I’ve been watching more YouTube than regular television lately and discovered that many of the songs from my youth can be found there. In Billy Joel’s River of Dreams, one phrase caught my attention: “Desert of truth.”

In the song Joel claims not to be a spiritual man, but to describe truth as a desert is amazingly perceptive as well as Biblical. Although, I must admit when I heard the phrase it seemed an horrid way to describe what truth is. I think of truth being rich and deep, whereas a desert is sparse and dull. Yet in a desert, there really is nowhere to hide. It is in a desert where we are removed from all distractions. When one is in the desert, it is living life at its most basic. 

Deserts play a prominent role in the Bible. It is in a desert that the Israelites first learn who God is. They learn to trust that he will provide food and water, in abundance, to meet all their needs. They spend a generation there to remove the influence of Egyptian life and to loosen the grip of a life familiar to them, as harsh as it was. 

John the Baptist chose to live out in a desert area, subsiding on the meagerest of food items. Yet he was a most excellent herald for the Messiah. By living away from cities and towns, those who came out to see and hear John had to make a special journey. This was not about stopping for a few minutes to listen to an itinerant preacher, but a journey to see the main attraction. He encouraged a literal turning away from the lure of secular life and turning toward God. He asked the people who came to see him to not just listen, but to take action, to make a commitment by being baptized. Baptism today calls us all to do the same, but instead of it being a singular action that one takes upon himself, baptism in the Catholic Church makes you a member of a family through Jesus Christ and an adopted child of God. 

Jesus, Truth itself, prepared for His ministry by spending 40 days in the desert. We’re familiar with the temptation that followed after that time, yet those days of preparation were not just for us to know that Jesus, too, was tempted. He spent His first 30 years living amongst men. Even though Jesus was fully divine, He was also fully human and needed the time in the desert to strengthen His connection with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Jesus also recognized that we need times of being in the desert to rest and recharge. In a similar way in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus invites His apostles to “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” (Mk 6:31) And this was in a time before all the modern conveniences and distractions that we have! How much more so should we be seeking out a desert place? 

Truth does have much in common with a desert. Both are stark, simple, yet beautiful. To describe truth as a desert means to not look for a truth that’s comfortable or that we can agree with, but to recognize that it can be sharp, stinging our fragile egos and wounding our pride. But only Truth can set us free and heal us from ourselves.