Fr Peter Helman (12.06.21)

Dear friend,

Before moving to Arizona, just over five years ago, I knew the state only from several visits to Phoenix that I made years before to see cousins on my mother’s side. I’ve spent many summers since college in Northwest Jordan, in the sun and heat of summer excavating, so I had a glimpse coming here of how distinct life in the desert is from the rain-soaked air and green tree-covered landscapes of Kentucky’s Cumberland Gap and every other place I’ve lived. No one can be made fully ready, though, for life in parched places.

It’s a curious thing, then, that after five brief years I find summer in the Sonoran Desert the most beautiful time of year. It is the most demanding, too, but also the most beautiful. The heat swallows the day, and the sun inflicts a strange reverse-seasonal depressive disorder where I long for an overcast sky to break open. I learned quickly with every living thing to hop from one shade island to another.

The beauty of summer in this desert is that inclemency does not put out life but teaches it to thrive. Despite every hardship that threatens life, life holds out in every rock cleft and burrow even as the sun bakes and bleaches the earth. The sun passes overhead, the shadows lengthen to night, and the night blooming cacti open their flowers.

 Advent is an arid season of waiting and prayer. We are wanderers in a wilderness landscape of anticipation, of longing for life to well up in the parched places of our hearts and in the world. Every adversity – the apparent barrenness of our hearts which do not yet know quite how perfectly to love – teaches us to wait patiently for the Lord who will come to save us. I love what the prophet Isaiah once proclaimed:

 The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp, the grass shall become reeds and rushes.” (Isaiah 35:1-2, 6b-7).

Advent is also a season of promise, for life takes hold in the desert, puts down its roots in soil that seems impossibly hardened. We who thirst for God with Us pray in hope that we may not grow weary in waiting, and moreover that we might at last find and then become the very wells of living water in the desert that we long for, fonts of God’s love and mercy for the sake of the world, even as we are restored. 

Peace be with you today~

Fr. Peter