“The Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beats; and the Angels waited on him.” This experience of Jesus, related on this opening Sunday of Lent, has often intrigued me. Yes, he was the Son of God. However, he was also a human being.

The life-changing experience of his baptism is followed by a purifying experience, solitude for forty days in the desert. It is only after that that he goes about his public ministry. In Luke’s Gospel, it is just after the temptations in the wilderness that he uses the words of Isaiah to lay out his plan: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

In my efforts to understand this, I find help in Dante. The opening line of Inferno says,  “Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost.” Literary critics point out that Dante is describing a journey of searching for God in a sinful world.

It is a journey that is not solely that of Dante; it is the journey of every human being. This journey is one that every individual undertakes so as to understand his or her sins and find his or her peace with God. In taking that journey, we enter into a search for self-knowledge. We discover the ways God calls us and we discover the ways we face temptations and sinful patterns. Jesus took this journey and was strengthened in and by the Spirit. He faced three temptations. Benedict XVI says that Jesus faced a dilemma. The alternative was “a messianism of power, of success, or a messianism of love, of the gift of self.”

Saint Ignatius of Loyola had a similar time of facing himself and his demons. His Spiritual Exercises are rooted in the experience of several months of prayer and fasting in a cave in Manresa, Spain. Women and men continue to take time away from the cares of the world to give themselves thirty or more days of solitude so that they can discover God’s dreams for them through those Exercises.

Ignatius says that the Exercises are a “way of preparing and disposing the soul to rid itself of all inordinate attachments and of seeking and finding the will of God.” There are few people who have the time for thirty days of solitude, so Ignatius devised methods to help people go through the fundamentals of the experience over several months.

Of course, people don’t need to go to the desert or to experience the Exercises. It could be an immersion program in another culture or a time of sabbatical. John Tarrant, a spiritual writer, says in The Light Inside The Dark that the journey into a life of awareness begins for most of us in a moment of helplessness. “When our lives are going well, we do not feel any need to change them, or ourselves. We are content to go on as we are, coasting, serene as planets in their orbits, or caribou on seasonal migration. Our habits of mind are sufficient to sustain us through the days. We are unperturbed, and half asleep.”

But then, something unexpected happens: illness, death, a natural tragedy or the breakup of a marriage. Tarrant says that we are stripped of everything we have relied upon to stay the same. This unexpected fall is “an initiation preparing us for new life.” We wake up and cannot return to the way life used to be. We’ve lost our sleepyheadedness. He says that we enter a journey whose end we do not know. As we go through this journey, it may feel as if everything we relied on has been snatched away.

Do our temptations eventually disappear? Alcoholics often say, once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. Temptations are a natural part of our make-up. Jesus’ own life shows us that temptation is always in the background. One of his most human moments is the Garden of Gethsemane. It was at that time that the temptation to go his own way reared its head: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.” An angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. He went with what he knew to be God’s will for him.

Thus, we enter into this sacred season. Our scripture readings and the prayers of the Church invite us between now and Easter to wake up and pay attention to what is going on in our interior and exterior life.

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Source for all photos:  Brendan McManus, SJ

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