So, what is the wilderness to you? Is it a place of danger or a place of safety? Is it a place of fear and anxiety or a place of wellbeing and renewal? Is it a place to flee from and escape, or a place to run to and embrace? How do we experience the wilderness?
The first Rachel and I heard about Nathan’s Killarney Wilderness adventure was at 9am on that Saturday morning when a tired but excited Nathan was dropped off at home and came bounding into the house, hospital bands still on his arms, and exclaiming that he had been in the Sudbury hospital last night but was all fine now. He proceeded to tell us the wild and scary story that he just shared with all of you. As parents, no matter what age your children, a part of you still worries about them, even as mature and responsible adults. It was probably a good thing that Nathan’s phone was pretty well dead and he couldn’t let us know earlier. Finding out after the crisis was over and everything was fine, was easier on us parent types. The Momma Bear in Rachel would have had us drive to Sudbury in the middle of the night! Three weeks later, I was on my own Killarney canoe trip. We did one of our tougher wilderness trips, which included, among others, a tough 3 plus hours, up and down 3-kilometre portage into Three Narrows Lake, two gorgeous days there of only seeing one other person, and then the return portage on the other side of the Lake – the aptly named infamous Pig portage – a 1 and a half kilometer straight up and down portage. The Pig portage is a small section of the 78 Kilometer La Cloche trail, and the very spot that Nathan and his hiking friends had hiked just before the one friend got lost and things started going off the rails. It was a bit sobering to struggle up and down the Pig portage knowing that. It had me reflecting on the wilderness and its place in my life. As you know, there is a huge part of me that loves being in the wilderness. I do a couple of interior canoe trips each year with two different groups of friends, and Rachel and I spend our vacations camping at Provincial and National Parks. I have even done a solo overnight wilderness kayak trip the last 4 summers. The wilderness calls to me, draws me in. I love its ruggedness, its remoteness, its unspoiled rawness, its absolute beauty, and the chance to get away from the demands of everyday life and be renewed. It is a sacred and holy space for me, and a place for spiritual renewal – where I meet God.
And yet… the wilderness can be risky, unpredictable, lonely, and yes, dangerous. You can get yourself in trouble. Help can be far away. You have to rely on yourself. Things can get out of control. Nathan’s story is pretty dramatic, and I am so grateful it turned out okay. In all my years, I have not had too many scary experiences, but a few that caused me to pause. Janet will remember the spirituality canoe trip she and her sister Nancy and niece Mary Ann joined with myself and Tanya Dyck Steinman leading to Massassauga Provincial Park – one of the tamer wilderness canoe areas. But, you can’t control the weather. We had just finished the first easy short portage, when a huge thunder and lightning storm came over us and soaked us and made the lakes a scary place to contemplate navigating. We were worried as leaders. We changed the whole route and grabbed a very near by campsite, soaked and setting up camp in pouring rain and wind. A few hours later, when we thought all was fine now, a huge clap of thunder and instantaneous flash of lightning, the biggest of my life, startled us and made us all jump. The weather and the trip did improve after that, but you realized how vulnerable you can be out there. Years earlier, I did several two day canoe trips with my three young kids, ending up back at our campsite and trailer where Rachel was enjoying her break from all of us. On one trip down the Mattawa River system to Samuel de Champlain Provincial Park, we were three portages in, turned a sharp corner, and all of a sudden there were some rapids not marked on the map. We got twisted sideways and jammed between two rocks, and with all that water pressure I could not budge the canoe, as water started swamping the sides. Suddenly, there was a loud cracking sound of the canoe. Nathan, I can still see the utter terror on your face in my mind, and you probably of mine. I was able to jump out, drag the canoe through the rapids, get on shore, dump all the water, and find out that it was the jell coat or paint above the water line that had a missing jagged cut, but the Kevlar was intact and the canoe was fine. But I did imagine what could have happened to us out there, isolated for hours, me the only adult, with a broken canoe and no way forward or back. We didn’t see another person until 7pm when a little group paddled by our campsite a few lakes on. Samuel de Champlain has become our favourite provincial park, and a month ago large swaths of the park and camping area and all the trees were flattened by a sudden microburst storm – stranding 150 campers and their destroyed vehicles, trailers and tents for hours – fortunately no one was killed. We have felt that loss, and that danger. So, is the wilderness a place of danger or safety? Fear or renewal? Escape or embrace? Of course, we can ask all those questions about the emotional and spiritual wilderness experiences of our lives. I must admit, that when it comes to my personal inner life, I try to avoid the wilderness like the plague.
