Why offer a retreat about contemplation and why offer it in Death Valley?

Having created and led A Desert Experience for a decade, Fred explains:

After 30 years of active ministry in the Church, I am increasingly convinced that the "conversion" the Church says is necessary for every Christian is ultimately a conversion from illusion to reality. I and others believe that cultivating a contemplative disposition is the key to the authentic conversion of the heart. Contemplation teaches us how to strip away illusion and to see the real. In my view, there is no better way to be liberated than to go through this kind of transformation.

This is why A Desert Experience is so important. It focuses not on what to see but on how to see. This also is why the desert is the least inadequate place to do a retreat centered on contemplation and transformation.

Jesus did not go to the synagogue after his baptism; he went to the desert. He did not take Peter, James, and John to a classroom to witness his transfiguration; he took them up a mountain. Jesus did not preach the Beatitudes in Jerusalem; he did it on the plain. He did not heal Lazarus in his home before he died; he raised him from a dead sleep in a tomb cut from the rock.

Transformation in the Gospel always seems to happen in nature. Although we believe that God is speaking to us through all of Creation, it is in the desert where we can hear God best, because there the distractions are few. The sands, the flats, the mountains, and the canyons can teach us contemplation better than any master or any catechism!

We are inspired by a number of spiritual leaders and teachers who have embraced the practice of contemplation. For example:

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Contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom—freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.
-- Archbishop Rowan Williams Former leader of the Anglican Church

The function of contemplation in all its forms is to penetrate illusion and help us to touch reality.
-- Parker J. Palmer American author, educator, and activist

Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life.… It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that source.
-- Thomas Merton From New Seeds of Contemplation

Contemplation is about seeing, but a kind of seeing that is much more than mere looking because it also includes recognizing and thus appreciating. The contemplative mind does not tell us what to see but teaches us how to see what we behold.
-- Richard Rohr American Franciscan friar-priest, writer, and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation