Jesus was led by the Spirit out into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil (Mt 4:1)

The original meaning of ‘temptation’, it seems, is simply to ‘try something out, to see what it’s like’. How else do we learn? Can we blame Eve for trying out the forbidden fruit? Who tells us what is forbidden and what is allowed? God or our image of God?

What if we were never to do what is forbidden? Would we ever grow up, our eyes opened to the difference between good and evil, real and unreal, so that we know the difference for ourselves? The devil is the master of division and doubt and so there is no end to questions when we enter into temptation. We question the motivation behind what is prohibited and we question our own motivation in risking disobedience. We pray not to be tempted. But we are also drawn to temptation because it tests and teaches us where we are truly prudent and strong and where we are merely frightened and weak.

The desert is a place without trees, the tree of life or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil which the Bible says are at the innocent centre of the garden of Eden. But these alluring trees are outside us, separate from us and so we feel we are being tempted by some outside force. As a child I was fascinated by cartoons in my religion book of a good angel telling me ‘don’t’ and a bad angel ,on the other side, urging me to ‘go on, you goody-goody do it’. The duality of it all seemed very simple but in fact it was deceptive.

I once crossed the Australian Nullarbor Plain by train for three days. As the name suggests, it was a treeless desert which I thought would be intolerably dull to look at for so long. No beautiful views, lovely coastlines or rolling hills. I soon discovered, though, how varied and subtly beautiful it was in its endless radical simplicity. It was in fact surprisingly beautiful. Jesus fasted for forty days in such a desert as his mind ran out of memories and his desires were uprooted and he was left facing the root division in every mind.

This was just what the Spirit – which is nondual and simple, beyond questions and doubts – had led him into the desert for. Now with an empty mind he was ready. Being mindless in this way is further along the way to selfhood  than being mindful. We are not looking at things and merely desiring or resisting because we are looking at nothing. External temptations – not just the sensual but the ego-sensual things like power, fame and wealth in their many forms – keep us locked into the devilish world-view of division. In the beautiful bare-ness of the treeless desert, when the mind is undistracted, we meet the root cause of temptation in our divided self. (Will we ever know how it became divided from itself except through a myth of creation?)

Strengthened by his fasting from thought and imagination, not weakened by it, Jesus has no problem in sweeping away the last remaining illusions of power, desire and the final illusion of the devil’s independent existence. Free, one in himself and one with all, like the desert monks after him, he returned to the world knowing what he was called to do and then discover in the end who he truly was.

He will place the sheep on his right hand and the goats on his left. (Mt 25: 32)

We were driving through the Canadian Rockies when this photo happened. I was more interested in seeing grizzlies than goats as we came upon this one separated from his flock, perhaps with a death wish, grazing on concrete.

There are different kinds of desert. Sand dunes, water stretching everywhere, dense trees confusing your sense of direction, libraries of endless words and crowded subway trains of people looking at their mobile phones, distracted minds and empty roads through mountain ranges. The common elements of a desert experience can be found in all these forms – and of course in meditation. They include an initial feeling of remoteness and separation that you have to embrace to let it become true solitude. There is no solitude at first without some degree of loneliness, but solitude is the cure for loneliness. Loneliness is the symptom of separation while solitude is the restoration of companionship.

The goat trying to eat concrete or, more likely, something edible that an unmindful driver had thrown out of his window, did not seem lonely. Quite unaware of us looking at him and taking a photo, he seemed contentedly solitary which would mean (if this applies to goats as well as us) he had found the Friend within himself. He didn’t look up and wonder if we were what he was looking for because he wasn’t looking for anything. Even for the truck that might have come tearing round the bend at any moment. Goats are more independent than sheep and so are often thought to be more self-centred which, taken further, may explain why they became symbols of evil. The devil is often represented as a nasty looking goat.

Anyway, it’s only a parable and probably Jesus didn’t have much against goats personally. However, goats do seem smarter than sheep, especially to those who like them, although looking at this one, eating the road on a dangerous bend made me think otherwise. Even in the form of an empty mountain road, the desert welcomes everyone. This is why meditation, by leading us into the desert of the heart, creates and repairs community and bestows the blessed awareness of equality.

At first the desert explorer does not even notice that there are other people around him, like himself a little lonely, trying to embrace solitude. Even then he can still judge them by first appearances, as we all do,. He may start to put sheep on his right and goats on the left. He may even think he is justified in separating and judging others because he is imitating Jesus.

Transformation comes when we understand fully that we are in the desert, accept it humbly and allow ourselves to feel at home. Then we stop looking for what isn’t there. Life becomes simpler and more livable the more we see only what is there.

The separation of sheep and goats separation is ended. They look into each other’s eyes and see themselves reflected there: the good, the bad and the ugly, the rich and the poor, the healthy and the sick, the imprisoned and the free, those with golden lives and beautiful dinner services and those who have only ever eaten off plastic, if they have eaten at all.

