Notes from a recent read: Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice by Belden Lane

I've had Belden Lane's book Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice checked out from the library since February - the advantage of the library being closed. But I'm feeling guilty about it, so I'm finally getting around to making some notes about it.  It begins with two pages of epigraphs, some that I've included on my syllabus for my nature writing class. They include:

Solvitur ambulando (It is solved by walking) - Attributed to St Jerome?

"I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a hypaethral book, such as Thoreau talked about- a book  open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better." - Wendell Berry, Christianity and the Survival of Creation

Wilderness is not a luxury, but a necessity of the human spirit." -Edward Abbey Desert Solitaire

"Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Note it; read it. God, who you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink; instead He set before your eyes the things that He had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?" St Augustine, The City of God

I'm mournful that I am not teaching nature writing this fall; instead the full time, tenured faculty member who first initiated the course is teaching it again. The University is inaugurating an interdisciplinary minor in sustainability studies, which she is helping to spearhead, as she has degrees in literature and biology. I would like to be a part of it, but I will be teaching a composition course again this fall. I do have a section of Nature Writing in the spring, if the spring ever returns.

Lane wrote this book before he retired from teaching theology at University of St. Louis. In it, he describes what spiritual insights he gained from backpacking and reading spiritual masters while on the trail. He mostly hikes alone, although his shepherd dog Desert accompanies him most of the time. His trips mostly take place around the Ozarks, not too far from his St. Louis home, but the place is not so important here as the process.  Reading while backpacking requires a commitment - books add precious weight to a pack - plus a journal, pencil, some sort of light. Lane argues that combining book wisdom with experiential learning leads to some intense insights and epiphanies.  One of his theses is that the wilderness and reading certain texts both pose dangers - to body and to soul. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that books and backpacking both change a person and provide both challenges and balms.

The structure of the book outlines these: He sees a pattern in the development of a wilderness spirituality and of backpacking beginning with departure, then discipline, descent, and ending with delight, (he acknowledges Campbell's archetypal hero's journey). Lane begins by summarizing what he has learned from his reading in spiritual masters from the past and present. These writers and his own practice confirm that both spiritual growth acquired by reading and prayer, as well as by backpacking require solitude and self-abandonment, moving on the margins, relinquishing desires, seeing failure as growth, recognizing physical discipline as a source of spiritual insight, resisting the trappings of culture, and being open to a wider "community of exchange" - here he means the wilderness and all that is in it.

Lane's style of backpacking is one that fits the life of an academic who teaches near the hills - he takes weekend trips to the Ozarks, although Aravaipa Canyon in Arizona is the first hike he describes.  He does do some longer trips, but he is not describing how to take long backpacking trips in this book.  Neither does he particularly focus on describing his hikes. The places he introduces the reader to are not described in a lot of detail - I'd almost like more color in the description of place and the challenges and process of backpacking, but this isn't a manual. Nonetheless, he does indulge in lyrical language at times. For example, of the Sonoran Desert he writes, "Hildegard of Bingen might have said that I'd touched the body of God as well, running my hand across a startling vulnerability. Blood-stained rocks and strip-mining scars lingered in its flesh, but the vibrating life was unmistakable. Here was a God known  in the sinew and flesh of bedrock and cactus, smitten by longing -- a great desert cat prowling the edges of abandonment, lurking unseen in teh shadows, hungry for love." (5)

This reflection follows a view of the desert canyon from a high cliff - but much of hiking is just slogging along a trail. This continuous movement results in a different kind of insight - the "effortless pattern of flow"  - complete absorption into the task at hand without having to think about it, the state of being that convinces long distance runners, hikers, swimmers, bikers, writers, readers, etc to persist.

The book is dense with quotes - sometimes overwhelmingly so: Barry Lopez, Wendell Berry, David Abram, the poet Novalis, scripture, Martin Buber follow each other in a two page spread. Tielhard de Chardin's "spirituality of wonderment" is a guiding theme - we offer experience wonder in nature, the same wonder that leads us to a generous Creator. Chardin offers a mass on the altar of the earth, recognizing the cosmic nature of Christ's body.

Lane describes feeling guilt as a young person because he preferred being outside to being in church, but he comes to realize that knowing God is a matter of physical connection as well as spiritual - the medieval mystics talk of tasting, savoring, and relishing God.  Our encounters with God in the wilderness are physical, and a relationship with creation is a connection with the Creator relying on both physical and spiritual encounters.

