Beldon Lane
Wilderness Spirituality

August 2 - 8 

We’re delighted that Belden Lane will be returning to the Ranch to offer a session. In 2001, having led a retreat at the Ranch, Belden wrote an article for Christian Century about the experience:

“In late June, weary of another long year behind a desk, I headed toward Ring Lake Ranch, an ecumenical retreat and study center in northwest Wyoming. A week in the high desert country of the Wind River Range, with time for silence and solitude, sounded just about right. I'd heard that Quakers have as many words for silence as Eskimos do for snow, and that they speak of various "stillnesses" as silky, heavy, light, dead, electric, even noisy. For months I'd needed desperately to explore some thing of that wide spectrum of quietude. . . .

“Others may respond more readily to Jesus' invitation to "Come away by yourselves to a desert place, and rest a while" (Mark 6:31). Usually I have to be kicked in the teeth. It was a hard voice that I heard crying out in the wilderness, saying, ‘It's time to stop, for God's sake! You've hurt yourself and too many others in the consumer-crazy violence of your busy life. Just stop!’
“Only then did I hear the soft, still echo of my own deepest longing. It's not ultimately new and exciting experiences that I seek most, not even experiences of wonderful places like the Wind River Range.

What I truly want isn't anything that I can acquire. It can't be taken home as a vacation souvenir or journal that I can savor during the long weariness of the coming year. What I seek most is God alone, the God discovered in sabbath emptiness and silence, the God who cannot be added to a grocery list of other happenings and thrills, who cannot be managed or comprehended, who can only be loved.This God claims me before I dare to claim anything of my own.”

Belden captures well what the wilderness experience at the Ranch can be for us. While we may not have as many words for silence as the Quakers do, time in the Wind River Mountains can be this time to stop – just stop – to “be still and know that I am God.”

And, Belden understands mountain and high desert spirituality from the inside. He has not only read the desert mothers and fathers, the anchorites, and the memoirs of moderns who have lived in these liminal regions, but he has hiked and camped, encountered the wilderness firsthand. I cannot think of anyone better suited to lead this session on Wilderness Spirituality. Welcome back, Belden.
-- Carl Koch, Director

More about Belden Lane

The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (Oxford University Press)
Book Review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
In Spirituality & Practice

Belden C. Lane, professor of Theological Studies and American Studies at St. Louis University, has written a compelling book about desert and mountain imagery in the Christian apophatic tradition. The author, a Presbyterian minister, juxtaposes his own desert experiences at various monasteries with the dying of his mother from cancer and Alzheimer's.

Using a rich repertoire of quotations from the Buddhists of Tibet, the desert fathers of early Christianity, the Native Americans of the Southwest, and a wonderful crosscut of writers and naturalists (Terry Tempest Williams, Edward Abbey, Kathleen Norris, Tony Hillerman, etc.) Lane depicts the danger and the desolation of the desert as a boon to the soul with "its unmitigated honesty, its dreadful capacity to strip bare, its long compelling silence."

In the counterculture spirituality of the Christian desert fathers, these fierce landscapes signaled the death of self, the limits of language, the unknowability of God, and the threat of nothingness. Lane rediscovers the meaning of love in his encounters with the Holy One in desolate places. He comes to see and to affirm the joyous freedom of the desert eccentric, the power of compassion as the fruit of indifference, and a degree of ecological sensitivity emerging from a closeness to the land.

The Solace of Fierce Landscapes is a deeply reverential account of the connection between spirituality and place. It also is beautifully written.

"Desert Indifference, Desert Love" is the transcription of a recorded talk Belden gave and an interview with him.

“Inadvertent Ministry” appears on the Religion On-Line website.

“Each visible (and ordinary) mountain, however, is a door to the invisible. To the eyes of faith, lowly Mount Zion--a mere hillock overshadowed by Mount Scopus and the Mount of Olives--becomes "the fair-crested, utmost peak of Zaphon," taller even than the holy mountain of Baal in Syria, rising over a mile out of the sea. This double vision of the seen and unseen mountain is an exercise in faith, an expression of our deepest desire.”
—Belden Lane