Ep. 25: Finding God in Wild Places w/ Dr. Belden C. Lane

Show Notes

Episode Summary

Can God only be experienced through the Church? Or is God revealed and able to be experienced elsewhere? Dr. Belden C. Lane, professor emeritus of theological studies, believes our experience of God is too limited and has thus spent many years cultivating the spiritual discipline of solo wilderness backpacking. In our conversation with him, we discuss why we need the wilderness, how being taken to the edge physically also pushes us spiritually, why we need “dangerous” books, and his deep admiration of the desert mothers and fathers.

Bio

Dr. Belden C. Lane is a Presbyterian theologian who teaches on a Jesuit faculty at Saint Louis University. His interests include the relationship between geography and faith, wilderness backpacking in the Ozarks, the magic of storytelling, desert spirituality, exposing students to urban poverty through the Catholic Worker community, and the poetry of Rumi. He also works with men, helping to lead initiation rites through Richard Rohr's program for Men as Learners and Elders in Albuquerque. Some time ago he found himself delightfully introduced as a Presbyterian minister teaching at a Roman Catholic university telling Jewish stories at the Vedanta Society.

Find Dr. Lane’s books on Amazon.

Quotables

• “In my own experience, God was as real in creation as God was in church.” (tweet this)

• “I need to be grounded again. I needed to get out of the ivory tower. I talked about God in the classroom, but I needed to spend time with God in the woods increasingly.” (tweet this)

• “Wilderness is an excellent place for making the necessary mistakes to get me to where I really needed to go anyway: learning to trust when I suddenly find I’m not in control.” (tweet this)

• “That countercultural dimension of the desert mothers’ and fathers’ powerful spirituality, of ignoring what doesn’t matter and loving what really does, that for me is the core of the life I want to live.” (tweet this)

• “Wilderness represents the risk and vulnerability that real, growing faith always demands.” (tweet this)

• “I felt that I had to be sheltered from anything ‘out there.’ But God wants to make me uncomfortable with new things that will break me into a deeper understanding of God’s love for me and the world.” (tweet this)

• “If you don’t have both this counter-cultural quality and openness to your culture, that’s not authentic spirituality. It’s just going to be a feel-good, private practice.” (tweet this)

• “We assume that the family of God is limited exclusively to human beings. But all of reality is embraced by God.” (tweet this)

• “There’s wonder in every backyard.” (tweet this)

• “I’m more of an evangelical now than I was growing up because the faith I have now is a good news. The first thing to be said about God is that God is love and that God made us in love.” (tweet this)

Timestamps and References

• [05:24]—Dr. Lane’s faith background and how he began to pursue God through wilderness

• [10:00]—Why going into the wild is not just something we do, but a spiritual practice

• [11:04]—“Going out, I found, was going in,” from John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of of John Muir

• [13:53]—How the desert mothers and fathers and other mystics have influenced Dr. Lane’s faith

• [20:21]—Where to start learning about the desert father and mothers.

  • The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, translated by Benedicta Ward

  • The Forgotten Desert Mothers by Laura Swan

• [22:17]—Why it’s so important to read “dangerous books” and what qualifies as dangerous

• [26:06]—“The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong. . . .The universe is the primary revelation of the divine, the primary scripture, the primary locus of divine-human communion.” from The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, & Religion in the 21st Century by Thomas Berry

• [27:06]—Dr. Lane’s thoughts on how we recapture the idea that God is both transcendent and immanent

• [32:01]—Why it’s important that humans are “at the top” of creation, but why it doesn’t mean what we think

• [35:07]—How people who don’t feel naturally inclined to go into the wild or who don’t have access can still have the same spiritual experience

• [38:09]—Dr. Lane’s suggestions for getting started with a wilderness spiritual practice

• [41:17]—What gives Dr. Lane hope for the future of faith

• [44:45]—Fun Rapid Fire questions

• [50:48]—The Heart of Matter and The Divine Milieu by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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Credits

This episode was produced by The Sophia Society. Music is by Faith in Foxholes, and sound engineering is by Joshua Mudge.