From the dwelling places in the desert, the road lies always open to our true homeland. Let those who desire “to see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living” (Psalms 27:13; 116:9) take up their residence in an uninhabitable wasteland. Let those who strive to become citizens of Heaven be guests first of the desert.

Scripture says that the Lord Jesus was accustomed to go into a desert place to pray. The desert may rightly be called a place of prayer, for God himself has approved it and taught by his example that it is appropriate for prayer. The prayer of a humble petitioner will more easily penetrate the clouds if it rises from the desert, because that solitary place gives it increased merit. The Lord Jesus, seeking that place for prayer, showed us where he prefers us to pray.

O admirable desert, how right it is for the holy monks to live or desire to live near you and within you, for you are rich and fertile in all the good things of him in whom all things are held.

Where is my dwelling place? Where I can never stand. Where is my final goal, toward which I should ascend? It is beyond all place. What should my quest then be? I must, transcending God, into the desert flee

Inhuman solitude made of sand and God. Surely only two kinds of people can bear to live in such desert: lunatics and prophets. The mind topples here not from fright but from sacred awe; sometimes it collapses downward, losing human stability, sometimes it springs upward, enters heaven, sees God face to face, touches the hem of His blazing garment without being burned, hears what He says, and taking this, slings it into men's consciousness. Only in the desert do we see the birth of these fierce, indomitable souls who rise up in rebellion even against God himself and stand before Him fearlessly, their minds in resplendent consubstantiality with the skirts of the Lord. God sees them and is proud, because in them his breath has not vented its force; in them, God has not stooped to becoming a man.

To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.

Who can number adequately all the benefits of the desert and the advantages for virtue enjoyed by those who live there? Finding themselves placed in this world, they in a way go beyond this world. As the Apostle says, ‘They wander through desert places, in mountains and caves and in holes of the earth’. Quite correctly the Apostle says that the world is not worthy of such people, for they are alien to the confusion of human society; they are distant, quiet, silent, and free now both from sin and from inclination to sin.

To be holy is to be home, to be able to rest in the house of belonging that we call the soul.

You show how strong in you is the love of solitary places, since the strongest human love must yield to it. What shall I call that love of the desert if not the love of God in you?

Some one wrote to me upon the publication of my book two years ago: “But you live in England! Poor man: then you are a preacher in the desert!” So I am. But I owe something to my desert. The desert is an excellent place for anybody who can make use of it, as biblical and post-biblical experience proves. Without my desert I should not have written my book. Without coming to England I should have become a modern creature, going in for money and motor-cars. For I was born with a fatal inclination for such lighter and brighter kind of things. I was born under a lucky star, so to say: I was born with a warm heart and a happy disposition; I was born to play a good figure in one of those delightful fêtes champêtres of Watteau, Lancret, and Boucher, with a nice little shepherdess on my arm, listening to the sweet music of Rossini and drinking the inspiring “Capri bianco” or “Verona soave” of that beautiful country Italy. But the sky over here is not blue—nor grows there any wine in England—and no Rossini ever lived here; and towards the native shepherdesses I adopted the ways of the Christian towards his beautiful ideals: I admired them intensely but kept myself afar. So there was nothing to console your thirsty and disenchanted traveller in the British Sahara. In the depths of his despair, there was sent to him, as to the traveller in the desert, an enchanting vision, a beautiful fata Morgana rising on the horizon of the future, a fertile and promising Canaan of a new creed that had arisen in Germany (there too as a revulsion against the desert): the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.
So I owe something to the desert. Had I not wandered there so long, I could never have fervently wished to escape nor finally succeeded in coming out of it.

I would say that the desert deserves to be called a temple of our God without walls. Since it is clear that God dwells in silence, we must believe that he loves the solitary expanses of the desert. ... Although God is present everywhere, and regards the whole world as his domain, we may believe that his preferred place is the solitudes of heaven and of the desert.

This is the Last Abode; we appoint it for those who desire not exorbitance in the earth, nor corruption. The issue ultimate is to the godfearing.

In former times it was customary for illustrious men, after wearing themselves out in business affairs, to turn to philosophy as to their proper home. How much more fitting is it for people today to direct themselves to the study of the highest wisdom, and how wonderful for them to withdraw into the leisure of solitude and the solitary places of the desert! This enables them to be free for philosophy alone and to wander in the desert with more pleasure than athletes exercising in the gymnasium.

But I was not my self, confronted with my thoughts. I should also rise up above my thoughts to my own self. My journey goes there, and that is why it leads away from men and events into solitude. Is it solitude, to be with oneself? Solitude is true only when the self is a desert.73 Should I also make a garden out of the desert? Should I people a desolate land? Should I open the airy magic garden of the wilderness? What leads me into the desert, and what am I to do there? Is it a deception that I can no longer trust my thoughts? Only life is true, and only life leads me into the desert, truly not my thinking, that would like to return to thoughts, to men and events, since it feels uncanny in the desert. My soul, what am I to do here? But my soul spoke to me and said, “Wait.” I heard the cruel word. Torment belongs to the desert.