Chasing Epiphanies

In just under 36 hours, I will be piled into a rental van, headed west to New Mexico. My destination: The Monastery of Christ in the Desert. The reason: As an I-term class, my professor, Dr. Hulitt Gloer, makes a yearly visit to this secluded Benedictine monastery along with a small group of students. The class is called "Wilderness Spirituality," and through our interaction with the resident monks, with each other, and through reading of several works on prayer, the desert mystics, monastic traditions, and the like, we are brought communally to an understanding of this age-old (from the beginning of Scripture) tradition of meeting/hearing from God in the wilderness.
I am both excited, anticipating the journey and the week-long stay, as well as nervous. There is a significant amount of apprehension within me right now as I prepare for the trip. I have recently noticed I only count hours when I am uneasy about something, anticipating it with a mixture of joy and fear.
I have been looking forward to this class for about a year now (that is when I had to get on the waiting list to make sure I secured myself a spot for this year's trip). I am extremely intrigued by monastic lifestyle, as well as the supplemental things I am reading about, such as fixed-hour prayer, lectio divina, and hearing from God in and through wilderness surroundings.
However, I have found, to my chagrin, that in the past I end up disappointed by things into which I place too much hope. What I mean is, often I trust that a certain event, trip, or meeting with someone will produce a penitent redirection within me - that such a thing would inspire me, immerse me in epiphany. It is the equivalent of those cinematic moments in which the protagonist takes a lonely walk on the beach, spies a swooping seagull or pelican, or perhaps, if the film has no shame, a leaping dolphin just off-shore, and in this glorious moment, from this momentously solemn walk, he or she realizes the essential purpose of life, and forevermore lives in this manner, to the chiming bells of continual happiness. Give me a break ...
I find it hard to believe these moments when they transpire in movies. So why ... why ... do I believe they will happen to me in my real life, in the here and now? Perhaps an even more uncomfortable question is, why do I feel I need these moments? I am not denying that right now, in my life, I feel a deep, desperate need for spiritual renewal (refreshment, redirection ... call it what you will). Two years of seminary can wreak havoc on your mental and spiritual equilibrium. As a friend once warned me before I left for Truett, "It ain't Bible camp." I never thought it was.
I'm glad it is hard, this trying to find mental and spiritual balance in the midst of learning so very much. This struggle is good - it makes me feel like this balance I desire is worth fighting for, searching for, like Proverbs encourages in chapter 2. And most of the time I don't mind feeling on edge; I think we all need to stand precariously on the ledge for a time, if only to make eventual security feel actually that: secure. I would assume most of my friends, unless I wear my heart too high on my sleeve, have no idea all this is going on inside me. Then again, I suspect these feelings are going on inside a lot of us.

And so, the Monastery trip ... I am very wary of putting too much stock into it, hoping for some epiphanal moment out there in that New Mexico canyon. It would be nice, I won't lie. I would love to experience something like taking a long walk at sunset, the sandstone cliffs my horizon, when suddenly I look up through desperate eyes to see, soaring magnificently above me, a mighty eagle with a twinkle in its eye, and then, softly but unignorably in my mind, there sounds the voice of James Earl Jones or someone else with a god-like pitch, and he quotes Isaiah 40:28-31, and tears well up in my eyes, and the next thing you know, I am cured of all my internal shortcomings, I am free of all my inner demons. Wow!
Such things, though, do not happen, at least not in the way our imaginations choreograph them. They are much more subtle, much deeper beneath the surface. Epiphanies (that is, the good ones - the ones that last) do not come in a flash like a rumbling freight train, but rather like an old, wide river that flows so slowly you can hardly tell it is moving at all. And it has been flowing for an eternity - has always been there, and shall always be.
"Take me to the river," I suppose, is my prayer for this trip. I hope that you will pray this for me, whether you know me or not. In a way, you will be praying it for yourselves as well.

The Chapel at Christ in the Desert Monastery

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Yahweh said, "Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of Yahweh, for Yahweh is about to pass by." Then a great and powerful wind tore the mounatins apart and shattered the rocks before Yahweh, but Yahweh was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but Yahweh was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but Yahweh was not in the fire. And after the fire came a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. Then a voice said to him, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" - 1st Kings 19:11-13