By reading spiritual masters while removing himself from his comfortable living room, Lane is able to encounter and consider their words in new ways. Awareness of the words, of his own immediate surroundings, of his body carrying book itself, of the discipline of the saint, and of God's work in the world all merge to expand and deepen his understanding of the inexpressible ideas that the saint was trying to convey.  He reads Pilgrim's Progress  and feels the reality of the allegories.  John Climacus's Ladder of Divine Ascent describes virtues of simplicity, watchfulness, and courage that are essential to the Christian and to the hiker. Jean-Pierre de Caussade's Abandonment to Divine Providence teaches attentiveness to the "sacrament of the present moment," a practice that can be honed on the trail. Julian of Norwich teaches him to let go of fear and stay calm while alone in the wild.

I would like to spend more time noting some of the insights Lane shares as he describes his own spiritual growth through his journeying, a type of pilgrimage into God's creation instead of to a site of martyrdom or miracle, but I'm running short of time, and there is just SO MUCH in this book. I borrowed it from the library, but I'm tempted to buy a copy just for the notes on the texts. If I have a reservation about this book, it's that it relies almost too heavily on quotes from different texts. It's almost as if Lane wanted to include every quote he loves - an impulse I am guilty of.

The guides he dives most deeply into are The Live of Columba by an abbot of Iona, St. Therese of Lisieux's Autobiography, Thomas Traherne's Centuries of Meditation, which are his "poetic reflections on God's presence in nature," Soren Kierkegaard's Journals, in which he explains the 4 gifts of solitude: 1. "Capacity for separating the individual from the crowd" - no performance of self -  "to stand alone before God", 2. "Ability to nurture true self" 3. "access to the mystery found at the core of our being" - that God is in the self, 4. Connection to the "larger, otherwise hidden community of the natural world."  These gifts in turn call for the responsibility to take care of the self, to take care of and honor the land, and to be accountable to and for others.

Dag Hammarksjold's journal Markings is another text that gets a close look.  The secretary-general of the UN "fed his inner tranquility" with mountain hiking.  A great quote "in the point of rest at the center of our being... we encounter a world where all things are at rest. .. . Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation." (93)

Small books like Brother Lawrence's The Practice of the Presence of God  and Thich Nhat Hanh's The Miracle of Mindfulness also are carried at times in Lane's pack.  Thich Nhat Hanh and Merton knew each other and shared a similar attention to presence and monastic practice. Backpacking requires a similar attention to what is immediately in front of you, for safety and for sanity.  Backpacking and monasticism also create rituals of everyday practices - packing, eating, making camp, etc.

In the "Descent" section John of the Cross gets a close examination. His dark night of the soul required him to relinquish a desire for possession and to accept absence as a source of longing.  Confronting fear of absence - or physical fear on the trail - is one way of acknowledging that God's presence was at one time know.  Lane also muses on Martin Luther's experiences of failure and challenges in comparison to his failure to summit Mt Whitney (familiar).  He is more generous to Luther than I might be.  Lane also reminded me of Rudolf Dreikurs, whose name was bandied about in my early years of child-rearing because he encouraged parents to let their children make mistake - to have "the courage to be imperfect."  He also invokes a couple of desert fathers, John Climacus and Abba Poema, who are gentle on the failures of their fellow monks, not that moral failure isn't significant, but that God forgives, while we cannot know the interior of the sinner. The Cloud of Unknowing also addresses our fear of failure, which can lead to fear of losing control and fear of loving.  Setting of into the unknown requires openness to the possibility of suffering, as does opening oneself up to love. This is so true of parenting - we cannot control what we love, and we will be wounded, but letting go and trusting is a part of loving fully.  Giving up control, even of language in the example of  The Cloud of Unknowing, is a way of emptying the mind to let the heart guide.  The author says that "It is not what you are nor what you have been that God looks at with his merciful eyes, but what you desire to be."  That is a comforting thought for a frequent failer.

