 |
| Sangre de Cristo [Blood of Christ] Mountains, Colorado |
The
spiritual journey almost always begins with other people.
We
enter this world surrounded by people who love us. If we come from a tradition
that believes in infant baptism, we are reborn at an early age into the family
of God surrounded not only by the people at our birth, but by a cloud of
witnesses who are called to embrace, protect, and nourish us with their love.
There
are people at other spiritual events in our lives: confirmation, bible camp,
church youth gatherings, church bible study, worship, social ministry projects,
marriage, ordination, small groups, like the Men’s Group I help lead at Peace
Lutheran in Alexandria, Virginia right now.
However,
there may be times in life when being surrounded by, crushed by, forced to be
with, people; well, it can be both exhausting and spirit draining.
Since
the beginning of creation, humans have sought God within and through nature
itself, often while alone and far away from other people. Adam and Eve found
God in their garden, until they made the mistake of trying to take that garden
over, without God. Cain found God in the fields, and Abel in the pastures.
Moses went up the mountain. Jesus went into the wilderness, and then up the
mountain. John ended his life on a deserted Greek island, Patmos. St Francis wandered
in the hills behind Assisi.
Even
our hymn writers have sensed the possibility of finding God in the natural
world.
Oh Lord
my God
When I
in awesome wonder
Consider
all the worlds
Thy
hands have made
I see
the stars
I hear
the rolling thunder
Thy power
throughout
The
universe displayed.
[How
Great Thou Art, Stuart Hine]
In a
time like ours, when community seems lost, nastiness runs rampant, prejudice
has regained popularity, moral leadership has taken a nap, and anger and
cynicism are the new norm, we may need to leave people behind for a time and
find our spiritual nourishment in nature once again.
Ten
years ago I went on a photographic and spiritual quest to find spiritual
meaning and inspiration in nature. From the deserts of Arizona to the mountains
of Colorado to the Badlands and plains of North Dakota to the lakes and forests (and
thunderstorms) of Minnesota, I sought comfort, peace, healing, and hope in
God’s creation.
My
guide was a wonderful, spiritual book by Belden Lane, 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. Lane
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. In
my next post, I begin with the first part, purgation (desert).
No comments:
Post a Comment