The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

Author: Belden C. Lane
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199886326
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
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 mothers long struggle with Alzheimers 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.

The Solace of Fierce Landscapes

Author: Belden C. Lane
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195116823
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
"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."--Cover.

The Great Conversation

Author: Belden C. Lane
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190842679
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
In the face of climate change, species loss, and vast environmental destruction, Belden C. Lane's spiritually centered environmentalism suggests that we must look to teachers in nature to understand how to save ourselves. Pairing anecdotes of personal encounters with nature with the teachings of spiritual leaders from a range of religious traditions, this book invites us to participate once more in the great conversation among all creatures and the earth itself.

Lived Theology

Author: Charles Marsh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190630728
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
The lived theology movement is built on the work of an emerging generation of theologians and scholars who pursue research, teaching, and writing as a form of public discipleship, motivated by the conviction that theology can enhance lived experience. This volume--based on a two-year collaboration with the Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia--offers a series of illustrations and styles of lived theology, in conversation with other major approaches to the religious interpretation of embodied life.

Backpacking with the Saints

Author: Belden C. Lane
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199927812
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Book Description
Carrying only basic camping equipment and a collection of the world's great spiritual writings, Belden C. Lane embarks on solitary spiritual treks through the Ozarks and across the American Southwest. For companions, he has only such teachers as Rumi, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Thomas Merton, and as he walks, he engages their writings with the natural wonders he encounters--Bell Mountain Wilderness with Søren Kierkegaard, Moonshine Hollow with Thich Nhat Hanh--demonstrating how being alone in the wild opens a rare view onto one's interior landscape, and how the saints' writings reveal the divine in nature. The discipline of backpacking, Lane shows, is a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Just as the wilderness offered revelations to the early Desert Christians, backpacking hones crucial spiritual skills: paying attention, traveling light, practicing silence, and exercising wonder. Lane engages the practice not only with a wide range of spiritual writings--Celtic, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi Muslim--but with the fascination of other lovers of the backcountry, from John Muir and Ed Abbey to Bill Plotkin and Cheryl Strayed. In this intimate and down-to-earth narrative, backpacking is shown to be a spiritual practice that allows the discovery of God amidst the beauty and unexpected terrors of nature. Adoration, Lane suggests, is the most appropriate human response to what we cannot explain, but have nonetheless learned to love. An enchanting narrative for Christians of all denominations, Backpacking with the Saints is an inspiring exploration of how solitude, simplicity, and mindfulness are illuminated and encouraged by the discipline of backcountry wandering, and of how the wilderness itself becomes a way of knowing-an ecology of the soul.

The Solace of Open Spaces

Author: Gretel Ehrlich
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504042883
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 96

Book Description
These transcendent, lyrical essays on the West announced Gretel Ehrlich as a major American writer—“Wyoming has found its Whitman” (Annie Dillard). Poet and filmmaker Gretel Ehrlich went to Wyoming in 1975 to make the first in a series of documentaries when her partner died. Ehrlich stayed on and found she couldn’t leave. The Solace of Open Spaces is a chronicle of her first years on “the planet of Wyoming,” a personal journey into a place, a feeling, and a way of life. Ehrlich captures both the otherworldly beauty and cruelty of the natural forces—the harsh wind, bitter cold, and swiftly changing seasons—in the remote reaches of the American West. She brings depth, tenderness, and humor to her portraits of the peculiar souls who also call it home: hermits and ranchers, rodeo cowboys and schoolteachers, dreamers and realists. Together, these essays form an evocative and vibrant tribute to the life Ehrlich chose and the geography she loves. Originally written as journal entries addressed to a friend, The Solace of Open Spaces is raw, meditative, electrifying, and uncommonly wise. In prose “as expansive as a Wyoming vista, as charged as a bolt of prairie lightning,” Ehrlich explores the magical interplay between our interior lives and the world around us (Newsday).

Ravished by Beauty

Author: Belden C. Lane
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199831688
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
In this novel exploration of Reformed spirituality, Belden C. Lane uncovers a "green theology" that celebrates a community of jubilant creatures of all languages and species. Lane reveals an ecologically sensitive Calvin who spoke of himself as ''ravished'' by the earth's beauty. He speaks of Puritans who fostered a ''lusty'' spirituality in which Christ figured as a lover who encouraged meditation on the wonders of creation. He presents a Jonathan Edwards who urged a sensuous ''enjoyment'' of God's beauty as the only real way of knowing God. Lane argues for the ''double irony'' of Reformed spirituality, showing that Calvinists who often seem prudish and proper are in fact a people of passionate desire. Similarly, Reformed Christians who appear totally focused on divine transcendence turn out at times to be closet nature mystics, exulting in God's glory everywhere. Lane also demonstrates, however, that a spirituality of desire can be derailed, ending in sexual excess and pantheism. Ecologically, holy longing can be redirected from a contemplation of God's splendor in the earth's beauty to a craving for land itself, resulting in disastrous misuse of its resources. Between the major chapters of the book are engaging personal essays drawn from the author's own love of nature as a Reformed Christian, and providing a thoughtful discussion of contemporary issues of species diversity and the honoring of an earth community.

Landscapes of the Sacred

Author: Belden C. Lane
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801868382
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Book Description
This substantially expanded edition of Belden C. Lane's Landscapes of the Sacred includes a new introductory chapter that offers three new interpretive models for understanding American sacred space. Lane maintains his approach of interspersing shorter and more personal pieces among full-length essays that explore how Native American, early French and Spanish, Puritan New England, and Catholic Worker traditions has each expressed the connection between spirituality and place. A new section at the end of the book includes three chapters that address methodological issues in the study of spirituality, the symbol-making process of religious experience, and the tension between place and placelessness in Christian spirituality.

Sacred Landscapes of the Soul

Author: Karen Brailsford
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781948018845
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
The desire to soothe our souls has perhaps never been greater. This collection of lyrical meditations, prayers, contemplations, devotionals and psalms, can be the spiritual balm we desperately need right now. Enjoy 111 passages structured around nine metaphorical landscapes guiding the reader over emotional terrains on a journey toward peace and transcendence, while providing a sense of place to be mined for inner awareness. We can't help bring about much-needed change in the world if we aren't engaged in some form of self-healing. What is happening on the global stage is a reflection of what is transpiring within. Sacred Landscapes of the Soul gently assists in the process by helping us to find the wisdom, wit and wherewithal to embrace our challenges and celebrate our spiritual liberation. We are each meant to become a magnanimous and beneficial presence on the planet. When we consciously choose to align with the divine within, we tap into wellsprings of faith, hope, and connection. Together we heal the world--this comforting and encouraging message rings out from every page and will resonate with readers wherever they are on life's journey.

Wild Woman

Author: Amy Frykholm
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers
ISBN: 1506471854
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
In the dusty corner of a library, journalist Amy Frykholm discovers a footnote that leads her on a decades-long search for Mary of Egypt--runaway, prostitute, holy desert dweller, saint, and archetypal wild woman. As their storylines crisscross maps and centuries, both become more fully revealed--in the embrace of the sacred.