The desert has to lead us, at last, from aloneness with God (in a moment of great and silent emptiness) to community with others, from the loss of the fragile self to the discovery of a new identity binding us to the world. The apophatic moment, if genuine, must ever result in a recommitment to speech and engagement, a renewal of kataphatic energy. Desert attentiveness and desert indifference lead necessarily to desert love.
