The Land of Your Life Remains Holy Ground

on surviving spiritual deserts, Dostoevsky, + letting the sands of your spirituality shift

click above to listen to me narrating this essay (albeit, quite imperfectly!)

“Take your shoes off.”

Someone behind me was telling his friends how sand is so much easier to walk through barefoot. We were stepping single-file through a fragile ecosystem of gypsum sand, white as the pages of a brand new book. We were a swell of thirty or so strangers made temporary friends, following a park ranger on a short educational hike in White Sands National Park. I turned and smiled, thinking of all the places we had come from and all the days this motley crew would never have chosen each other’s company. 

As we reached the ranger’s next stop, I quietly unstrapped my chacos and fastened them with a carabiner to my backpack. I wanted to savor the sensation of the cooling sand beneath my feet, the crunch of layers breaking under my weight, the coalescence that the rocks that became this sand were made of the same stardust as me.

To be fully present requires consent. We choose to connect. We choose to coalesce.

The ranger tucked her black curls behind her ears and tilted her woven sunhat down against the sun’s still-strong glare, as she began tell us about the strategies plants use to survive in the desert we were walking through. “Life as a plant in these dune fields is harsh,” she said. “Plants here must adapt to a constantly shifting landscape to survive. They must find a way to the water and nutrients they need.”

When the winds blow, the dunes grow. The landscape shifts, and the plants subsist by growing tall, growing fast, or holding on. 

I listened, rapt, as the ranger pointed toward the stems of a soaptree yucca, reaching like hands full of seeds in sharp contrast against the waves of white sand. Apparently if you see a soaptree yucca like the one below, you can assume around 30 feet of sand is burying the plant under the dune, with the stem rising high to survive the shifting sands. 

I thought of many therapy clients who have grown tall not in spite of but because of the harsh conditions burying them. Later I learned that once the soaptree yucca’s stem has done her work of standing tall to sustain herself, she collapses, releasing her seeds to the earth. It is both her climb and her collapse that continues her life cycle. 

Do we bless both our climbing and our collapsing? 

The ranger pointed back at the fragile interdune area through which we had just walked. The grasses studding the sand complete a whole life cycle before they are engulfed by the invading dunes. They trust the wind to carry the seeds of their survival. 

I’ll be the first to remind us that slow growth is sacred (hell, that’s a quote from my first book—which btw, is on sale on Kindle for $2.99 all month!!). But I wonder if we can also bless the pace our surroundings call forth. In the desert, sometimes we must grow fast to spread the seed of survival. Can we also bless this?

We walked further, cresting a dune and descending to what looked like an out-of-place  (and, honestly, ugly) tangle of sticks forming a mound. This, our ranger said, is the skunkbush sumac. The tree’s roots sink deep into the water table, sending the water into the surrounding sand to harden it back towards its original rock form into a pedestal that protects the plant and keeps her in place, even when the dune has receded. 

Funny how survival can shift our perspective of what is beautiful. This mound is actually mighty. The skunkbush sumac holds on to the sand around herself, creating stability in a shifting ecosystem that ends up being the means of both her own survival and that of others. Kit foxes make dens inside the plant’s pedestal.

At one point driving into the park, the road was walled in by high feet of sand, and I felt like I had traveled to another world. I wished I could step into the sand of this new season of my life with the same expectancy as I did stepping out of our car for that hike. 

The truth is, like the ranger said, life in the desert is harsh. The desert disorients us. It calls forth our fury to survive. It asks us to trust that the shifting of sand is not the end of survival but a beckoning to adapt and grow. 

When we find ourselves struggling to adapt to the fierce landscapes in our lives, huddling against the cold nights and burning raw in the sharp sunlight, we sometimes wonder if we did something wrong by ending up here at all.  

But I look across the sands of time to Jesus, who right after he was named Beloved by the Father was led out by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted. 

“One of the most painful realities to grasp about the Christian life is that our belovedness doesn’t guarantee our ease. Christ’s baptism as beloved didn’t wrap his life into swaddle of security, and ours doesn’t either.

The brutality and barriers in life do not cancel out the truth that we are beloved. They are the wilderness through which we must walk to trust that truth as ours no matter what.”

—The Lord Is My Courage, p. 17

Maybe the disorientation of our deserts is not an indication of faithlessness but of Spirit. 

Like Christ, we are driven into the very place where our attachments to possessions, the avoidance of pain, and the accumulation of power can sink into the sand of a more spacious faith. 

“When Jesus walked into the wilderness, Satan tempted him to prove his identity as the Father’s Beloved Son by bypassing the slowness of seeing that the Father’s relationship with him was secure, even in suffering. Satan’s three temptations of Christ are ours too, taunting us to turn away from the pain and possibility of relationality: Have more. Hurt less. Rule faster.

These are the temptations of every shepherd and every soul.”

—The Lord Is My Courage, p. 19

The word “temptation" is loaded, but I believe that witnessing Christ’s refusal in the desert lightens the load into an invitation into liberation and true human flourishing. Temptation isn’t about missing the mark. It’s about responding to the easier invitation. 

