Many ancient cultures around the world venerate a similar practice of going out into the wilderness to connect with God. The aboriginals of Australia called this sacred outing the "Renewal of the Dreaming," to the Lakota it was called a "vision quest," and the Buddhists call it attaining "Enlightenment."
Do Christians have any examples of such a process? Yes, many! One of the most profound comes from the life of Jesus Christ himself:
"Then Jesus was led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be with God. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights and had communed with God, he was afterwards an hungered and was left to be tempted of the devil" (Matt. 4:1 – 2, JST, emphasis added).
The three ingredients to a vision quest include: solitude, wilderness, and fasting. The goal of these items taken together is to affect a complete disconnect from the world of man—the world of the flesh and of Babylon—in order to provide a more complete connection to the world of spirit, or, in other words, the world as God created it.
"No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?" (Matt. 6:26 – 27).
Joseph Smith explained that God may choose to 'appear' for physical encounters in one of two places: either a consecrated edifice, such as a temple, or otherwise in the wilderness:
"The keys are certain signs & words by which false spirits & personages may be detected from true ones—which keys cannot be revealed to the Elders until the Temple is completed. The rich can only get them in the Temple, but the poor may get them on the mountain top as did Moses.... No one can truly say he knows God until he has handled something" ("Discourse, 1 May 1842, as Reported by Willard Richards," p. 94, The Joseph Smith Papers, grammar modernized).
In the wilderness, man, the handiwork of God, is no longer the "master" of his domain but he is made keenly aware of his dependence upon God and interdependence with nature, God's other handiwork. Wild places—fashioned by God alone as their supreme architect and designer, and untouched by man and unspoiled by sin—can of themselves exude holiness to the LORD:
"Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro his father in law, the priest of Midian: and he led the flock to the backside of the desert, and came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb. And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him.... And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground" (Exo. 3:1 – 2, 5).
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