Jesus was cared for after he was exhausted by what he went through in the forty days in the desert. He had confronted the dark forces of his ego, urging him to power, self-sufficiency and pride. He had seen through them and did not succumb to the temptation to give up the struggle to be real, to stay real and to deny the easy allurements of illusion. But that can be exhausting at times and, like any human being, he needed to be ministered to. Where do we find this ministry of spiritual friendship and accompaniment in our own lives? Not perhaps in hosts of angels flying down from above, but in the sharing of the pilgrimage ever deeper into the realm of the real. Although the commitment to reality demands solitude, it also opens us up to community. The people we meet in the desert of our solitude are real friends. We recognize each other and value each other but also know we cannot possess each other because the pilgrimage is also a journey into a dispossession of our own selves.