When Satan tempted Christ to turn stones into bread, fling himself off the temple to be saved by angels, and give away his worship to gain power over the world, it was bait to become less than human. I spent a whole chapter of The Lord Is My Courage on this, but walking through the desert in New Mexico lit up my imagination and curiosity again, and I found myself shouting happy expletives in my study yesterday over the way Christ's own walk through the wilderness welcomes us into our full humanness, including our interdependence. 

The following is a little dense, but goodness, there is room for us to reflect on what needs to shift in our spirituality while we wander our own desert landscapes. Postcolonial theologian Caleb Upton has pointed out how Dostoevsky (yes, the classic Russian novelist!) saw the temptations of Christ not as overcoming individual sin or the spirit beating the “flesh,” but as Jesus’ refusal to live and rule in a way that leads to the enslavement of anyone.

In The Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor wields the the first temptation, turning stones to bread, as a ploy to use prosperity to persuade people to follow Christ. In refusing to turn stones to bread—to have more, immediately—Jesus refuses to use prosperity to gain or maintain his power. When Christ replies that man does not live by bread alone, he is placing himself in the story of his people, the Israelites, who were once enslaved and had to learn to trust God to provide for their needs in the wilderness by the means of bread they could not control or hoard. Jesus refuses to be a Shepherd and King who makes promises of prosperity that end up pulling people into a relationship of supply, demand, and dominance.

In the second temptation, Satan tempted Christ to throw himself off the ledge of the temple, because if he was really the Son of God, the angels would protect him from falling. In the aftermath of his second temptation, Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor says “…man does not seek God so much as miracles.”

Jesus refuses to be commodified. 

The temptation isn’t about Christ’s capacity to do miracles but rather his refusal to use the promise of miracles in the face of suffering to captivate our affection and attention (to hurt less). Jesus never bypassed human suffering on the way to the cross, and he refuses to captivate our consciences with the promise of bypassing any part of our personhood, which includes suffering, aging, and dying. Yes, these are hard words. But here is what they mean: 

God is not a magic lamp to rub the right way to relieve the pain in your life. God is not a megachurch to visit once a week to get a massive hit of concert joy. Love comes through a cross, and Christ is unwilling to bypass being with you in your pain. 

(Translation: your fear and your stress are places God honors.)

Christ refuses to live and rule in a way that allows your conscience to be captivated by games and cheap glory but leaves you unseen and unknown. Such systems are a grand distraction, giving us a temporary hit of relief while reinforcing dependence on powers who do not care to know and love us when it’s inconvenient. 

Finally, in the third temptation, Satan offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world for the price of his adoration and worship (to rule faster). It’s hard to imagine Jesus actually bowing down to Satan, so perhaps there’s more at play here. 

Upton notes how Dostoevsky foresaw the rise of totalitarian religious regimes and says that in Dostoevsky’s legend of the Inquisitor, this final temptation “was not to labor for Satan in service of the flesh but rather refusing to take up the coercive power of the sword to establish his kingdom.”

Jesus refuses to achieve the end of God’s kingdom by the means of coercion.

In Dostoevsky’s legend of the temptation, the coercive power of Satan isn’t mere violence but seeking global unity at all costs. And I think of the church and world today, hungry for unity but crushing difference. Forcing a way, rather than listening to one another. We want to bypass the cross of compassion and curiosity and costly courage to get to ruling over the world “for Christ” faster.

Every time the church chooses political coercion and control, we are taking Satan’s final temptation for ourselves. 

And like Jesus, when we are led out into the desert, exiled from places of religious power and physical ease, we are given the opportunity again and again to respond to God’s invitation to a full humanness that includes our differences, relinquishes dominance to uphold the dignity of all, and welcomes every place of pain as a place God will provide. You get to consent to be here, in your life. Coercion and faith don’t co-exist.

With the memory of white sands still fresh in my mind, I am emboldened again to receive the fierce truth that our deserts and dark valleys are not places of punishment or threats to our survival but sacred landscapes to stretch us into love. It is here, among the plants who grow tall or fast, who mysteriously hold onto water deep under the surface and grip into place despite the wild movement of the land around them, that we learn to relinquish all forms of spirituality that suppress our humanity and the humanity of those around us. 

If you are in a spiritual desert, disoriented by the land of your life, may you receive the sifting of the sands around you as the strengthening of your survival and the seeding of a spirituality of greater wholeness for us all. 

Take your shoes off. 

The land of your life

remains holy ground.

—KJ

I’d love to hear what resonated with you from today’s essay. How did this land with you? What parts of your life does this connect with? Feel free to leave a comment below.

PS Like I mentioned, my first book is on a wild sale right now on Kindle for $2.99—for allllll of August. Get a copy or send one to a friend as an uber-cheap gift.

PPS And if you haven’t started my brand new book yet, I hope you will get a copy of The Lord Is My Courage today. Thank you to everyone who has shared reviews on Amazon and GoodReads of how it’s encouraged and companioned you. Some authors don’t read their reviews, but I def do…and they definitely encourage the hell out of me. 🙏🏼 Here are some kid words from twitter yesterday that literally made my day: