“What distinguishes the Christian exercise of silence in prayer is the “naked intent” of the person who, while empty of thoughts, nonetheless reaches blindly for the God who cannot be seen or even named. What keeps contemplative prayer from being privatized, disembodied, and free-floating is its anchorage in the repetition of the psalms, lectio divina, the sacramentality of the Mass, and the stabilizing influence of community.



What the desert teaches is a radical letting-go of the thinking-experiencing-managing self, so as to be content with God alone, a God without adjectives, without comforting signs of presence, so that at last one learns truly to delight in nothing. This nothing may be disclosed by the Christian habitus as “Something,” as the Holy Trinity hidden in light inaccessible from every effort to grasp its mystery. But the naming of the mystery is no longer an anxious concern to those who’ve been to the desert. Naming implies a control the wilderness no longer allows.”

Belden C. Lane “The Solace of Fierce Landscapes” [Oxford University Press, 2007]



“In the tradition of Kathleen Norris, Terry Tempest Williams, and Thomas Merton, “The Solace of Fierce Landscapes” explores the impulse that has drawn seekers into the wilderness for centuries and offers eloquent testimony to the healing power of mountain silence and desert indifference.

Interweaving a memoir of his mother’s long struggle with Alzheimer’s and cancer, meditations on his own wilderness experience, and illuminating commentary on the Christian via negativa–a mystical tradition that seeks God in the silence beyond language–Lane rejects the easy affirmations of pop spirituality for the harsher but more profound truths that wilderness can teach us. “There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul. They heal, as well as mirror, the brokeness we find within.” It is this apparent paradox that lies at the heart of this remarkable book: that inhuman landscapes should be the source of spiritual comfort. Lane shows that the very indifference of the wilderness can release us from the demands of the endlessly anxious ego, teach us to ignore the inessential in our own lives, and enable us to transcend the “false self” that is ever-obsessed with managing impressions. Drawing upon the wisdom of St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhardt, Simone Weil, Edward Abbey, and many other Christian and non-Christian writers, Lane also demonstrates how those of us cut off from the wilderness might “make some desert” in our lives.

Written with vivid intelligence, narrative ease, and a gracefulness that is itself a comfort, “The Solace of Fierce Landscapes” gives us not only a description but a “performance” of an ancient and increasingly relevant spiritual tradition.”

http://www.amazon.com/The-Solace-Fierce-Landscapes-Spirituality/dp/0195315855

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