Growing up in California, I had many opportunities to camp in the desert.  At any given moment, I was only a couple of hours from thousands of acres of expansive stretches of cacti, sagebrush, empty rivers, and vast mountains of sand.  Over the years, I grew to love desert camping.  Though I still loved the mountains foremost, I found in the desert a starkness of beauty, a sublimity and equanimity of geological expression that I could find nowhere else.  Pushing all the superfluous and extraneous away, the desert reduced life to its raw essentials:  there was little else beyond its presence.
     The early fathers of the Christian church (and the elders of countless other religious traditions as well) enjoyed the desert, too.  They found its emptiness ideal for spiritual reflection and existential contemplation.  Reveling in the silence of the voiceless landscape, they found themselves drawn ever more deeply into meditating on anything but the ordinary and mundane.
     You may never come to appreciate the desert.  Yet you can perhaps come to accept that we will never find what is most important without letting go of everything else that we think is.  Though God is everywhere present, he remains apophatic.  In this world, he is a hidden God.
     Ironically, more often than not, we're the ones who hide him.
     As we do not see the surreal majesty of a nighttime desert sky, its black darkness sprinkled with innumerable stars, without leaving our urban lives far behind, so we will not see God unless we set aside the busyness of the present for the greater and illuminating presence that lies within and beyond it.
     It's hard to see in the quotidian dark.