Hope in the Wilderness: Spiritual Reflections for When God Feels Far Away

By Noel Forlini Burt and Jerry Sittser

"Behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak to her heart . . ." (Hos 2:14)

Hope in the Wilderness urges you to consider that your wilderness experiences--places where you suffer deeply, places where you can't find or feel God anymore, places of transition and upending of the life you used to know--are the very places where God speaks to your heart. As Noel Forlini Burt invites you into her own season of wilderness wandering, she enfolds the story of biblical characters who also wandered in wilderness, gently beckoning you to open yourself to the heart of God in your own story. Not merely a book to read, Hope in the Wilderness beckons you to lament your losses honestly, to be allured by the God who loves you, and to discover hope in the midst of your own wilderness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Nov 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781532689369

Noel Forlini Burt

Noel Forlini Burt teaches and lectures widely in the intersection of Bible and spiritual formation. A spiritual director, retreat leader, and academic, Noel believes the Bible is a deep well from which people can draw in their own spiritual formation. She has one husband, one dog, and one cat. Noel recently moved home to Alabama, where she drinks as much coffee as she possibly can.

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Introduction

Sumatanga

If you’re willing to strap on a good pair of hiking shoes and sweat your way over a mile straight uphill, the view of the cross overlooking the mountains at Camp Sumatanga will take your breath away. Aptly named A Place of Rest and Vision, Sumatanga is a Methodist camp just north of Birmingham, Alabama. Though it does not boast exactly the vista described in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, with its quintessentially Alabamian tree cover and rolling hills, I like to think that Sumatanga captures a bit of the holy. If you find yourself in a season where you’re a little bit lost, or a little bit disoriented, Sumatanga is a good place to go.

It was during such a season, one in which I found myself profoundly disoriented, that I arrived at Sumatanga for orientation to what I’ve come affectionately to call monk camp.

No, I’m not a monk.

I’m a thirty-nine-year-old married WASP with deep ties to the deep South and even deeper ties to the friends I’ve made there. In August of 2018, I began certification in spiritual formation through the Upper Room Academy for Spiritual Formation, returning to Sumatanga every three months for two years. Those two years as a member of Academy #41 are about as close to monkhood as I’m likely ever to get.

I’ve taken no vows in religious orders except, I suppose, for a vow to move my husband and our big orange cat halfway across the country, from our home of Birmingham, Alabama, to Waco, Texas, home of the Fixer Uppers and . . . not much else. For the past six years, I guess you could say I’ve been a member of the order of The Most Holy Fixer Uppers, the religion faculty at Baylor University. And no, I’ve never met Chip or Joanne, and I couldn’t begin to tell you anything about interior design. Most of my furniture is homemade and falling apart, or purchased from Target when I was still in college. Most recently my husband and I kicked an old and broken recliner to the curb with a sign that read, Rest in Pieces.

So, I am most decidedly not a monk, and I can’t tell you anything about interior design, only that I wish that particular recliner a happy afterlife.

The things I can tell you about are relatively few. I can tell you where to get the best cappuccino you’ve ever had in your life (O’Henry’s Coffees. For the record, my favorite location is the one on 18th Street South, Homewood, Alabama). I can tell you that if you’re a runner, it’s probably better to stretch first (but I never do). After nine years of graduate study and about an equal amount of time teaching, I can tell you a couple of things about the Bible (although I’m not nearly as certain of as much as I used to be).

And I can tell you about the wilderness. No, I’m not talking about actual wilderness. I’m talking about deep wilderness seasons of the soul. About the seasons when there’s some kind of disorientation happening in your life, caused by any number of things: the loss of a dream, the crumbling of your sense of self, the prolonged waiting for that thing you’re desperately hoping for, the deep sadness that has a name (illness, family tragedy, loss of a job, the list goes on and on), and the deep sadness that you don’t even know how to name. All you know is that it’s an invisible companion, one who is with you when you wake up in the morning and who is there with you when you turn off the light on your bedside table at night.

I can tell you about wilderness seasons of the soul, because it was during such a season that I arrived at Sumatanga for the first time. And on that first day of orientation, I heard the following words: In the struggle is the formation.

