Abiding in the desert
The Fix It Impulse: Learning how to abide in the desert
“I can fix it.” As a minister, spouse, father, social worker, son, and white male, that phrase has echoed through nearly every part of my life. There is an urge to right a wrong simply because something is wrong, and I want to trust its immediacy. Often it fuels my anger at injustice or my response to another’s sorrow, and it is the same human desire Jesus confronts in the desert on this First Sunday of Lent. It is both gift and curse.
To be in the desert and hungry or thirsty is not metaphor. Anyone who has fasted, and more truthfully anyone who has lacked food or water, knows that need is an embodied fact. Ending suffering becomes an existential demand that makes deep claims on us. Johann Baptist Metz calls the temptations in today’s Gospel “three assaults on the poverty of Jesus,” the radical emptying of God into human vulnerability. His framing helps me lean into the often misinterpreted first Beatitude: “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Mt 5:3).
Stone to Bread
Years ago in Latin America, I ministered in a prison where men survived through a forced informal economy. Carlos told me he often did not have enough to eat beyond the one small meal and piece of bread he received. My anger rose and I thought: I can fix this. In our Bible study we read the feeding of the five thousand and discussed sharing. Carlos was invited to breakfast the next morning, and I felt validated. The temptation of stones into bread is the quick fix, the instinct to eliminate pain. It is part of our poverty.
Fear of Falling
The next week, after violence in a cell block, I was turned away. When I returned Carlos was still hungry and now alienated from the men who had shared with him. My fix had not understood the relationships, and I had opened a conflict I could not mediate. The rescue had been more about my fear of falling or failing. Discernment eluded me because I did not notice who I was trying to save. As Metz writes, sometimes “the tabernacle of self is empty and barren.”
Refusing to Bow to “the powers”
I think of Marvin’s weather-worn hands from Chicago winters at a car wash. Poverty kept him in pretrial detention longer than his sentence. In a family session he praised his seven-year-old son’s strength and then wept. I wept too. It was all there was to do. He accepted what he could not change and refused to bow to the powers against him. God abided with him and taught me something important.
“Jesus’ no to Satan,” Metz writes, “is his yes to our poverty.” In meeting hunger, fear, and the temptation to rise above his humanity, Jesus chooses us instead. Lent invites us to remember that real strength lies not in quick solutions but in becoming more deeply human.
John DeCostanza now serves at Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago, and he continues to learn these lessons every day. This is adapted from a piece he wrote twelve Lents ago and that reflection will likely still ring true in twelve more.