What is interesting about Dominic’s hymn is that it suggests a parallel between ‘wilderness’ and ‘routine’, which in fact may be very full and varied – but nevertheless leaves us feeling equally disconnected and directionless. If we haven’t actually experienced the physical desert places such as Moses wandered through, we tend to imagine them simply as empty and barren. It’s a feeling too often accompanied by a lesser or greater degree of depression.Īnd that, as Dominic Grant’s hymns hints, is as true of an active, busy life as of one that appears more obviously cast adrift.

Despite having a wife and family now in his life, there is about Moses a veil of inadequacy, of failure to do anything really useful with his life.

He is safe, not enslaved or fearful like his Hebrew brothers and sisters in Egypt but he appears dislocated and without purpose. For Moses, surely, had found himself in a desert place long before he led his father-in-law’s sheep toward Horeb, ‘the mountain of God’.Īn exile in Midian, he had named his firstborn son tellingly: Gershom (suggesting something like ‘sojourner there’), “because I have become an alien in a foreign land”. ( Exodus 3: 1-12) Not what side of bed he got out of, but what kind of place he was in his deepest self. You have to wonder what mood Moses was in the day he came across an undiminishing burning bush in a desert place. You can also download this article as a PDF

Reproduced on StF+ with kind permission of the Methodist Recorder. This article was first published in the Methodist Recorder’s Hymns and Spirituality series, 2015-16. ‘O Watcher in the wilderness’ by Dominic Grant ( Singing the Faith 667)

The Watcher by W.J. Davies