The Solace of Fierce Landscapes

The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, by Belden Lane, is one of the best books I've read in the last 5 years.  It is a very moving reflection on the tradition of desert and mountain spirituality in the Christian tradition, interwoven with the author's personal experience of watching his mother die slowly in a nursing home. It has been particularly powerful for me because my own mother is towards the end of a very long and slow decline into incapacity in a care home not far away from where I live.

Lane is a scholar too, in the perhaps unusual position of being a Presbyterian minister who teaches theology at a Catholic university in the USA. The weight of scholarship is obvious without overburdening his beautiful writing style, and his personal experiences of wild and desolate retreats (both geographically and spiritually) is very honest and compelling. He is not a heady academic - in fact he is involved with the increasingly popular movement towards a natural spirituality, one that takes into account the beauty and the cruelty and the boredom and the banality and the glory of nature and our human experience of it without lapsing into depression or anomie, or taking refuge in regarding oneself as special.

There are some wonderful reflections on the spirituality of silence, and on the place of discipline in a spiritual walk. The place he reaches, if that is the right metaphor, is one of quiet attention without the expectation of any kind of spiritual experience, a place that might be familiar to contemplatives of any persuasion, eastern or western or any other.  This is a silence that has no attachment to the idea of ever speaking again. It is a kind of dying, the dying that many of the great religious traditions speak about. And what can one say about dying?  Perhaps silence is the perfect preparation.

You can link to the book in the Bookstore page.