Beyond the Wilderness

...We Encounter Divine Love

by

Practicing Faith

Special to United Methodist Insight | May 19, 2026

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness and came to Mount Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Exodus 3: 1-2

The man pulling radishes

pointed my way

with a radish.

– Kobayashi Issa 17th c Japanese haiku poet

In the beginning was the Word…. John 1:1

Moses encountered the burning bush in the desert. When he asked who it was, speaking to him from the burning bush, the answer was enigmatic: “I am that I am” or “I am becoming what I am becoming”. The Russian language has no verb for “is” or “to be”. In the Russian Bible, God’s answer is Sushchiy – Existent. Nor does Russian have a definite article – no word for “the”. So it’s not even The Existent. Lots of stuff is “existent”. “Existent” is generic, non-specific, pointing beyond itself into a mystery beyond words in any language.

The opening lines of the gospel of John place the Word at the beginning of all things. But what Word is the Word? Any particular word? In Genesis, God spoke words that had the power to create the world. In John, those sentences of divinely uttered words are conflated down to one Word which is not specifically denoted because it is one and the same as God.

The mystics of Christianity were focused on experiencing God directly and personally. And in their intense practice of contemplation, they realized that their experience of God transcended any language they tried to use to describe it. They sometimes became giddy in their attempts to convey the experience of union with the divine. They would use positive terms – describing what it is – but realized that there was no way to come close to conveying it. So they’d turn around and describe it in negative terms – saying what it was by saying what it was not. They’d go in circles all around the experience: their giddy, contradictory and convoluted language about it succeeded only in making it obvious that it was beyond capturing with words. All their words could do was point toward it.

Like the farmer pulling radishes and pointing the way with a radish. The radish wasn’t the Way – it had nothing to do with the destination – but pointing the Way with a radish was a charming, even comedic expression of the indescribable nature of both the Way and the destination.

The book of Exodus says that Moses “led his flock beyond the wilderness.” But what’s beyond the wilderness? Mystics have gone to the desert for thousands of years to get past all the distractions that get in the way of experiencing divine Love. The desert – whether the physical place or the inner emptiness – invites us to go beyond it: “The wasteland possesses neither time nor place… it is light, it is bright, it is completely dark; it is unnamed; it is unknown… Leave place, leave time, avoid images, too! Go out without any path on the narrow way, and then you will find the wasteland’s hint…” 

These words in the “Mustard Seed,” a 14th century mystical Christian poem, aim beyond to a place beyond words, beyond description. Moses went to the wilderness, and beyond it into the presence of the Holy One. The radish points the Way. The Word points the Way. The wilderness points the Way beyond itself, beyond our egos, beyond our small-“s” selves, and into the indescribable Self at the center of our being….

The Rev. Jim Burklo serves as pastor of Simi Valley United Church of Christ in Simi Valley, Calif. This post is republished from his Substack blog, Musings.