If my first spiritual home is Durham cathedral then my second spiritual home is the seventh century - for that was a golden era for Christianity in this land.  Later this year as part of my continuing ministerial education I hope to attend a course at St. Johnís College, Durham entitled "Celtic & Anglo-Saxon Saints: A Living Spirituality".  Thus, the location and the subject will beautifully combine my first and second spiritual homes.  The lives of the great saints from Northumbria in the seventh century continually fascinate and inspire me and I look forward to attending lectures on saints Aidan, Oswald, Cuthbert, Wilfrid and Hilda.  The course will include an outing to Whitby where the great Synod took place in 664 and Lastingham, where our own St. Cedd, who brought Christianity to Essex from Lindisfarne, is buried. The course will conclude with a lecture by Martin Wallace, Bishop of Selby on "The value of Saints today"- Martin used to be our Archdeacon when I first came here in 2003.

This year Ash Wednesday falls on March 1st, which is, of course, St. David's Day.  Dewi Sant is another of those great Celtic saints, although from the sixth rather than the seventh century.  Lent is the time when we remember the forty days and forty nights that Jesus spent in the wilderness prior to beginning his public ministry of teaching and healing.  It was a time when the Kingdom of God began to break through as Christ did battle with Satan in the wilderness.  The Judean wilderness is an amazing place - it is barren, waterless and mysterious.  At first sight the place is so arid that you might be forgiven for thinking that it has nothing to commend it.  But first impressions can often be deceptive, for the wilderness may have nothing to give but it has, in fact, everything to offer.

The wilderness certainly has nothing to give; it is a place of emptiness, where everything is stripped down until only the essentials remain.  The wilderness has everything to offer; for it is there that we can encounter God and our true selves in a way that is impossible anywhere else - being there can be the most profound spiritual experience.  It is no accident that the three great monotheistic faiths - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - were all born in the desert.

But you don't have to travel to the Judean wilderness - you can experience the desert within.  Almost everyone has had the experience of a world of emptiness, when circumstances have left you feeling bleak, alone and vulnerable.  There is something of the wilderness in that arid experience, and, if we are spiritually alive to new possibilities, we can encounter the truth in the desert within just as much as we can in the physical desert.  At times we need to delve under the emptiness in order to discover just what lies beneath it.

Yet, without any shadow of doubt, the most impressive thing about the wilderness is its stillness - there is no sound, no movement - simply stillness, silence and tranquillity.  This stillness is more than just peacefulness: it has a sense of presence about it.  For the wilderness is the place where God IS, without distraction.  As a result, it is a place where we can engage with God with an amazing intimacy.

As people of the frenetic twenty first century, we spend much of our time full of inner movement, turmoil and noise. Going off into the desert is a way of simply trying to still all that and to centre our lives more and more upon God - the source of all being.  Lent offers us the perfect opportunity to go, with Jesus, to the desert within.  For the real task is not about making a physical journey but a spiritual quest.  Lent encourages us to let go of all the props we surround ourselves with in order to shelter ourselves from the depth of encounter with God that the wilderness offers.  Lent inspires us to quieten our inner being so that we can indeed recover that sense of presence, that sense of intimacy with the living God.

So, use Lent wisely as a wilderness experience and you too will discover that although the wilderness has nothing to give, truly, it has everything to offer.