subject: Have You Experienced a Crash in the Desert? [print this page] Ongoing Daily Spiritual Insight from the Story ofThe Little Prince
The pilot who is used to living his life alone because he can't find people he is able to truly relate tobecause most people are so shallow and not interested in the really meaningful aspects of lifehas crash-landed in the Sahara Desert.
Now he istrulyall alone in a life-threatening situation, which is symbolic of situations that arise in our lives that have the potential of ending our life as we presently know it and introducing us to a whole new reality grounded in a self we lost touch with when the boa constrictor of childhood got hold of us.
It takes a crash in the desert, with no hope of help from anyone else, to awaken us to our forgotten selfthe essential being we came into the world to be but that got constricted in our early years by family and society.
I have experienced many crashes in life in which I felt all alone, but most of them did not turn out to be crashes in the desert, a thousand miles from any inhabited land. Like most people, I waseventuallyable to pick myself up and go on with life.
Situations that tear our heart out arepotentiallya crash in the desert of the kind the airman in the story of The Little Prince experienced. But they are notnecessarily so.
I had been through romantic breakups, even divorce, that tore my heart out. Years ago I sometimes wondered how I could even live without a certain person in my life, I felt soempty without them. Pathetic, as I look back, but that's the nature of a life that's being squeezed by the social boa constrictor. We become desperate, needy, clinging, and controlling.
I was incredibly lonely at times, experiencing great sadnessespecially after the death at a relatively young age of my father and mother, younger than I am now.
None of these times of emotional trauma constituted a crash in the desert however, as they don't tend to be in most people's lives.
Still, they were precursors to such a crash, generating pain that would eventually become overwhelming enough that when I did crash in the desert, my old self "died," allowing space for my true self to revive.
St. Paul wrote about our "old self" and its need to die so that our "new self" could come alive. That's not a religious experience in the way that most churches paint it. It's a very real experience of everyday life. We literally lose our old identity, as we awaken to the fact we have been living an inauthentic life for years.
This new self isn't actuallynew, just new to us in our experience now. It's ouroriginalself that's been in the grip of the boa constrictor, which has been squeezing the life out of us ever since we were little.
This is why Jesus said that adults need to be "converted" back into who they were as little children, since children are naturally in tune with the kingdom of Godthe realm of the divine Presence that is the essence of our being and pervades the whole of reality.
Most people crash just enough to put them in pain so that they start seeking answers. They then take on theidentityof a "seeker."
When I get invited to give the sermon in various churches or to conduct a workshop, I find a great many "seekers." Some of them have been searching for years, reading book after book, listening to talk after talk, going to classes and retreats one after the other. But they haven't yet died to their identity. They have just recast it as a seeking identity.
What the crash in the desert represents is coming to the end of the search, completely bankrupt as an identity. It's only then that we can be reborn as the very special person we came into the world to be.
