Wilderness and Wonder

Wilderness and Wonder:

A Holy Week Practice of Paying Attention

There is something about the Lenten desert that I've been thinking about differently this year. We often speak of the wilderness as a place of testing, of deprivation, of spiritual struggle. And it is all of those things. But the wilderness is also where you see things you might miss anywhere else.

When there are no distractions—no noise, no busyness, no screens—what remains? In the silence and simplicity of the desert, the ancients found not just their own emptiness, but the fullness of God. Elijah heard God not in the earthquake or the fire, but in the still, small voice. The wilderness teaches us to listen differently.

THE PRACTICE OF HOLY NOTICING

The contemplative tradition has long valued what we might call "holy noticing"—the discipline of paying close attention to the ordinary moments of our lives as potential places of encounter with God. This is not complicated. It simply asks us to slow down enough to see.

For Holy Week, I invite you to carry a small notebook—or use your phone's notes app. Once a day, write down one thing you noticed. It might be the way the light came through your kitchen window. An unexpected kindness from a stranger. A phrase in a book that seemed to reach off the page and grab you by the collar.

Barbara Brown Taylor, in her beautiful book Learning to Walk in the Dark, writes that darkness and difficulty are not obstacles to encountering God—they are often the very places where we find God most clearly. "I have learned things in the dark," she writes, "that I could never have learned in the light."

WHAT ARE YOU NOTICING?

As we walk toward Easter, what is the wilderness teaching you? Where are you being stripped down to something essential? And in that sparse and quiet place, what do you hear?

Holy Week is not about earning anything. It is about creating enough space that we can receive what God is already offering. The disciplines —whatever form they take for you—are simply a way of clearing some ground. Of making room.

May your wilderness this Holy Week be full of holy noticing. And may what you find there surprise you.

Go make peace, my friends.

Pastor Leanne

Community Presbyterian Church
32202 Del Obispo
San Juan Capistrano. CA 92675
949-493-1502 
info@sjcpres.org