I used to want to go to Burning Man

By Elizabeth Prata

It’s Burning Man week in Black Rock Desert.

Burning man is a free-for all party in the remote and forbidding Black Rock desert of northern Nevada. For the last 35 years, folks who want to get away from it all, create some art, hang out far from the prying eyes of society or simply to party, have been attending this informal and rapidly growing libertine and eclectic gathering.

They keep going to Burning Man so as to indulge the flesh.

The top two tenets of Burning Man as stated are:

“Radical self-reliance—” Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.”

“Radical self-expression—”Participants at the Burning Man event in the Black Rock Desert are encouraged to express themselves in a number of ways through various art forms and projects. The event is clothing-optional and public nudity is common, though not practiced by the majority.”

There is no plumbing, no running water, no structure and no societally normal limits on, well, anything. Participants return to regular society after the week-long party is over filthy, exhausted, sunburned, and satiated.

The climax to the event is the torching of the effigy of the man, hence the name Burning Man. Each year the ‘set’ of and around the man gets bigger. This year’s theme is Waking Dreams, exploring dream energy individually and in community as collective.

The roots of the festival were the brain child of Larry Harvey who attended a few solstice ceremonies on Baker Beach in San Francisco back in the 1980s. The culmination of the solstice festival was a bonfire, where a wooden man was burned. When the original organizers stopped putting on the pagan festival, Harvey developed the idea and ran with it. Harvey says that the he was unaware that a wicker man was a large human-shaped wicker statue allegedly used in Celtic paganism for human sacrifice by burning it in effigy. Accordingly, rather than allow the name “Wicker Man” to become the name of the ritual, he started using the name “Burning Man”. (Wikipedia)

So as these things always do, it has pagan idolatrous roots.

The penchant for man to collect around an object and idolize it goes far back. It goes back to the Tower of Babel. It even goes back to the Golden Calf of the Hebrews, just released from slavery.

At two points in the early Bible record, God wanted His people scattered, in Genesis 9:7 after the flood, which the people did not do. And secondly at the Tower of Babel, where they had collected together in the desert, erected a pagan monolith to worship. (Genesis 11:8). This time He confused the languages and they did scatter eventually.

Burning man is said to be “the biggest party on the planet.” I believe it. Left alone to seek self-expression, the unsaved flesh will always gravitate to sin. Always. And it is no different in the Black Rock Desert the last week of August.

The horrifically sinful roots of Burning Man are incontrovertible. And before I was saved, I wanted to go there in the worst way.

I wasn’t saved until I was 43 years old. That left a lot of adulthood to play around and let the flesh have its day. Yet I was a study in contrasts. My flesh would seek freedom and licentiousness (which is what ‘self-expression’ is all about) but whenever I’d encounter it or have an opportunity to indulge its worst excesses, my conscience would be shocked and I’d back away.

Burning Man was too difficult and too remote for a Mainer to attend.

For a long while I was jealous of Burning Man, thinking THAT was the place to be. I wanted to see the art. I wanted to look at the large-scale installations. Yet, saying you’re going to Burning Man for the art is the same as saying you read Playboy for the articles. If you want art, go to MoMA, or any public park in the United States to see large scale art installations. What you are really wanting to see is the spectacle of unrestrained flesh, and the unpredictability of how far the unbridled ones with a seared conscience will go.

Solomon knew the flesh, once indulged, leaves a person feeling guilty, hollow, and a little sick and embarrassed. I am grateful it never came about that I went there.

The inhibition the conscience naturally levels makes a person intuitively understand that it is NOT about freedom and self-expression. It is about indulging wanton passions which are frowned upon by society, and for good reason. They are sins against God and there is nothing new under the sun. Not even the sun of the Black Rock desert. Solomon said of the vanity of self-indulgence, in Ecclesiastes 2:1, & 10-11,

“I said in my heart, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure; enjoy yourself.” But behold, this also was vanity. … And whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.”

At Burning Man in the remote desert, there is nothing new under the sun, except guilt and shame.

Thanks the gracious Lord that he gave us the Holy Spirit to indwell us. After we repent unto salvation, He helps us restrain this hot wind of lust and revelry. He instills in us good desires. He helps us re-orient our heart to the things above and not the things of the flesh. Our Lord eternally satisfies.

Jesus always satisfies the eternal longing that sends people to places like Burning Man. After the Man is burned and the people return to life as normal…they will feel the desert wind leaking from their hands, evaporating even as they begin dreaming of the next time. Come to Jesus and be satiated with Him.

“The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.” (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14)