‘The desert in the city’, I repeated over and over to myself, looking out of the window, my thoughts reaching to the distant origin of this word ‘desert’ which had been laid on my heart at the best moment of my life. I thought back to nights in the Sahara, to the sand-dunes, to all the paths I had trodden, to the search for intimacy with God, to the memorable stars which decorated so discreetly the sweetness of the African nights, deep symbol as they were of the nights in which my faith was immersed and in which I felt so well and so safe.

The real desert, the desert of sand and stars, had been my first love, and I would never have left it had not obedience claimed me from afar.

‘Brother Carlo, you have discovered the absolute of God, now you must discover the absolute of man.’

So off I had gone in search of men.

I was thoroughly disorientated and it took me some time to recover my equilibrium and deep joy.

But then God caused me to realize that there was no privilege place where He lived but that everywhere was the ‘place’ whe He lived and that you could find Him anywhere.

The Desert In the City

“I must create the desert in my own life,’ I said to myself as I gradually moved away from the stability of my solitude and walled
towards a totally different world.

But this was not enough.
It was necessary for me to experience [the city] in order to see that even the city had the potential of the desert and even sky scrapers could become luminous like diamonds of desert stars.

All you had to do was to turn them around in the darkness of faith until the lights looked like stars.
‘I can but try,’ I said to my young student.

‘I had decided not to write any more books. .. But the theme of “the desert in the city pleases me. It corrects in me, and in anyone who, like me, is too in love with solitude, the urge to want to flee.” The temptation is so easy, especially for the violent and lazy.

I remembered then that even Sarah’s withered womb and Abraham’s old age can give birth to a son as beautiful as Isaac.

Carlo Carretto (1910–1988) was an Italian Catholic layman, member of the Little Brothers of Jesus, and spiritual writer best known for his deeply personal reflections on prayer, solitude, and the presence of God in ordinary life. His writings helped bring the spirituality of the desert fathers and Charles de Foucauld to a wide modern audience.

Note. When a few times in the 1980s I corresponded with Carlo Carretto he always responded to me—- in Italian which I could not read! SH.