Today’s Lenten reflection was recorded by Will Howard, a Tutor in the Licensed Ministry Training programme. You can find a transcript of the video below:
Hello, everybody. I’m always interested in where words come from. And the word wilderness, in Old English, means where the wild deer are. Where the wild beasts are. Where the wild things are.
I didn’t grow up in the church, and so my imagination wasn’t shaped by the stories of the Bible.
I was shaped by other stories. And so, when I hear where the wild things are, I immediately find myself thinking of the children’s story by Maurice Sendak.
A story called just that. “Where the Wild Things Are”. Back in 1963 and remains a bestseller to this day. In fact, it’s been made into a film and a ballet.
It tells the story of young Max. Max is driving his mother spare. He’s roaring around the house, dressed up, as a wolf causing chaos.
He’s sent to his room without any dinner.
Once there, he finds his bedroom turns into a forest, where he can go travelling. He ventures out and eventually comes to an ocean where he boards his private boat and sails to the land where the wild things are. There he encounters all sorts of fearsome wild animals who roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth and roll their terrible eyes and show their terrible claws.
Max looks them in the eye and tells them to be still.
The wild things do, as Max says, and proceed to pronounce him king. Whereupon, upon Max declares a party, “let the wild rumpus start!”
Max has travelled to a place where everything is on his terms. He’s in charge. There are no frustrating outside constraints.
The wilderness is free from rules and impositions. Everyone is at his command.
As an adult, and as a Christian for some years, I read this story now and I hear resonances with the stories I read in the Bible.
Now, I’m not pretending that this is a Christian story. Maurice Sendak, who both wrote and illustrated the book, wasn’t a believer.
But what I find fascinating is that in the story, when Max has everything on his own terms, when there are no constraints and everything is bent to his will, he experiences loneliness.
Sendak writes, “Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely, and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all.”
And though the animals, the wild animals around him, want him to stay and keep partying, Max, the call to return home.
So he sails back and returns through the forest into his bedroom, where he finds his dinner has been laid out for him by his mother. And the dinner is still hot.
As I say, I am struck by the resonances with. the broader biblical narrative, this desire to have things all on our own terms, our frustration with the constraints and limitations of creaturely life.
And so we push back against our Creator. We rebel, in other words. Over and over in the Bible, we read stories about individuals and the people of God more generally.
Wanting to have things on their own terms, not God’s, imagining that thereby they will have freedom and fulfilment. But over and over the opposite happens.
It’s as if it’s something that we all have to learn, each and every one of us, for ourselves. And that sense of loneliness that Max experienced is something that we all experience in the wildernesses we create for ourselves and, and those that are created for us too.
And that desire to return home that we experience, often only when we enter the wilderness, is something that runs deep within us.
It’s as if we can only truly come home after our time in the wilderness.
And when we do come home, like Max does in the story, the good news is that there is a party, a feast, a banquet, prepared with love, and where the food will always be hot.
