The Solace of Fierce Landscapes.

Belden C. Lane, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 304pp. $25.00 (cloth).

The Solace of Fierce Landscapes is a moving and sturdy meditation on the desert. The desert is an outer place of starkness, terror, privation, and beauty; it is above all the locus of an encounter with God. For the author, the desert is also an inner locale, embodied in experiences of relinquishment and privation. But if the desert traveler persists, and in keeping with traditional wisdom, he or she finds the path to living waters. The desert offers "no cheap and easy access to divine majesty," whether interior or exterior; in the desert it is the searing mercy of God which alone can sustain us. And that is the soul's saving grace.

The importance of Lane's work is three-fold. First, it offers an alternative to our daily individualism and consumerism, which, it seems safe to say, have fostered self-preoccupation in the spiritual quest as well. "My fear," writes Lane, "is that much of what we call "spirituality" today is overly sanitized and sterile, far removed from the anguish of pain, the anchoredness of place. Without the tough-minded discipline of desert-mountain experience, spirituality loses . . . its demand for justice . . . [it] assumes no risks" (20). And again, "I am increasingly uncomfortable with current images of God . . . that mix popular psychology with a theology wholly devoted to self-realization, declaring that 'the chief end of God is to glorify men and women, and to enjoy them forever' (53). Second, Lane's book accessibly conveys the heritage and continuing vitality of desert and apophatic, or via negativa, spirituality - no small achievement. We twentieth-century Christians are in danger of forgetting this spiritual heritage. Third, the author's stance indissolubly links together natural landscape and soul in an heroic way, bridging the age-old gap between earthliness and spiritual progress.

The circumstances of the author's desert pilgrimage are interwoven into his spiritual account. At middle-age he accompanies his mother, dying of cancer and Alzheimer's in a nursing home, as she relinquishes physical and mental abilities but gradually and remarkably appears to find a deeper freedom. The desert experience of the nursing home opens out for Lane into a search for "ancient silence and the fierce love of God" (51). He finds himself longing to be physically in landscapes that are rugged and "utterly indifferent to pressing human concerns." Paradoxically, these landscapes offer exactly what the nursing home residents initially experience: renunciation, brokenness, and loss of control.

Lane allows the reader to enter with him into a desert pilgrimage. He describes his world-wide travels and desert locales with an alertness reminiscent of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire (Lane conveys his indebtedness to Abbey for several of his insights.) No Simeon Stylites, Lane relates his arduous journeys to the history-laden desert centers: Mt. Tabor, Mt. Sinai, Christ in the Desert Monastery in New Mexico. Lane is drawn, one suspects, by the need to find ineluctably represented outside himself his deep inner landscape. With humility, though, given his effort to understand and convey his experience, Lane confesses of these rugged, inhospitable landscapes, "I still don't understand . . . my attraction to this wild and unwelcome land" (52).

It was no mean feat to reach these places, both logistically and physically. The disconcerting changes of plans that left the pilgrim stranded for a week before beginning the arduous trek to Sinai, the bitter cold wind on the night before the final ascent, the author's nighttime dreams of death, all convey the rigors of his quest. Sinai, throughout religious history, "became a symbol of what the heart longs for most, as well as what the mind is least able to comprehend" (107). For the author and for many others, Sinai seems to represent nothing less than transformation by the radical love of God.

Lane's summary of the wisdom of desert spirituality and the rich apophatic Christian tradition is arresting. We are apt to forget that the founders of what became established religious communities, such as St. Romuald and St. Bernard, led their handfuls of disciples initially into terrible wilderness settings to live out their days. His conclusion is that "the apophatic tradition, despite its distrust of all images about God, makes an exception in using the imagery of threatening places as a way of challenging the ego and leaving one at a loss for words. . . . Only there do we enter the abandonment . . . necessary for meeting God" (65). Pseudo-Dionysius, Eckhart, John of the Cross, Merton, Simone Weil, even Calvin and Barth, continued the tradition. They charted for us the seemingly deeply troubling truth that, for those most serious about God, only in utterly losing one's way is God found. Desert spirituality and the via negativa know God as other and as mysteriously beyond our control. The spiritual path is assiduously not one of accumulation, whether of insights or of experience. Rather, it fosters relinquishment of images of self once thought necessary, of concrete goals, and of achievable life sign-posts. We must, it seems, give these up to the otherness and lack of care of the God of the desert, in whom we find a mysterious, unexpected, and longed-for Presence. Unaccountably we find our way home, even to the "palm of God's hand," loved in a way we have never known ourselves to be. In the end, the aridity of the desert brings about fresh waters, new springs. From these encounters we learn to trust, to love, and to redeem the profound ruptures within and without. We know that it is precisely in our desert experiences that we can find the terror and joy of the hidden God. For the radical indifference of the desert and seemingly of God unravels our ego strivings and their accumulation of prejudice, pain, and desire to give us the surprising and profoundly undeserved fierce love of the divine.