The section on "Delight," begins with a chapter about discernment - trying to find what is authentic among what is illusory in our lives.  This is a process I really struggle with as we move closer to my husband's retirement from the Navy and the next phase in his career.  I met with our priest before Covid shutdowns to try to get some insight into the discernment process and duly made charts of consolations and desolations.  But my resulting data offers no clear preference.  Perhaps mixed in between desire, duty, resistance to change, responsibility, aspiration, whatever all the mixed motives involved in making a decision about a major shift in life after having relinquished control for so many years are, there should be some clear, authentic self that yearns toward one path. Part of me that feels like God's will is out there somewhere and we just have to find it, but perhaps it is what should be most obvious to the interior self.  Maybe I have a split personality - what is the personality type that can't make decisions?  Of course, it's not entirely my decision to make anyway - plenty of external factors will limit our choices, which seem limitless at this moment.

Lane reflects on discernment with Rumi as a guide.  Rumi suggests that we shouldn't ask "what should I do? " or "What is expected of me?" but "what do I love? What arises now most naturally from my heart?" (159). Rumi, as a Muslim mystic, "spoke of creation as God's first prophet, a window revealing God as the 'hidden treasure' within all things. 'The world is like a reed pipe and God blows in its every hole.'"  Lane goes on to write, "This ability to discover the holy in everything is a gift of discernment that emerges from one's encounter with an extraordinary human being, a revelatory text, or a vivid experience of nature."  (161) He also credits Ignatius of Loyola for promoting meditative prayer that begins with a reflection on plant life and the elements.  Christian teaching overlaps other traditions in perceiving nature as a teacher and as reflective of God's glory.

Maybe I need to go hiking by myself for several days with a backpack full of books and notebooks. That sounds a little like Heaven to me, which is probably why this book appealed to me. Perhaps my indecisiveness comes from a love of many things...

Similarly, time alone in nature increases love for fellow creatures - knowledge and mystery go hand and hand, and an appreciation of community and interdependence grows. Thomas Merton, Desmond Tutu, and Teilhard de Chardin are the spiritual masters lane refers to in his section on Community. De Chardin's Divine Milieu and The Heart of the Matter both reflect on the interconnectedness of the physical and spiritual, beauty and danger, love and suffering. Creation is "God's chosen instrument" and "a living host." (177). This isn't to say that nature is God, but that God is present in the things that He creates and animates. I'd like to dive into Teilhard de Chardin's way of thinking even more - he has a subtle way of understanding evolution and scientific theories about the cosmos within a theological perspective that appeals to my own vague understanding of the alignment of faith and reason in these mysteries.

The final section of the book points to accountability and a responsibility to teh community of anture. He quotes Edward Abbey's line, "Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul." (181) But Lane also invokes Martin Luther King, Jr, and Gandhi to apply their theories of nonviolent action and the need for spiritual discipline to sustain community to the crusade for environmental justice. The privilege of experiencing "wilderness" hiking continues to be limited by the decimation of the wilderness - if there are even any wild places left.  Rarely are you ever really alone on a trail.

Lane recognizes the challenge of letting someone else's words stand in for our own experience, though.  The goal isn't supposed to be an iconic experience, or an attempt to live someone else's practice, but to fill our own genuine longing, even if the experience isn't revelatory or sublime, but simply an encounter with ordinary beauty - like a reunion with a good friend.  He truly feels the "communion of saints" as he reads them and finds the similarities with his own experiences. He combines lectio divina  with lectio terrestris.

One of the last chapters, with reference to Merton, recognizes the folly of taking any of this too seriously.  Reading - like hiking - is dangerous but also magical (reference to David Abrams, whose interesting essay on the magic and ecology is in my anthology of nature writing).  The hiker, like the hero, eventually returns home. This book is his attempt to share his synthesis of all of these ideas and experiences - an ambitious project. These ideas have all been said before, these places explored and described before, but each person's connections between people, place, and idea adds to the communal understanding - and to sympathy and longing.  With a nod to Abraham Herschel, Lane ends the book with his promise to share the wonder - "Wonder is the wellspring of love ... and love, in teh end, is what drives us to a passion for all things wild and at risk."

Reading in Review

Although wintry weather doesn't have us cozied up in the evenings by a fireplace reading (except in my dreams), we have spent some quiet evenings with books this month.  I've been reading The Secret Garden with the five year old, mostly because I wanted to reread it, but she is loving it. We have just a few chapters left, and then we'll watch a film version. I had forgotten how mean Mary and Colin are. I may have left out a few of their lines here and there because of their rudeness. I also skipped a bit in the Magic chapter because it becomes a bit incantatory. I can dismiss their superstitions and see it as a manifestation of a desire to believe in the power of prayer, but I'm not sure the kindergartener would understand, and she may start wishing for magic rather than praying for miracles - which at this age she doesn't do anyway. Her prayers are sweet lists of people she loves. Despite my minimal editing of the text as I read aloud, I am loving rereading it. The descriptions of the garden are beautiful, and the effect of the garden on the children fits right in line with what we talk about in our nature writing class.  (Also confirmed in the New York Times summary of this study. I'm not sure that we need these studies, except to point scientifically to the fact that we all agree with that more time outdoors is better.)

