IN March, the light returns but the cold holds on. The garden is neither one thing nor the other.

We are not in winter, but we are not yet in spring – we are suspended somewhere in between.

In the Christian calendar, this season is Lent, and it draws on old stories of desert wandering, flood, fasting, and testing.

They are old stories of thresholds and becoming. The wilderness that holds this becoming is not the destination, it is what happens before.

I think about the wilderness a lot – both in the sense of the vast and often strange natural world, and as a space of testing and transformation.

It is easy to see it as a kind of barrenness, or a difficult path we must survive if we want to arrive somewhere better. But I wonder if there's another way to look at it: that the wilderness is a place of clarification.

Perhaps if we strip away distractions, what remains is what's real. The desert wilderness, with its heat and silence and indifference, has always formed prophets and mystics who eventually came out with a deep sense of clarity and knowing.

And it formed Jesus, who came out with the Spirit, with vocation, with healing for individuals and the world.

The Middle East – whose deserts gave us so many of those prophets – is in the wilderness now.

What is happening there now and in recent history is not clarifying, it is obliterating.

And yet still I think about wilderness here because I wonder what it does to people – the people who live under the shadow of war, the people who make decisions, the people who witness and wait for resolution – to live so long in the wilderness, with little felt sense of coming light.

It often seems we are all in the wilderness, not only people in the desert.

Wilderness speaks of land that follows its own rules and will not be tamed for our needs.

March is the same – it will not be hurried into warmth and abundance. And grief – for an individual, a people, a world – will not be argued into resolution. It is part of our becoming.

Perhaps what Lent and any honest reckoning with wilderness offers, is permission to stop pretending we have things figured out or have already arrived somewhere.

We can stay for a while in the grief or the not-knowing. We do not need to explain or conclude or hurry into the season of light.

The wilderness has its own gifts, even if they are hard to see.

The light is of course returning, and there will be life in abundance, but for now, it is ok and even necessary to be in the in-between – in the cold that persists, or the grief that has no easy resolution, or the wilderness that insists on its own terms.

It feels an important and honest space to be able to be in, individually and collectively. And it is good to ask for support to be in that space.

Elizabeth Lloyd

Crediton Congregational Church