In today’s biblical story we find Hagar in the wilderness on two occasions. It is a fascinating story, and gives new perspectives on wilderness and on the workings of God. I want to delve deeper into the story, in 5 short scenes, drawing on the wisdom and the titles from the Prone to Wander book.
Scene 1 – Hagar Enslaved
The story of Hagar is a troubling one. She was a female slave in a time when females and slaves had absolutely no rights. It is unusual, and rather remarkable in the biblical witness, that we even hear her name – Hagar, meaning ‘to flee,’ or even ‘to drag away.’ Abram, who became Abraham was married to Sarai/Sarah, and she was barren in a time and culture when worth was determined by the ability to bare a child, particularly a male heir. So Abram took Hagar as another wife or mistress with which to have a child. Hagar had no agency or consent in this situation, and in our day, we might label this sexual assault. Once she was pregnant, Sarai was filled with contempt for Hagar and mistreats her even more harshly. Hagar finally flees to the wilderness, runs to the wilderness. As Joanna Harader writes ‘The wilderness seems like a better option than enslavement. The exposure to the elements, the thirst and potential starvation – it all seems preferable to the treatment she faces as Sarai’s slave…The wilderness, it seems, is not always a place of despair. It can be a place of freedom from the confines and abuses of society. Sometimes we choose the wilderness as a place of respite and refuge.’ (Prone to Wander, Herald Press, 2025, p.39). Danger or safety?
While our focus today is Hagar, a quick note on the other two main characters. Sarah does not come out looking good in these stories, even as we more often read some of the lovely stories of Sarah, and her laughter at the miraculous promise of a child at a very old age, and her delight in the birth of Isaac. She too is caught in societal expectations and bonds, and carries her own share of inner pain. We know that hurt people often hurt people. There is a whole story there we could explore from her perspective, on another day. Abraham seems more in the background to this story, and we can easily miss his complicity, but as Harader points out ‘The person with the greatest power in the system abdicates that power when it becomes inconvenient.’ (Ibid). There are questions to ask of Abraham too.
Scene 2 -Hagar names God
It is in the wilderness that Hagar first encounters God, in the form of an angel of the Lord, who finds her by a spring of water in the wilderness, and asks her ‘Where have you come from and where are you going?’, the kind of life question all of us could be asked in life. ‘I am running away.’ The advice feels problematic, wrong – go back into that awful situation. It is probably her only chance at survival around the birth of a baby. But she is also sent with a promise – that the birth will happen, and she will name this boy Ishmael – meaning ‘God will hear,’ and that he will be ‘a wild ass of a man, living at odds with all his kin.’ (verse 12) It doesn’t sound like a blessing, and yet to the ears of Hagar, might she hear that differently – this son will not be enslaved – better to live at odds, and be independent, than to submit to abuse or slavery. Blessings come in all shapes and sizes.
And then Hagar does something astonishing. She names God. You are El-Roy, meaning ‘God who sees,’ for ‘have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him.’ Yes, ‘God indeed sees the abuse Hagar has suffered and her desperate state, the dangers her child will face, but in naming God as the one who sees, Hagar calls God to be accountable for what is seen, to not turn a blind eye to suffering.’ (Ibid, p.42). This enslaved woman, with so little power, does one of the most powerful things in the whole Bible – she takes it upon herself to name God. Naming is a powerful thing. It is a claiming of power in a world that does not give her power.