I have a confession to make. I have deceived you or at least some of you. This week’s photo that I took of a goat eating the road in the Canadian Rockies is in fact not of a goat but a Canadian or Bighorn sheep. I would like to thank the meditator from Alberta who corrected me. In fact, it’s a happy fault because the point of the reflection was to say that the judgement and separation of sheep and goats in the gospel of that day is not the whole picture or last word. It can sound disturbingly dualistic and punitive even though the difference between sheep and goats in the parable is about the compassionate level of response to the suffering and needs of others. (‘Lord when did we see you hungry and give you food?’)

I suggested that there is a step beyond this judgemental separation in the all-embracing, non-punitive love of God which is apportioned equally to the good and wicked. The merely moralistic, dualistic mind doesn’t like this kind of God at all or the prayer that awakens us to Him. This love creates a transformation of the two into one. Goats become sheep and sheep find themselves in goats. Maybe the moment of this unity is always coming round the bend of the road but we can’t see it until it thunders into us.

The power that effects this unified consciousness and metanoia is the same grace that supports and edges us into detachment. We live and move in grace as we do in the earth’s atmosphere which is an envelope that contains all the gases we need to survive. We take it for granted but, consciously or not, we receive it with every breath and movement as a free gift. All we have to do is receive it even if we don’t feel gratitude. Thankfulness awakens when we understand.

A young couple preparing for marriage may have different kinds of spirituality. Yet they can share a profoundly unitive sense of the mystery of their love and the strange coincidences and patterns that led them to meet and to love deeply enough for each to see him- or her- self in the other. Turning inward as the wilderness experience, the desert, has us do, we find in that boundless inner space as large as the external cosmos the ‘love that moves the sun and other stars’.

The hungry and war-weary human heart finds peace by seeing that the peace beyond understanding is always there. At first it partially delivers a new kind of happiness. But in the Sahara Desert night temperatures drop an average of 42 degrees Celsius. As the mystics discover, God is also an imageless desert we learn to adapt to. Adaptation is metanoia to what we cannot do without and yet cannot control. At times it is a roller-coaster of desolation and consolation, soaring and plummeting. The great poet of the inner journey, George Herbert, describes this in one of the most beautiful of English poems, the Flower:

These are thy wonders, Lord of power,
Killing and quickening,
bringing down to hell
And up to heaven in an hour

Turning the goat and the sheep in us into one is hard work. And we still think meditation is just about reducing stress?

Whether we are a sheep or a goat, whether we flip between the two identities or whether the fusion of the two has been completed and we are released from worrying about it, there are always surprises leaping out of unexpected places. Something is always coming round the corner. Until the integration of the personality has happened – the harmonisation of mind and heart and everything in between – we may fear the unexpected, even live in a state of incessant anxiety or hidden dread. But gradually the peace of the harmony of order proves stronger than fear which is ever rooted in the constant change which reminds us uncomfortably of our mortality.

This is already beginning to sound abstract, even preachy. Stories are more effective in getting certain truths across and discovering more even than the storyteller understood. Good stories, like creation myths, at first seem self-contained with a beginning, a middle and end. In fact, they emerge from a swirling cauldron of ancestral imagination. Literary theorists argue about how many basic plots there are: seven (of course) or up to thirty-six. However, if you’re listening to a story wondering about which category it belongs to, then it probably isn’t a very good one. Good stories persuade us they are unique.

Many of the greatest stories and the big questions they contain deal with the origin and meaning of suffering. God’s reputation hangs on this question. Nietzsche thought that to live is to suffer and that to survive is to find meaning in it. A neat answer but maybe too neat. The Hebrew creation narrative (Genesis 1-3) tells a timeless story. The first home of the childhood of humanity was a garden with beautiful fruit trees and our first parents could eat what they liked except the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They disobeyed because the Woman, as usual smarter than her mate, thought ‘well, why not?’. The result was expulsion from Eden and a life of suffering ending in death.

The biblical story doesn’t bewail this as later Christian commentators did when they called it the Fall, blamed the Woman and saw suffering as punishment. Not so the wise Hebrews, who agreed with Eve and saw the story not as terrible disobedience but simply about growing up and discovering what the world out there is really like.

Enter ‘Yetzer Hara’ in the form of the serpent who is cast as the devil in Christian imagination. In Chinese myth it becomes a dragon, symbol of power, strength and good luck. The array of stories of human wrongdoing in the Bible recognise there is something in us that does often wilfully choose the bad over the good. It seems the decision to invade Ukraine was simmering and finding self-justification in Mr Putin’s mind for many years. Nevertheless, remember the destiny of sheep and goats. The Bible never dreams about going back to Eden. What’s coming round the corner is a new future.

Jewish commentators turn the creation narrative into high art by naughtily saying that the Yetzer Hara, the cause of disobedience, was purposefully created by God and inserted in the human psyche. Otherwise, God would always know everything that was going to happen: and how eternally boring that would be for Him. Now, doesn’t that make God a more interesting character and make us feel better about being a goat?