. But they are so beautiful.
Our hotel was right next to a trailhead leading up into the mountains. It’s the very beginning of the Cactus-to-the-Clouds trail which leads up to the summit of Mount San Jacinto, if you choose to go, which we did not. Someday I would love to, but I’ve got to train for that one.
Every morning, a few of us would go on a hike though. And we did climb a mountain. Well, maybe more of a foothill. But we climbed up a couple thousand feet in elevation every day. It’s a pretty steep and rugged trail, but the views and the scenery are stunning! The desert, for all its dryness and heat, is simply a beautiful landscape, especially in the morning as the sun rises. It’s almost as if the rocks change colors as the light gets brighter, from the complete darkness, to hues of purple, to almost a pinkish red, and then to brown.
And so every morning we hiked the trail, zigzagging back and forth through the switchbacks leading up the side of the mountain, traversing boulders overcoming a ridge to simply see another one. Sometimes we walked down a bit in small valleys between walls of rock. Every once in a while, we’d stop to take in the view. And then we reached our summit, well of our little mountain anyway. The larger one loomed further above us, but even in climbing that foothill, there was a sense of accomplishment, and through it all, we enjoyed the climb. The challenge. The grace of experiencing God out in His creation.
We were in the desert, but it was full of life. The natural beauty, the feeling of being alive as we climbed. As I was climbing, I thought of Jesus, His disciples, and of all the characters in the bible. They lived in an environment much like this. They had to traverse terrain like this, and they climbed many mountains in their quest for God’s grace. I thought about how tough of a life it must have been, and I thought about the ups and downs and the deserts we all face in our lives. As I was climbing, I thought about how I can’t focus on the trail behind, because one stumble or one false step, one loss of concentration could lead to severe injury and peril, or worse. I was thinking to myself, I must focus on the trail ahead. Where will I place my foot, how can I climb these rocks? I had to look forward and literally take it one step at a time.
I was relating this to my personal and spiritual life. I thought about the second reading for today, where Paul writes – Forgetting what lies behind, but straining forward to what lies ahead, I continue my pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling in Christ Jesus.
This climb is analogous to life. It is about hope of the destination, embracing the challenges set before me, and enjoying the view along the way. But it’s also so pertinent to our spiritual life – the mountains we must climb, the scrapes and boulders and trials we must endure, but God’s beauty and grace are always there, underlying everything, helping us to grab footing.
As we reached the summit, I would look down on the Coachella Valley below. In all this hot, dry, desert, there was the oasis of Palm Springs. In the canyons nearby, there are more natural oasis’ where the native peoples lived. In the heights above, there is a cooler alpine environment with evergreens. In all this desert, there is so much life. God tells us he will do this for us in today’s first reading from Isaiah:
In the desert, I make a way. In the wasteland, rivers. For I put water in the desert and rivers in the wasteland.
He does this in the natural world, and he does this in the deserts of our spiritual life as well. He gives us the water we need, he provides the rivers to irrigate our dryness in our soul. He makes a way. And in no bigger way has He done this, than by providing this water of life through His Son – Jesus.
As we climb those mountains in life and struggle across those deserts, we learn that Jesus is our guide. We learn that Jesus is the way. It’s written in our soul. I often wonder when reading the Gospel passage from today – what was Jesus writing on the ground? And why did St. John mention this twice?
Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger… and then he goes on to say …Again he bent down and wrote on the ground.
Was he bored? What exactly did he write? I think one of the meanings of this is the fact that Jesus draws our path for us, and he meets us where we are, and especially in those depths of despair where we may be losing hope. He meets those who are in the abyss of sin and trials right there where they are, just as he did for the woman today who was to be stoned. He came to the earth to meet us, and to live as one of us, and to walk as one of us. He came to us fully human, one with us on this earth.
But being fully divine, He is that water of life. He is the one to provide a way out of the desert in our life, and he is the one to provide a path up the mountain. When he wrote on the ground, Jesus may have been becoming that lifesaving water in the desert. He was drawing a path for us, making a map, and becoming that oasis with which we can break the bonds of the sin we are guilty of or enslaved to, and be that oasis that can shelter and nourish us back to health from the heat of those deserts and the scrapes and blisters from the mountains in our lives.
Jesus may have even written down the woman’s sin. The bible doesn’t say this, but perhaps he wrote her sin, and then when no one was able to stone her and they all had left, he told her she was forgiven and to sin no more. Perhaps he then scratched it away with his foot, just as He did for the woman’s sin, and in fact all of our sins when we repent. Perhaps he wiped it away to be lost forever, not looking back – just looking forward.
Maybe he wrote her name, or perhaps simply wrote Love. We don’t know.
But this I do know. The struggles and mountains and barren deserts in life will come, and we will encounter them. It is written in our very livelihood here on earth. But there is a beauty in the deserts we must cross. And what is also written in our soul is God’s saving grace. God has written Himself within us, just as Jesus wrote into the ground. We can be filled with a flood of nourishing grace if we simply ask God for it. We can keep striving up that mountain, climbing and reaching for that next height, reaching for God. In those times we need help, we can look to those oases of grace – the sacraments – and let Jesus fill us back up again.
But here’s the key – we must not look back, lest we lose our footing and fall. We keep striving and putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes we must go down a little to go even higher.
Let Jesus make the way, and follow the path He has written for us. And He will lead us to new heights and provide the grace and mercy we cannot imagine.