However, Lane offers very practical thoughts on the "habit of being" in the desert. For he does not expect each seeker to follow his arduous journeys but rather encourages us to find the desert wherever we can (his own habit is to nightly lie on his house rooftop staring into the abyss of space). We live a desert spirituality by learning to pray contemplatively, practicing awareness of the moment, doing our work with a loving detachment: all in an effort to "move slowly and deliberately through the world, attending to one thing at a time." In this way we model the sparseness of the desert, which has honed the attentiveness of its inhabitants with its stark indifference to their needs.

One cannot help but have misgivings in dealing with personal accounts. This is a personal book. The personal is both an advantage and a disadvantage. We are drawn to the author's life details yet pull away from the rather abrupt intimacy. I found this particularly true in the disclosure of the author's troubled relationship with his father, who died in a catastrophic manner when the son was an adolescent. The book conveys a climactic coming to terms with this death. In a moving account that is difficult to read but essential to Lane's story, he finally releases the impossibly painful experiences and memories clustered around his father's death. In the end he resolves with his father, now newly reconciled to him even in death, to live fully into life, making commitments and fostering human connection, freed from the fears and pain of the past.

Another minor problem is the author's tendency to express what may be universal truths somewhat pedantically: "Women naturally delight in wildness, even as men are drawn to gentle images of nature's playfulness" (139). In a passage about the Fisher King in the Grail legend, he writes that "all men, I suspect, are wounded in the thigh . . . where they are most vulnerable, where they've failed and been failed by others" (119). He claims that "the route to all great things passes by the way of the commonplace" (99), but the reader thinks of St. Paul or Julian of Norwich or others for whom ecstatic experience or vision has unalterably changed a life. Finally, in speaking of his mother's final peaceful death, he says that he doesn't know ultimately what it was she experienced yet she "seemed to have been invited in those last few months to a third and final stage of union with God" (152), a claim that the reader would not dare dispute but yearns to know more about. The author is perhaps better at telling stories than in making summary statements. (This affirmation of himself as a storyteller, discovered by night on a riverbank, is arresting. He tells a Lakota Sioux sacred story by the fire throughout the night to a group of trees). These minor flaws are just that, and they do not detract from the achievement of the book.

Lane asks us to ponder what he and others have discovered: that only in experiencing natural places that are profoundly not ourselves do we come to know ourselves. The loss of nature's otherness in the destruction of natural habitats is, then, one more reason for spiritual concern.

But we don't save natural spaces from ourselves or undergo spiritual transformation with a studious, weary heaviness. For Lane has a wonderful insight about the playfulness of God. He relates a hide-and-seek game with his seven-year-old daughter, in which she stood close to him, hiding, breathing silently, all the while pretending she had gone. In the moment of grace in which each pretended that the other was not there, he now realize he was touched by the playfulness of God. "God is like a person who clears his throat while hiding and so gives himself away," said Eckhart (179). Why does God seem to hide, playfully? To incite longing, surprise, and even deeper joy, Lane surmises: the unanticipated joy of discovery of presence out of absence heightens the joy at meeting, in an epiphany of the beloved, who has been there all along!

"What I desire most of all is the assurance of God's love, the echo of God's laughter breaking over me in waves of playfulness that won't let me go" (183). If we dare to accompany Lane on his pilgrimage, we too, may exult with him: "Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing! For the Lord has comforted his people and taken pity on those he has afflicted" (Isa. 49:13). All in all, a good version of "send my roots rain."

NANCY WRIGHT