Backpacking with the Saints

Every so often I enjoy looking through my past semester's work on the Google Drive and see what thoughts have been continued or even contradicted as I continue to learn. I looked up Belden Lane in my email chain and saw a conversation I had with an old friend all on beholding beauty and what that might look like. In it we were referencing a book by Belden Lane the two of us read through called Backpacking with the Saints. A great read. We talk about the idea that wilderness (as explored by Lane) as a liminal space allowing for spiritual transformation. It seems evident that wilderness connects to the person in an unexplainable way. As we looked as different Biblical accounts we saw that something very common within spiritual experience is encountering God in the wild place. Take the Israelites for example. These people journeyed through the wilderness for forty years. Look at Moses and the first ever theophany. Check out John the Baptist and his locust lunches. In addition, the New Testament is rich with the theme of exploring the wilderness of our own hearts. As I continue through this conversation I see how we talk about the Biblical tendency of having physical and metaphysical pointing towards each other. Wilderness is a liminal space in which an individual becomes open and available to spiritual transformation by seeing life as a unified whole where everything belongs. We appreciate things as they should be, as we embrace things in the state of I-Thou, not taking advantage of them or using them for our own anthropocentric desire. Lane writes in Backpacking that the book of nature “communicates a danger and a beauty that stirs the sense, opening the soul to a corresponding truth found in the text of Scripture,” (25). This sparked our interest because we find it interesting how most beautiful things in life are also dangerous, or threatening to our humanity in a sense. However it is just this danger, just this risk that shakes the ego off of the human and allows for us to treat other things in the “Thou” rather the “It”.