Belden C. Lane - The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

Praise for The Solace of Fierce Landscapes

Lane, a Presbyterian minister teaching theology at a Catholic University, makes some of the rich tradition of the Christian people available to us in a uniquely powerful way because he has allowed it to live in his own life and has an artists ability to make that experience present to us. This is theology at its most fruitful best and an exquisitely beautiful read.The late M. Basil Pennington, O.C.S.O., St. Josephs Abbey, Spencer, Massachusetts

This is a beautifully written book in which the author describes and unfolds the mutually illuminating interaction in himself between his profound sensitivity to place, especially the hard places of this earth, and his experience of one of the hardest of lifes losses. Lane uses his wide and deep knowledge of the mystical tradition to interpret this experience in such a way that the reader is enlightened and encouraged. Reading this book is an experience of the human engagement with the Mystery of God as lived by the author.Sandra M. Schneiders, Professor of New Testament and Christian Spirituality, The Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley

Belden Lane is a storyteller. Here he tells the story of the relationships between inner and outer wilderness. The landscape is an integrant of selfhood. To be in the desert is to want somethingwater, promise of exodus. But there is no replenishment of these desires. The imagination and the self are transfiguredgiven illuminationwhen the desert has its way. In the emptiness, the Voice says, stay with me; talk with me, not about me or you. This is my body, along with the echoes from yonder mountain. This is what Belden Lane teaches us.Richard E. Wentz, Professor of Religious Studies, Arizona State University, author of John Williamson Nevin, American Theologian

Pushed by God, deserts, and death to the limits of human life, the spiritual seeker is relieved of worry over her own anxious egothe things that ignore us save usand the reader, in turn, comes away soothed by a fine illustration of the intimate connection there can be between abstract ideas and the daunting realities of life. In the vast desert of pop spirituality, Lanes book is an oasis.Kirkus Reviews

Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

BELDEN C. LANE

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Copyright 1998 by Beldon C. Lane

First published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 1998
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www.oup.com

First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 2007
ISBN 978-0-19-531585-1

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Lane, Belden C., 1943
The solace of fierce landscapes:
exploring desert and mountain
spirituality / Belden C. Lane
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-511682-8
1. Spiritual lifeChristianity.
2. Wilderness (Theology).
3. DesertsReligious aspectsChristianity.
4. MountainsReligious aspectsChristianity.
5. Lane, Belden C., 1943
I. Title.
BV4501.2.L31834 1998 248.4dc21
98 10842

Pages xi-xii constitute an extension of the copyright page.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

I have to acknowledge, before anything else, my debt to the landscape itselfto those empty places surrounding Mount Sinai, Ghost Ranch, and Christ in the Desert Abbey that have been life-giving for me in the process of this work. These are places increasingly at risk, threatened by the expansion of developers, tourists, even occasional retreatants like myself. The ecological concern of this book is not often emphasized in what follows, but one could argue that the apophatic tradition has (and must) support the preservation of fierce landscapes in the process of extolling the solace they provide. These are places most important for what isnt there. To those devoid of imagination, wrote Aldo Leopold in his Sand County Almanac, a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.

Books are written out of a long loneliness, sustained and encouraged at times by communities of hope. The groups of support to which this book is indebted, through various stages of its growth, include the third-floor residents of the Colonial Health Care Center in Saint Louis, Missouri, the Dominican community of the cole Biblique in Jerusalem, the Benedictine community of Christ in the Desert Monastery near Abiquiu, New Mexico, the Presbyterian community of Ghost Ranch down the Chama River Valley from the Benedictines at Christ in the Desert, and the Jesuit community of Saint Louis University.

Scholars who have offered criticism and encouragement along the way include Bernard McGinn of the University of Chicago, Philip Sheldrake of the Cambridge Theological Federation, Regina Siegfried, A.S.C. of the Aquinas Institute, and most particularly my friend Douglas Burton-Christie of Loyola-Marymount University. While their insights have helped immeasurably in writing and revising the book, I alone am responsible for its faults. Bob Raines of Kirkridge, Steven Berry of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, and David Douglas of Santa Fe have also helped through their invitations to participate in seminars and workshops on desert and mountain spirituality.

Friends, students, and graduate assistants who have offered insight and assistance along the way are too many to number. I am grateful to Saint Louis University and the chairperson of the Department of Theological Studies, Bill Shea, for support in allowing time for writing, and to Gin OMeara, R.C.S.J. and Joan Chamberlain, trusted guides through the deep canyons of the soul. Cynthia Read at Oxford University Press, along with Jeannette Batz and Ann Weems, offered invaluable editorial assistance.

Finally, to my children, Kate and John, and most especially my wife, Patricia, I give thanks for their loving me most when I least knew how to love in return. In the apophatic tradition, the one about whom the least is said is always most important. Such is the case with this woman whos shared my life these last thirty years. The book belongs at last to my mother and father, Jane E. Lane and Edward H. Lane, who through their dying offered me most of what they had to teach about living.

The Two-Headed Calf, from The Hocus Pocus of the Universe, by Laura Gilpin. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.