The only problem of reading books like this is that they make me yearn for a garden to grow bulbs and roses and snowdrops and delphinium. I wonder if there is a study that relates wellbeing and the amount of time spent reading: a certain amount makes you feel good, another amount unearths unfulfilled desires... How often does what we read get put into practice? If we read too many competing visions of life, do we become incapacitated?)

To avoid that situation, I forget a good deal of what I read, so instead here is a list of what I've consumed and passed back to the library:
 First, a collection of essays: The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 edited by Deborah Blum.
This was a library book I picked up on a whim. The articles were mostly published in 2013 but still seem relatively timely, albeit familiar - a couple on extinction and hybrids, one about genetic engineering to prevent crop disease, one about a female college professor who spent her career writing about end of life issues who is now caring for her husband after he broke his neck in a bike crash and became quadriplegic. Their regular brushes with death and the ethical debate about ending his life was a fascinating read. To see the wife move from writing about ideas about dying to experiencing what it meant to love someone struggling to live revealed how strong the will to live can be.  That essay was "A Life or Death Situation" by Robin Marantz Henig originally published in The New York Times Magazine. The husband died around the time the article was published when he asked that the machines that kept him alive be unplugged.

Ethical issues were at the heart of an essay about a woman seeking family after taking a DNA test. Less controversial were articles about how the brain prefers reading and writing on paper, an encomium to wool by Barbara Kingsolver, and an essay about combating boredom on long expeditions by having celebrations. I only skimmed a long essay about paleontology but read with fascination one about waking up from anesthesia while in surgery and another about Hansen's disease, or leprosy, by Rebecca Solnit, whose writing I usually love. E. O. Wilson's essay about mountains was hard to get interested in, as was an essay about fire ants.  Essays about the fear of antibiotics failing and the return of measles were a bit sensationalized. "Learning to die in the Anthropocene" by Roy Scranton is an essay I see referenced in some of the reading I do for my nature writing class.  The author published a book by the same title. Drawing on realizations he had as a soldier in Iraq in 2003, Scranton suggests that the end of our era is already here, and we need to learn to confront death.

I read this collection on a car trip - and it's the perfect kind of read for a journey because you can dip in and out of it, and look up every once in a while to discuss the ideas with others.

For book club, I read Mist of Mercy by Anne the Lay Apostle. I was reluctant to read this one, but I had a free copy from the church library liquidation. It was not what I was expecting - which was something more "mystical" I guess. Based on the cover copy, I thought there might be more discussion of demons and sin and describing different visions.  Rather, the beginning gave a short history of "Anne's" visions and how she came to transcribe them. The middle section is basically short dramatic anecdotes about how sin is manifest in different ways in different lives and how guardian angels might intervene. Then a section about purgatory follows. The way she describes souls in purgatory as being in a "mist" reminded me a lot of  C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce. It was more narrative than I expected. The next section was transcriptions of Jesus's messages to Anne. Here is where I become more skeptical because the language is so sentimental. The final section is a short compendium of prayers and brief advice for incorporating more prayer and good works in your life. I'm interested to hear the response of my book club, but I wonder if those who did not connect to the book will be more guarded because the person who recommended it LOVES it.  I struggle to articulate my feelings about this book and its style of writing - amateurish but sincere - and subject matter: personal visions and advice for holiness.  After reading it, I do feel convicted about steps I could take to live a more holy life, and it helped me identify thoughts and attitudes that distance me from God and weaken my ability to respond with love to those around me. I know the weed of selfishness is rooted deep in my soul and needs some major work of excavation, but I have a skeptical side that withholds affection from this type of book. For instance, I have never been able to finish Story of Soul and the book about Fatima through the eyes of Lucia. Here again is where reading widely prevents me from being enthused about a book that is good for me - a little like eating raw vegetables.

