The flowering desert

I once had the chance to visit the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. It’s one of the driest places on earth. Some areas of the desert can go years, or even decades, without rain. The landscape looks more like something you’d expect on the surface of Mars than on earth.

What struck me most was the silence. It was a silence you could almost hear. There were no birds, no rustling trees. No sounds of water. No sounds of modern civilization – no motors or engines or human voices humming in the background.

There was, though, a sense of expectation. Of possibility. And I learned later that every so often – maybe once a year, maybe once a decade – every so often, it actually does rain in the desert. And when it rains, that empty landscape bursts into bloom. Wildflowers grow everywhere. Blankets of brilliant color stretch across the usually barren sand. Locals call it the desierto florido. The flowering desert.

The seeds were there all along, hidden in the dust. Waiting.

I thought of that image as I read the Prophet Isaiah this week. “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing.”

Isaiah’s words put a name to a promise that feels impossible. Isaiah insists that that promise is already underway. Hidden, perhaps, but at work even in the dust.

Isaiah is writing to a people in exile, cut off from their home, despairing for the future. He’s writing to a people who know something about deserts, both literal and metaphorical.

But still he says, “Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear!’ Here is your God.”

It’s a call to believe that what seems lifeless may still hold life. To believe not only that God is coming, but to hope that God might already be at work.

But there is a sense of the fantastical to Isaiah’s dream. “The eyes of the blind shall be opened,

and the ears of the deaf unstopped; … the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert.”

It’s a dream of more than just rainfall in a dry land. It’s a dream of a world transformed. It’s a beautiful vision, but it’s also distant, almost mythic. It’s not quite ours to touch.

But then Mary turns Isaiah’s dream into something concrete. Something possible.

She doesn’t speak in metaphor. She sings of what hope looks like in the real world. Not someday. But now. Not somewhere else. But here.

“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; * for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant. From this day all generations will call me blessed: *the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.”

“He has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, * and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, *and the rich he has sent away empty.”

That the lowly be lifted. That the proud be scattered. That the hungry be fed. That mercy be the measure of all that we do.

Her vision isn’t supernatural. It’s not impossible. It’s difficult. Costly. And therefore, often avoided.

A flowering desert might astonish us, but it doesn’t ask much from us. Mary’s song does.

Mary’s hope is concrete. It challenges us. It dares to believe the world doesn’t have to stay the way it is.

It’s a beautiful thing to dream of a world where deserts bloom. It’s even more beautiful – and harder – to work for a world where the hungry are fed and the lowly are lifted up.

That’s the world Mary sang of. That’s the world Jesus was born into. And it’s the world he came to shape. He’s the flowering desert in human form, healing what’s broken, calling the weary to rest, feeding, forgiving, unsettling the powerful with his presence. The Gospels show us this again and again: how the authorities watched him with suspicion, how his very existence threatened the order they’d built. Jesus didn’t topple thrones with violence. He toppled thrones by loving the wrong people, by refusing to draw the lines others demanded of him, by eating with the excluded, by insisting that the last would be first.

But even now, so much still feels dry. So much still feels unfinished. The hungry still go without. The lowly still wait to be lifted. The powerful still cling to their thrones. We live in the gap between Mary’s song and its fulfillment—between the promise Jesus embodied and the world we wake up to each morning.

The season of Advent is a season of waiting—but waiting for something. Waiting with hearts tuned towards the promise of Isaiah – and Mary. Advent is a time for the steady, faithful work of holding space for hope in a world not yet whole.

Tending to hope requires real work of us. It’s choosing to notice where life is stirring even when the landscape around us looks barren. It’s the small, deliberate choice to act as if the prophetic visions of Mary and Isaiah are already taking root. When you pause to truly see the people you interact with every day, when you speak to them not as transactions but as people worthy of dignity, you’re scattering seeds. When you share your table with someone the world overlooks, you’re watering ground that looks barren. When you refuse to let cynicism define your family’s conversation around a dinner table, you’re tending soil.

So let’s keep scattering seeds, seeds that remain in the ground even when we can’t see them.

Because even when the silence presses in, the desert never forgets how to bloom. And neither does God.