These were the first words that I heard—really heard—during my orientation to monk camp. For the next two years, I would hear those same words, a favorite saying of the academy, repeated often: In the struggle is the formation.

When you travel to the same place every three months for two years, you’re just about guaranteed to see it in all kinds of weather, even in Alabama where the seasons aren’t always very pronounced. Since that first visit in August of 2018, I’ve been to Sumatanga in every season and in all kinds of weather. I’ve been there when the Alabama heat was so oppressive that you couldn’t walk two feet without sweating through your clothes. I’ve been there when a rare winter snow blanketed the trees, magically, until you slip and tumble down one of the rolling hills I usually love so much. And I’ve been there when half the week was like a monsoon, muddying the trail around the lake, and the other half of the week was dry, shrinking the muddy patches like a wound just beginning to heal. Depending on the season, Sumatanga always looked a little different, but the words I heard were always the same—in the struggle is the formation.

During my wilderness season living in Texas, that statement became a liturgy, sacred words that shaped my shared life with God. What I’ve discovered during these six years is that while there are many orientations we go through in our lives—orientation to school or to a job or to a new city, for example—there is no orientation to wilderness. It just happens to you, and you hope to God that God is somewhere nearby when it happens.

My season of wilderness, of disorientation, began when I was offered my dream job as a religion professor at Baylor. Landing that job was one of the great shocks of my life, one that felt like providence. So after just a few months of marriage, my husband and I packed up our minimal belongings and our big orange cat and headed to a place we’d never been before. At Baylor, I would teach four classes a semester, most of them with sixty students in each (quite a load, any academic will tell you), participate in academic conferences, mentoring of students, thesis advising, service to the university, service to the department, service to the church, universal and local, and if I wanted to advance in the academic world, maintaining a robust scholarly research and publication agenda. Meanwhile, my husband would struggle with unemployment and underemployment for over two years. Our big orange cat, who had been with me since college, would die. My father would suffer a series of heart attacks. Significant relationships would fracture and die. I was diagnosed with a chronic illness that, for a time, severely hampered my ability to do anything other than go to work and come home. We would struggle to find a church home in Waco. We would miss the twenty-year friendships we had forged in Alabama. Our own relationship would struggle under the weight of everything else. And I would enter an intense four-year depression that turned on its head everything I thought I knew about myself, about the world, and about God.

Ultimately, my wilderness was a combination of all these things, some harder than others, some that I don’t even have the courage to name here. But at the root of it all was a profound sense that I didn’t belong anywhere. Part of that meant facing the reality that the so-called dream job I landed at Baylor was definitely someone’s dream—it just wasn’t mine. I had given over a decade to my education and training and sacrificed a whole lot along the way, only to discover that I was a heart person working in a head profession. I felt trapped and confused, unsure what path to take. All the familiar paths of chasing achievement through hard work and sheer determination (I’m an Enneagram 3, I’m told), which had served me so well all my life, suddenly no longer served me. Those paths were well-trodden and well-worn, but somehow, I couldn’t rely on them anymore to get me on the right path, mostly because I didn’t know the right path. And through it all, God kept silent. For the first time, I couldn’t will my way out. I was lost in the wilderness.

And the trouble with that is, I have a comically bad sense of direction. With an equal mix of glee and pity, my husband likes to tell the story of how I once got lost leaving our apartment from the back entrance. And I’ll readily admit that it was two years before I stopped using my GPS to drive to my best friend’s house, and even then I could only find her house if I took the same road to get there. Because my sense of direction is so bad, I almost never get lost. I’m always in control of where I go, always sure how to get there because I’ve prepared well beforehand.

In this wilderness season, what I’ve discovered is that in spite of my best efforts to keep my life, I lost my life anyway. During these six years in Texas, I’ve begun to wander down an unknown trail, one wholly unfamiliar to me. Wandering down an unknown trail is something my buttoned-up self, desperate to keep the life that she had, wouldn’t have done six years ago. I’ve misplaced myself, unsure of where I am. Of course, Christian tradition tells us that it’s when we finally give up the life we’re holding onto so tightly, finally loosen our chubby-fingered grip on it, then we will stumble onto the right trail.