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Most often when I’m asked where I’m from, I’ll say something like, “I’m from New Orleans, but I’ve spent most of my adult life in the Philadelphia region.”

You've been lied to! Well, not quite, but call it a summary perspective elided for the sake of efficiency.

Technically, the numbers do reveal that the majority of my post-college years have in fact occurred around here, although my hard core fans will remember that I spent a handful of years from the mid-aughts to the early 2010’s doing church planting in Lubbock, TX (motto: “The Texas part of Texas”).

I’ve had Lubbock on my mind the past few days since I’m just returned from a weekend jaunt to a sister church of the Liberti Network called Frontline, which is located in Oklahoma City. OKC is no Lubbock, nor vice versa, but their terrains aren’t dissimilar.

One of the things that I love about living in Collingswood is its location, both micro (a walking-distance community) and macro (minutes from Center City, less than an hour from both Atlantic Ocean and Pocono Mountains).

Surrounding Lubbock is. . . nothing. (Google Maps it.) It exists on an almost dessert-like plateau with only brown and flat for all that the eye can see. Within city limits, you’ll have some grass and small trees, even if you need to water them like a maniac and what you end up cultivating only looks like the vegetation equivalent of a 13 year old boy’s chin fuzz. Up until moving to West Texas, my cowboy experience was more of the rhinestone and steel horse variety. It only took me a few days of dust, tumbleweeds, and armadillos to convince me that I was more of a city slicker than I’d ever realized.

Don’t get me wrong, I deeply appreciated my time in Lubbock, and while I wouldn’t use “beautiful” to describe that area, one could get away with “stark,” “startling,” “harrowing.”

What surrounds Lubbock? Desolation. And that’s what I’ve been pondering during Lent.

If Lent is by definition a period of spiritual wilderness–––think the Israelites’ desert wandering after the Exodus, Jesus’ 40 days of fasting before being tempted by Satan––then it’s not a stretch to add “desolation” to what the season connotes.

I seem to possess a growing number of Protestant friends who practice various forms of Ignatian Spirituality from the Roman Catholic tradition. Color me intrigued.

One of the primary modes or movements of this spiritual habitus is what practitioners of the form refer to as “desolation,” kind of a dark night of the soul that may nevertheless persist for a long time. Desolation seems to hold both active and passive components. On one hand, desolation can feature our active declension into patterns of sloth and sin, and on the other, sometimes you find yourself in desolation less due to what you’ve done or not done, but simply because you’re there.

According to Ignatian rites, if you find yourself in desolation, don’t run away from it but instead, ahem, name it and claim it. Own your position before God, and direct your soul through crying out, fasting, prolonged prayer, and so on, toward the One who alone can transition you from desolation into consolation (another Ignatian state).

I suspect that culturally speaking, we don’t sit with desolation all that well. We’ll recognize our own pain but too quickly try and blunt it away. By contrast, we can seek God’s Spirit to let our desolation linger without freaking out or numbing out. As we direct our whole beings to Jesus, even if our own desolation is stark, startling, or harrowing, we seek the grace by which we can struggle to say, “I’m ok.”

The good news and bad news is that traditionally, desolation for Ignatians might last years. Not exciting to ponder, I know, but might we benefit from stretching beyond our short attention spans and practice endurance for longer intervals?

Desolation might not fit with a season like Advent. Yes, Advent carries within it its own feelings of longing, waiting, and watching, yet it seems a little too hopeful to bear the full freight of desolation. But Lent can. Let’s name it, embrace it, and help each other look to God in our wilderness.

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