The desert is always the same, the sky is always beautiful, the road deserted. What else can I say? The only this which is always new is God.
-- Letters to Dolcida
In the desert, when the sun sets after the toil and trouble of the day, the wind drops and with it the burning heat and life seems to begin afresh. It is the hour of peace. On a stretch of level but not too sandy ground, beside the hillock which provides your shelter, gather up the dry brushwood of which there is no lack, even in the most deserted places, and make a fire.
That is the first thing you need to do so as to boil the water for the broth in which to break the bread you are going to bake under the sand by the heat from the embers of the fire.
An hour later everything is finished, and, restored by the hot broth and a few dates, you can throw whatever remains of the wood onto the fire and leave it to cast its fantastic lights into your chapel under the star-lit sky.
After that, move away a little and settle down in a sand dune or sit on some hospitable rock, and then, without haste, with no watch and no definite program, begin to pray.
I will never be able to find words strong enough to express what it means to stay with God like this, hour after hour, in the vastness of the night.
-- In Search of the Beyond
One thing is certain: we are on earth as in a huge space where everything is light and dark at the same time, where everything is the sign of an invisible presence, and where a continual challenge comes from the splendid vault outstretched above in its astronomical distances.
Inaccessible far-away things question us endlessly, oblige us to look up at those luminous specks like starry holes piercing the black vault, which seem to say that there, above, is the repose we seek.
How often have I known that living picture in the desert night of the Sahara!
How often, lying wrapped in a blanket on the sand, have I passed hour after hour gazing at a starry dome ceaselessly speaking to me, questioning me, helping me to find my bearings in the dark!
Why do we live?
Why do things come to be?
Why do I plod along like a wandering shepherd?
Why this vast silence?
Why do the stars look down as though indifferent to our suffering?
Withal, one thing is certain: this light, the sign of the truth we seek and the means by which we may catch a glimpse of it, has not got its roots on earth.
Light comes from up there, it comes from something stretching above me, something transcending me, something preceding me.
You can actually see this, physically.
Like it or not, the explanation I seek is not here on earth, though I may look for it here.
The earth goes on rotating on its axis, day after day, season after season, millennium after millennium, and vouchsafes no final answer to my justified questioning.
And if I try to immerse myself in work which interests me and gives a sense of achieving something with my effort and intelligence, why does the question continually recur: "For all his toil, his toil under the sun, what does man gain by it?" (Eccles 1:3)
And if I marry and settle down so as not to feel so alone, the fact of death taking away my wife, or robbing me of my children before they can manage on their own, embitters my already harsh path.
No, a thousand times no!
The mystery is there and I cannot escape it. The mystery is there and I cannot avoid it. The mystery is there and I cannot laugh it off.
--Why, O Lord?
Here is the miracle of love: to discover that all creation is one, flung out into space by a God who is a Father, and that if you present yourself to it as he does --unarmed and full of peace-- creation will recognize you and meet you with a smile.
--I, Francis