A Feast in the Desert
A Feature Review of
God in the Desert: A Spiritual Theology of Wilderness in the Old Testament
Noel Forlini Burt
Paperback: IVP Academic, 2026
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Reviewed by Maria L. Henderson
“Who is the God I encounter in the desert?” Noel Forlini Burt asks at the beginning of this journey through key wilderness texts in the Old Testament. She claims that this “is the great question throughout time for people of faith” (2). This question focuses a book that ranges from explorations of characters like Hagar and Jacob to deep dives into key Hebrew words, from the wisdom of the desert mothers and fathers to recent voices such as Henri Nouwen and Richard Rohr. These travels through wilderness touch upon many of the important themes of spiritual formation – desire and discernment, purgation and attachment to God – alongside reflections on spiritual practices from confession to contemplation. Throughout the journey we are in the hands of a thoughtful, practiced guide who approaches both the texts and the challenges of our world with a spiritual director’s listening ear and probing questions.
Forlini Burt makes the depth of her biblical scholarship accessible while adding a wide-ranging understanding of the way Christians have approached the process of being conformed to Christ throughout the centuries. Each chapter explores one of the places people in the Old Testament encounter God in the wilderness. The connections she draws between these texts and contemporary issues such as the “ideological desert” (19) many of us experience in a polarized country and church are perceptive. She notes that Hagar’s “act of naming God [as the God who sees] is itself an act of resistance” against her oppressive treatment at the hands of Abram and Sarai, and does not hesitate to ask the difficult question: “Is the God of the oppressor the same God of the oppressed?” (28).
Just as we’re about to congratulate ourselves for our liberating view of God, she plunges us into questions of social location and empathy, challenging us to read from the viewpoint of those unlike ourselves and to query the hidden realities of prejudice lurking within our own hearts. The desert thus becomes a place of repentance, where the spiritual discipline of confession appears particularly suited to our time. “We would do well to cast ourselves into an inner wilderness through the spiritual discipline of confession. Doing so is one way in which we cooperate with the same God who sees the Hagars of the world and asks us to do better by them” (35-6).
Forlini Burt takes her meditations one step further, drawing a connection to acedia, the mindset the ancient desert tradition identified as the “noonday demon,” finding its source in “doubting God’s ability or willingness to forgive us” (37). The ease with which she moves from biblical story and theological insight to spiritual practice and the prickly questions of faith and faithfulness here and now makes the book both an invitation to draw closer to the Source and a challenge to our preconceived notions of comfort. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a seeing God and to recognize that we are the ones who have not seen God rightly at all” (39), she writes in the conclusion to the Hagar chapter. We feel the discomfort of the desert, its inherent dangers, its ability to pull the rug out from under cherished beliefs, its tendency to confront us with a God who is wilder than we had imagined.
Her engagement with the biblical texts stands in contrast to many books on spiritual formation that select texts to support a theme and rarely delve past the surface of the story. Instead, she approaches the stories with the ear and heart of a spiritual director, asking the questions that drive us deeper into the narrative and offering conceptual frames drawn from spiritual guides of the past. The bewildering encounter with God’s holiness on Mt. Sinai is framed with a discussion of liminality, the state of disorientation that occurs between captivity in Egypt and the freedom of the promised land, in which she also highlights the role of desire. “Desire is at once the catalyst for liminality, our companion in liminality, and the gift that emerges out of liminality. … In the preamble to the giving of the Ten Commandments, Yahweh expresses his own desire to take the people for himself” (90). The ensuing discussion of darkness and unknowing as Israel stands before the overpowering presence of God on the mountain leads to quotes from Gregory of Nyssa as a representative of the apophatic (wordless) tradition of mysticism.
Spiritual direction comes into focus in her discussion of Deuteronomy 8, where Moses retells the story of the wilderness to his people, “helping them reframe their story from a narrative of scarcity to a narrative of abundance and hope” (113). Our functional theologies are revealed in wilderness, where “the traumatic core of the wilderness experience” (115) has to be reconciled with God’s provision and care. She describes Moses’s role as that of a spiritual director, helping the people to hear their own story as “honest reporting” while also pointing toward deeper truths revealed when we “allow God to be the Voice coming alongside us to narrate our stories” (116-118). Forlini Burt points us toward the view from the end – eschatology – that helps us make sense of both the biblical story and our own lives, including the bewildering experiences of desert hardship that are present in both.
Each chapter provides a way station in the desert, where she helps us meet the God who escapes our neat definitions and proves to be more gracious and loving than we would have known without the perils of the wilderness. The book is an invitation to a spiritual formation that challenges easy answers and pat formulas. Anyone interested in formation or accompanying others on this path would do well to wrestle with God in the Desert.
Maria Henderson
Maria L. Henderson is a writer and spiritual director based in Santa Barbara, California. She is trained to lead others through the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and is currently working on a D.Min. focusing on the spiritual formation of White Christians for the work of pursuing racial justice. She writes at mariahenderson.substack.com
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