Pope Benedict XVI
Retreat preached at the Vatican, 1983

“He went to a deserted place"

         The desert is a place of silence and solitude where we stand apart from the events of everyday. There we escape from noise and superficiality. The desert is the place of the absolute, of freedom, where our deepest needs confront us. It is not by chance that the desert is where monotheism is born. In this sense it is the home of grace where, emptied of all our concerns, we meet our Creator.

Great things have their beginning in the desert, in silence and poverty. We ourselves could not know how to take part in the mission of the Gospel without entering into this desert experience with its nakedness and hunger. The blessed hunger of which our Lord speaks in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5,6) could not come to birth out of the sufficiency of the well fed.

Let us not forget, either, that Jesus' desert did not come to its term with the forty days following his baptism. His last and final desert would be that expressed in Psalm 22[21]: «My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?» It was from this desert that the waters of the life of the world would well up.

 

For more information about our new "Solitud of the Sacread Heart" click here