The Solace of Fierce Landscapes

(Right) Near Cortez, Colorado. Ute Mountains in background.




(Below) Navajo Nation, north of Rock Point, Arizona.


The beginning part of my sabbatical (and something that will carry all the way through and beyond) is built around provocative concepts in a book by Belden Lane entititled The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality. This book relates the emotional and intellectual journey of spirituality to three aspects of creation: desert, mountain, and cloud. He finds these three landscapes as seminal to the spiritual journey in the Bible, in the history of the church, and in his own experience.

He is building on the Christian apophatic tradition (primarily of the desert fathers and mothers), the via negativa, that “rejects all analogies of God as ultimately inadequate.” [p. 4] Paradoxically, the tradition views God as beyond any kind of language or place, and yet it uses the three spare and lean images above to suggest metaphorically the most profound and ultimately indescribable human experiences of both joy and pain. [Ibid.]

The overall spiritual movement Lane describes is from “abandonment of control and acceptance of God’s love in absolute, unmitigated grace.” [p. 6]
More specifically, it follows the classic pattern of Christian spirituality as movement through the three stages of purgation (to be made free of something unwanted), illumination, and union, corresponding in order to the three landscapes of desert, mountain, and cloud. I begin with the first part, purgation (desert).

Desert is the place of weeping. In its vastness and desolation, dangerous as it is to human life, we realize our lack of control. It is the place of sorrow and grief, as its barrenness reminds us of our losses and broken dreams. In the desert we are stripped naked of all our pretensions. We are vulnerable, bewildered, feeling abandoned. There is no protection from loneliness, isolation, depression, confusion, emptiness, meaninglessness, fear, and ultimately death. Grief overwhelms us and opens us to God, the only one who can quench our thirst.

Abraham and Sarah wandered through the desert, not knowing where they were to go, only trusting that God had a plan for them. The Hebrews wandered for forty years in the desert, at times trusting God to deliver them from their suffering, more often doubting and disbelieving. Jesus spent forty days in the desert, fighting all manner of human temptation in preparation for being a relentless and undeterred follower of “the way” of God.

I have had many desert experiences, but two stand out as the most profound and painful for me. One was the year after my first wife, Pauline, died. I felt like I had been dropped in the middle of a deserted planet, not knowing which way to turn, seeing no oasis to step toward. Like the Psalmist I called out over and over gain, “How long, O Lord! Now long!”

Another was a little over a year ago when my daughter became severely depressed. I could taste the fear, having no choice but to admit that I was powerless to protect her from death. I was forced to give up my desire to control events. I felt totally lost and bewildered, and had no choice but to do what is so painfully difficult for us humans to do: to trust her to God.

What have been your desert experiences? What have you learned from them?

In the next blog we will discuss the relationship of desert to mountain.