On the other hand, I can gush over Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks, although admittedly I skipped right over what he might say is the essence of the book - the glossary of forgotten words. His essays describing different terrains of the islands around the UK are luminous, a real delight to read. Despite apparent similarities in these places, he gives them each a personality.  He is an author I have only recently discovered, and I want to read more from him, as I love his essays. Here is an hour-long talk he gave about landscape and the heart, based on one of his earlier books, The Old Ways, which is a model for what I am trying to say so inadequately in my class. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q1IK-O5Ypg  (And for my own notes, I want to return to this: Macfarlane and Barry Lopez at Powells Book Store last summer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyCFGPlLjbE -- Macfarlane makes a very genuine and moving tribute to Lopez at the beginning. Love it!)

I was looking forward to reading Brian Doyle's The Journey of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World because I have always enjoyed Doyle's essays, and his death last year was a real loss to the literary world.  He wrote in a natural and conversational way that made him seem a friend across the miles.  I wanted to love this novel about a period in the life of Robert Louis Stevenson when he was living in a boarding house in San Francisco while he waited for his fiancee's divorce to be finalized, but I had trouble staying focused.  The book is mostly about the adventures of the landlord, John Carson, which serve as an inspiration to some of Stevenson's stories.  While Stevenson lives at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Carson, he writes furiously during the day, and then sits down to enjoy a drink and the storytelling prowess of Mr. Carson. Mr. Carson was a sailor who had many adventures familiar to readers of RLS.  I have not been an avid RLS reader, so I likely did not catch all of the allusions and am just assuming that Carson's adventures translate into models for many of Stevenson's heroes' adventures.  The book is charming, but there are almost too many tales. And though I enjoy reflections on the power of storytelling/writing, some seemed shoehorned in.  Interspersed between the tales are letters exchanged by Robert and Fanny, his fiancee, which also seem to need more context or perhaps are too sweet or too contemporary?  I can't quite put my finger on it. I did warm up to it and enjoy it more as it went along, but I kept putting it down and forgetting to pick it back up. Doyle's gifts as an essayist are not dimmed in my opinion, but perhaps do not translate to novels.

Nonetheless, there are some especially good passages. This may be my favorite:: "We do not acknowledge enough, I think, the clan and tribe of our friends, who are not assigned to us by blood, or given to us to love by a merciful Creator, but come to us by grace and gift from the mass of men, stepping forth unannounced from the passing multitudes, and into our lives, and so very often stepping right into the inner chambers of our hearts. In so many ways we celebrate those we love as wife or husband, father and mother, brother and sister, daughter and son, but it is our friends whom we choose, and who choose us; it is our friends we turn to abashed, when we are bruised and broken by love and pain; it is our friends whose affection and kindness are food and drink to our spirits, and sustain and invigorate us when we are worn and weary."

A sadder line: "I did not know then, and only can imagine now, the pain of realizing that the child you love with all your heart and soul is a stranger, and perhaps always will be, no matter how many years you both shall live."  Substitute child with spouse or sibling or friend or parent - any soul we think we know who surprises us with a distance we did not know existed, but is inevitable between embodied souls.

On storytelling: "There is a story in every thing, and every being, and every moment, were we alert to catch it, were we ready with our tender nets; indeed there are a  hundred, a thousand stories, uncountable stories, could they only be lured out and appreciated; and more and more now I realize that what I thought was a skill only for authors and pastors and doctors and dream -diviners is the greatest of all human skills, the one that allows us into the heart and soul and deepest layers of our companions on the brief sunlit road between great dark wildernesses. We are here to witness, to apprehend, to see and hear, to plumb, with patience and humility, the shy stories of others; and in some cases, like mine, then shape and share them; so that they might sometimes, like inky arrows, sink into the depths of other men and women and children, and cause pleasure, or empathy, or a sort of delicious pain, as you realize that someone somewhere else, even perhaps in a time long ago, felt just as you did. Stories, among their many virtues, are messages from friends you did not know you had; and while you may well never meet the friend, you feel the better, with one more companion by your side, than you thought you knew."

Finally: "Always it is thus, I suppose, hat the sharpest savor is the last, and we finally understand what we have, when we no longer have it. A deep delight, married to a deep throb of sadness -- perhaps that is the quintessential human condition."

And that is it for now.  Classes have started so I am reading along in my packets for those, too, and reviewing Walden again - still trying to jam in too much in a short time.  How can I leave out voices like Brian Doyle/s?