24 February 1982
Rome, Italy

My dear Sisters and my dear Confreres,

I know a priest who decided one summer to spend a good part of his vacation in the desert. He was a priest who was very busy at all times. He gave his days to counseling people, praying with people, dialoguing with people, advising people, and after a long experience of this type of life, he felt that he needed to get away from people and to spend time alone with God. So he decided to go into a real desert. He went to Tamanrasset and there after several hours of journeying, he reached a hermitage which the Charles de Foucauld Brothers have in that part of the Sahara Desert. The nearest person to him was a priest of the Charles de Foucauld Society who had spent twenty-three years in that part of the desert and he lived in a hermitage a kilometer away. My priest friend had decided to spend a month there in the hermitage in which was to be found the Blessed Sacrament, a small bed and some supplies of food to keep him alive. He took with him a number of spiritual books. All went well for eight days and then the sheer isolation of the desert overcame him. He told me that in a sudden gesture he threw his breviary down on the ground one day and rushed over to see the priest who was, of course, a counselor and a friend to him. After a discussion, he decided that it would be best for him to return to more normal conditions of living. The old hermit explained to him that living in the desert was not something that could be taken on easily. He told my friend that it would have been much wiser for him to spend maybe three days in the desert and thus gradually accustom himself to its silence and solitude. For it was precisely the solitude and silence that broke the nerves of this well-intentioned priest.

Jesus Christ spent forty days in the desert. We honor that mystery in His life each Lent. Physically we do not go into the desert, but we try by the grace of God to enter into the spirit in which Christ passed those forty days of His life. It was in the desert that He had His temptations, those temptations which one could say were related to the "concupiscence of the flesh, the concupiscence of the eyes and the pride of life." (1 Jn 2:16). Did Jesus Christ in the desert come to a more profound understanding of His poverty, of His celibacy, and of His obedience? Along those lines, I will find inspiration about the manner in which I ought to spend this Lent.

A desert is a silent place, a desert is a place where one does not find the ordinary amenities of life. God is not inviting me to do what my priest friend did, but He may, and almost certainly, is inviting me to have a little more inner silence in my life. He is probably inviting me to give more time to personal, private prayer this Lent. He is probably inviting me to have the experience of relying less on material things. As I look around my room, He is probably asking me quietly, "Do you really need all these things? Can you manage on just a little less, so that you would be a little more free to think about and `seek the things that are above, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God,' (Col 3:1) to have a little more time for others, to have a little more to give to the poor?"