Scene 3 – Hagar Cast Out
Fast forwards several years, until after Isaac has been born to Sarah and been weaned. The two boys are playing together, and Sarah’s jealously and anger hit hard – this is a potential rival to the inheritance and to the promises of God – and she convinces Abraham to banish Hagar and send her away, but not before God tells Abraham that a nation will also come from Ishmael. Hagar is sent away with some bread and a skin of water. Joanna Harader speculates about Hagar’s choices as she is sent away. Could she have potentially headed to the city or back to her original home in Egypt, either case, where she mostly likely would be enslaved again in some form? Did Hagar actually choose to head to the wilderness, to wander there, where at least she could do so on her own terms? Was it the best option of bad options, but at least a place she had been to alone before, with the potential to encounter God again? It is a sign of bravery and self-assuredness, as she writes, ‘a choosing of faith instead of fear.’ (Ibid, p.46).
Scene 4 – Hagar Encounters God
Soon the water had run out and Hagar was in a desperate place. She cannot see a way forward, and knows her son will die first. Hagar cannot bear to watch Ishmael’s suffering. She weeps uncontrollably. Nobody should have to watch their child die. We have a friend right now in London from Valleyview Mennonite whose 9 year old son was recently diagnosed with a highly aggressive malignant glioma brain tumour that has no long term cure, only some treatments to slow its growth and give him some time, with the hope he can maybe spend a little bit of time back at home from the hospital, with such an unknown and scary journey ahead. It has been agonizing reading her Caring Bridge blogs as a mother. She can identify with a Hagar in the wilderness, agonizing over a child. It is that Momma Bear instinct!
At the point of utter hopelessness, Hagar again hears the voice of God through an angel – ‘Don’t be afraid, God has heard our cries and the voice of your son…. God will make a great nation of him.’ God is the one who sees, El Roi – and now the God who hears. Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water, which may have been there all along, but unseen. The well water is renewable – it gives her and her son hope and life in the wilderness. They will survive and even thrive.
Scene 5 – Hagar Endures
The scriptures say that ‘God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow… and his mother got a wife for him from Egypt.’ (Gen 21:20-21) In Genesis 25, we read of his 12 sons, their own 12 tribes, who settle near the eastern border of Egypt, and lived in hostility towards all the tribes related to them… But they lived and thrived. The wilderness became a place of new life and opportunity. Harader writes ‘For those with structural advantages and power, “wilderness” tends to have negative connotations. But for those who are oppressed, the wilderness may not be such a scary place – perhaps not as frightening or dangerous as “civilized” society. The wilderness becomes Hagar’s safe place, her sacred space. It is where she finds refuge and where she meets God. It becomes her home. What might it mean for the wilderness to be our home? For Ishmael and Hagar, it means they are no longer enslaved. They have a new measure of power and control over their lives, over their bodies. They also have a new measure of responsibility for their own survival: they must provide their own food, shelter and protection.’ (Ibid, p.50). She continues a little later on ‘Sometimes in our own periods of disruption and discomfort, we suddenly realize that we are no longer disoriented and uncomfortable. Sometimes, when we live in the wilderness long enough, when we face its challenges and welcome its blessings, it transforms from wilderness to home right under our aching feet.’ (Ibid, p.51)
So back to our original question – What is wilderness to you? A place of danger or safety? Fear or renewal? Escape or embrace? Just maybe the story of Hagar can remind us that there can be hope within the wilderness experiences of our lives. It just may be where we encounter God, a God who sees and hears. Sometimes we may need to choose the wilderness, to help us let go of what has been unhealthy in our lives, and only through the wilderness arrive again at a place of home. The blessing prayer we will soon hear read by Bertha, ends with these words. ‘Please allow me to offer this blessing for your wilderness journey: May your wells be full. May your life be free. May your love be fierce. Amen.’ (Ibid, p.57)