the desert, when the proportions become eternal 
" Desert "is a Latin word. Disertum stands for "left", a place that has known fertility and which is now empty. But this I think we Westerners are used to fill all the spaces of our urban geography, I believe that none of the inhabitants of the deserts of the world thinks of living in an abandoned land. Maybe you do not even think the same Jesus that gives priority to the desert to meet the strength and tenderness of the Father (Matthew 4.10-11), probably even thought he was John the Baptist who chose the Judean desert to resonate ad joyful presence of the Messiah (Luke 3:2-3).
It is a landscape known and familiar to many protagonists of the Bible. I like to think that the Psalmist had just imagined the desert of Judah when he compared the views of the sunset and round the highlands of dunes to the "flap" of rams and lambs ( Sal 114.6). Then you understand that Midbar ("desert" in Hebrew) is the place of Dabar that the Word and the encounter that changes your life. The etymological root is the same!
The image evokes the desert has always two opposite meanings from the reality on the one hand dryness, difficulty in obtaining the necessary, on the other side of silence, away from daily worries, the interiority allows you to open yourself up to infinity. Sometimes you need to go into the desert to escape not so much what to put on a brave face to face with yourself The desert and with God you need to find especially when you are in a situation of false sense of security and happen to feel in control of our destiny for a series of favorable circumstances.
More than a geographical space, we can represent an "area of \u200b\u200bthe soul", a concrete situation where you will find. Capita, unwittingly, that the desert is within our reach, because it coincides with loneliness, insecurity, the sense of insecurity and fear that we carry inside. This desert to conquer, then, is the essential place: where the roles do not count, neither money nor i successi, né gli onori, né le amicizie; dove sei ricondotto alla tua verità ultima di creatura incapace di sussistere senza un aiuto provvidenziale e liberante.
Dovremmo incontrare di più Gesù attraverso un cammino nel deserto, diviene una necessità per tutti noi ancora oggi: abbiamo bisogno di ripercorrere il deserto per imparare ad abbandonarci di più nelle mani di Dio, a fidarci di più di Lui. Il punto è proprio questo non ci fidiamo più di Dio, ci chiudiamo a riccio e non sappiamo più guardare lontano; nel deserto impareremo finalmente a dire con il beato Charles de Foucauld “ Padre mio, mi abbandono a Te… ”. Non a caso the Lord's name was given to Moses right in the desert.
Go into the desert to meet the Master of our life is for every Christian to have the courage of the indispensable, is to learn to strip away the reality may be too artificial and muted, with all but its deepest essence: 's love. There are three dimensions in their extreme nudity that the desert helps us to take up: the sky, the earth and ourselves in the fragility of our bodies. As we lack the clear skies and clean ground that perhaps we only see walking on the beach on summer evenings! We lack the experience of transparency of things and people we meet. As St. John of the Cross, only it turns out the desert and Todo Nada : all of God and the nothingness of every man.
"From the desert things are better viewed with eternal proportions. The cosmos takes the place of your native country and God really becomes an absolute. The Church also expands the size of the universe, and distant, even those who are not visibly Christians, they become neighbors. The dimensions of the Church is alive and enlarging the comfort of thinking that Jesus died for all, reaching everyone with his supreme sacrifice "( Carlo Carretto dal deserto del Sahara nel 1974 ). Sentiamo rivolto a noi oggi questo appello accorato di Fratel Carlo, forse lui pensava proprio alla nostra Azione Cattolica quando ci ricorda che “dal deserto le cose si vedono con proporzioni più eterne”.
don Nicolò Tempesta
