The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality
by Belden C. Lane

The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality
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Book Summary Information

Author: Belden C. Lane
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1998-04-30
ISBN: 0195116828
Number of pages: 296
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Book Reviews of The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

Book Review: The Solace of Fierce Landscapes
Summary: 5 Stars

Belden Lane has written a remarkable book. I so appreciate his modesty as exhibited, for example, at p. 217: "What little expertise I can offer to legitimate these words lies less in the training of a scholar than in the perseverance of the companero, one who has traveled with another through dangerous territory."

Lane is a scholar and a good one. He knows how and when to document his sources. He is a theologian and a good one, one who appreciates the value of non-Christian religions. He is also a wounded and broken human being, like us all. His writing does not take us to the lofty heights of Theologia and Esoterica leaving us to wonder how to return to the Real World. Lane takes HIS woundedness (and if we would only will it, we the readers may let go and take OUR own wondedness with us as we journey with Lane) with him. It is Lane's lived experiences that make sense out of the lofty heights of Theologia and Esoterica, as well as the aridity Philosophia's desertscape.

This is a great book and those who complain of its over-sentimentality totally miss the point. They may well be resisting dealing with their own woundedness.

Summary of The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

In the tradition of Kathleen Norris, Terry Tempest Williams, and Thomas Merton, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes explores the impulse that has drawn seekers into the wilderness for centuries and offers eloquent testimony to the healing power of mountain silence and desert indifference.

Interweaving a memoir of his mother's long struggle with Alzheimer's and cancer, meditations on his own wilderness experience, and illuminating commentary on the Christian via negativa--a mystical tradition that seeks God in the silence beyond language--Lane rejects the easy affirmations of pop spirituality for the harsher but more profound truths that wilderness can teach us. "There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul. They heal, as well as mirror, the brokeness we find within." It is this apparent paradox that lies at the heart of this remarkable book: that inhuman landscapes should be the source of spiritual comfort. Lane shows that the very indifference of the wilderness can release us from the demands of the endlessly anxious ego, teach us to ignore the inessential in our own lives, and enable us to transcend the "false self" that is ever-obsessed with managing impressions. Drawing upon the wisdom of St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhardt, Simone Weil, Edward Abbey, and many other Christian and non-Christian writers, Lane also demonstrates how those of us cut off from the wilderness might "make some desert" in our lives.

Written with vivid intelligence, narrative ease, and a gracefulness that is itself a comfort, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes gives us not only a description but a "performance" of an ancient and increasingly relevant spiritual tradition.


The great religions of the world were nourished in mountains, nearly all of them born in the deserts but raised in the cool highland air. Belden Lane, a professor of theological studies, explores the role of these "fierce landscapes" in the development of the human spirit, and he travels firsthand to many of them, notably Mount Sinai and the deserts of the American Southwest, where seekers holy and profane have traveled before. "Desert and mountain places," he writes, "located on the margins of society, are locations of choice in luring God's people to a deeper understanding of who they are." Just so, and this modest book yields a deeper understanding of wild lands. --Greg McNamee

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