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Just Another Jim

Just Another Essay



The Solace of Fierce Landscapes

Essay Posted May 15, 2007 by James E. Nelson

I want to revisit a question posed in my journal of our Gulf Coast mission trip with the IOCC: Why travel all the way to Louisiana when there are needs closer to home? The two answers I offered in the journal were (1) the opportunity presented itself at a time when no similar opportunities were known to me at home, and (2) because of the magnitude of the destruction the need along the Gulf Coast continues to be overwhelming even as we approach the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

I recently purchased a new book at my favorite bookstore, Eighth Day Books, in Wichita, KS. The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, by Presbyterian minister Belden C. Lane, is subtitled, “Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality.” The book added another dimension to my understanding of such mission trips. This justification is nothing new; it is part and parcel of the piety in which I grew up, but it’s something I had partially dismissed and partially forgotten about because of how it has traditionally been cast in popular Christianity.

As I have observed on various occasions, popular piety (and academic theology, for that matter) frequently fails to understand where their ideas come from. The result is that a perfectly good biblical idea gets turned into a caricature of itself. In this essay I offer another example. In high school and college many events were aimed at achieving a “mountaintop experience.” Everything from YouthQuake at a little Bible College in Saskatchewan just north of where I grew up to summer camp in the Rockies, to regional youth retreats were billed as having the potential to be such experiences. In Bible College I began to become uncomfortable with the idea and that discomfort and skepticism was focused by a silly little song sung by Amy Grant (that me and my group of skeptical friends loved to make fun of) about meeting God on the mountaintop.

In the Old Testament the people of Israel encountered God on the mountaintop at various times, Mt. Sinai being the archetypal divine encounter. In St. Matthew’s version of the Gospel, a whole series of important events occur on mountaintops (The Sermon on the Mount, the Feeding of the 5000, the Transfiguration, etc.), but Bible mountains seemed substantively different than Amy Grant’s silly little mountaintop or my summer mountaintop experiences at Bible Camp. A few years later I took sociology and psychology courses at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, KS as well as theology courses under Prof. John Riest at Central Baptist Seminary, and I began to develop a proper context for my skepticism. The happy mountaintop experience (the mountaintop experience of the average ‘70s youth group) is an idea developed and promulgated by psychiatrist Abraham Maslow. Although Maslow was no mere pop psychologist, many of his ideas, including the mountaintop experience, entered into our general vocabulary. Many Christians grasped that idea and confused it with what happened to Moses on Sinai as well as Peter and John the high mountain.

But Biblical mountains are inhabited by a God of a different species. Moses was awe-struck by the burning bush. The children of Israel were terrified of Sinai, Peter and John were dumbfounded at the Transfiguration. Biblical mountaintop experiences may be dramatic and life-changing, but they are rarely pleasant affairs.

Dr. Lane observes that our love affair with mountains is a recent thing and that mountains were largely avoided rather than climbed until the fifteenth century (p. 42). Mountains were fearsome and frightening. In the book, while observing a difference between desert and mountain, he tends to view the two experiences as essentially the same thing, calling them, more generically “wilderness experiences” (p. 41).

In the wilderness, people typically find a metaphorical edge (a cliff, an endless horizon in the distance, an unscalable peak between “here” and some destination). The wilderness offers “thresholds” between where people have been and where they are going (p. 38). One can begin a trip into a wilderness comfortably enough, but the expanses and harshness of the place eventually strip the soul naked, so that when God is finally encountered, there is nothing to insulate us from the magnitude of the experience save the divine grace in which God clothes himself.

In the Old Testament, the prophets and people went to the desert to encounter God unencumbered. In the Christian monastic traditions of both east and west, the favored locations for monasteries were either deserts or austere mountains—in either case, places that were inhospitable. Such is also true of the Buddhist communities in Tibet and is the normal pattern of the Sufiism, the contemplative tradition of Islam. In a wonderful turn of phrase, Lane says, “Mountain and desert experience is a ‘wintery’ phenomenon, more kenotic than pleromic, more given to being emptied than to being filled” (p. 37).

Our trip to Louisiana contained neither the mystery nor the grandeur of a pilgrimage to Mt. Sinai or week of fasting in the high desert plains of Wyoming or New Mexico, but certainly one of the attractions to the trip before we ever signed up was that it was “more kenotic than pleromic” (in all the theological richness that those terms imply). St. Paul tells us, in Philippians, that we are to have the same mind as Christ, who emptied himself (the Greek word is kenosis). In stark contrast, the pleroma is the “fullness” (as in the fullness of Christ who fills all in all (Eph 1:23).

There is a fullness of the world that can satiate us, satisfy us with the here and now so that we no longer hunger for God. But the pleroma of Christ, who fills all in all, can only come to those who have emptied themselves of all competing desires and things.

In our everyday lives certain patterns develop, certain attitudes become ingrained. In turn, others come to expect us to do certain things and act certain ways. A comfortable rhythm of life develops. But as we grow in Christ, those patterns and attitudes become increasingly unsatisfactory while at the same time are increasingly difficult transcend because that is what others expect of us.

Occasionally we must intentionally break the familiar patterns in order to break into something new. I could have pounded nails in Sioux City, but the experience would have presented no boundaries; there would have been no new thresholds I would have had to cross. Even though we had an air conditioned room, plenty of food, and a comfortable context in which to work, Mandeville, Louisiana was a sort of wilderness of expectations where I was free to consider—and then to cross into—patterns and attitudes that were unfamiliar. In short, Louisiana was a place to work out my salvation with fear and trembling (Phil 2:12), rather than settle for the ease of the familiar and comforting.