wellness fad. We put saunas in our backyards to sweat out the toxins we imbibe all day long from city living; we buy expensive organic bedding and wear our Oura Rings to monitor our sleep and stave off exhaustion; we shop for organic vegetables at our local farmers market to resist the cheap“ food” at the grocery store and stock our pantry with expensive probiotics and an ever-changing jumble of supplements; we meet weekly with our therapists because we moved away from our families, don’ t live in community, and often have no one else to listen.
Enter the wellness entrepreneurs, who are all too willing to help us de-stress. For a price. Or to make it even less stressful, a monthly subscription fee.
" It isn’ t an escape from our pain, but an encounter with it."
I’ m not a cynic here. At their best, these new modalities are good and necessary counterbalances to the toxicities of modern life.( For the record, I have a sauna. And a cold plunge. Huge fan.) At their worst, they are thinly veiled strategies from a multibillion-dollar industry to monetize our pain, aided and abetted by secularism’ s attempt to co-opt spirituality without being willing to dethrone the self, much less do the unthinkable: surrender to God.
To state the obvious, it does not work.
No matter how many cold plunges you endure or essential oils you buy or psilocybin sessions you can afford, you are still a fragile, finite, flawed human being. Joy cannot be bought with a monthly subscription or engineered through the latest life hack, app, or drug.
Here’ s the point I’ m getting to: We all are shaped by the culture we’ re immersed in, so it’ s only natural that we would approach the desert with the aim of spiritual wellness, as a kind of Christianized attempt at self-care. We go in expecting, or at least hoping, to find emotional well-being, a cathartic release of our anxieties and agitations, and a palpable sense of joy and peace in God, deposited directly into our inner beings like Jesus’ dove landing gently upon the waters of Jordan.
Hence, we are often in for a rude surprise.
I mean, sometimes it is like that. True happiness, true peace, immediately upon entry, almost a kind of bliss in God. Why else would so many of us return here, again and again?
But in my experience, and that of so many others, the happy feelings tend to come later, not in the beginning.
There’ s a U shape to solitude: We go down before we come back up.
Henri Nouwen said this more insightfully than I could:
Solitude is not a private therapeutic place. Rather, it is the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the
42