Illuminations When grief drove him to the desert, Lane heard the sound of
silence
By JEANNETTE
BATZ Special to the National Catholic
Reporter St. Louis
A deeply human theologian, fascinated by sacred space and story,
Belden Lane, has searched every tradition for divine truth. After a
revival-camp youth and years at the evangelical Moody Bible Institute, he moved
to doctoral studies in historical theology at Princeton, became a Presbyterian
minister and wove Jewish stories, African fables and Zen koans into 21 years of
teaching at Jesuit St. Louis University.
Then, a few years ago, he found himself struggling to understand
his mothers agonizingly slow death and to somehow make peace with his
fathers mysterious death four decades earlier. (Had it been murder or
suicide? Had the boy not loved him well enough?)
Traditional theology was too abstract for such intimate despair.
None of the worlds stories, prayers or aphorisms could pierce it. So Lane
went to the hot emptiness of the desert alone.
In the tradition of Catholic mysticism, he journeyed mainly by
staying put, relieving his daily academic and family routines with occasional
trips into the wilderness to feed his soul.
If in certain respects, this is a fools errand,
he would write of his search to find meaning in pain, its one
anchored in deep longing, a quest leading into a place of
brokenness where divine mercy must suffice. Other present sorrows folded
into the loss of his parents. For a dark time, half a year, he could not write
at all.
Then the words came, a freshet of language flowing around
obstacles, carrying him to the edge of the inexpressible. The Solace of
Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality is an
extraordinary book fusing memory, sadness and hope with history, geography,
formal theology, poetic evocations and deft social commentary. When he
finished, the often reticent Lane surprised himself by sending his manuscript
to Oxford University Press, the best publisher he knew.
I felt like Id just given birth and I wanted to send
her to the kings court, he said, his shrug as awkward as a
boys.
She was admitted and released nationwide, with a cover in burnt
sienna. Provisional, as all theology must be, the work draws on the teaching
authority of those on the margins, Lane said -- persons who are dying,
residents of nursing homes, the poor, people at the edges of sanity and
despair.
The test of hospital gowns
All theologizing, if it is worth its salt, he writes,
must submit to the test of hospital gowns, droning television sets, food
spilled in the clumsy effort to eat. What can be said of God that may be spoken
without shame in the presence of those who are dying?
The book, he said, left him with the sense that I had done
something I had been born to do.
Unaccustomed to such drama in his own life, he swiftly distanced
ego from euphoria. Im not in that same desperate place
anymore, he said. I was writing to people burned out on shallow
religion, longing for something to hope in. He does not see it as the
last word. A reader coming at it from that point of emptiness can answer
these questions maybe even better than I can now.
In his years of teaching in a Catholic institution, Lane has
marked the traditions beauty and let it influence him. His book, he said,
is a very Catholic one. Yet his way of exploring the mystical
stages of purgation, illumination and union and connecting them with desert,
mountain and cloud, succeeds in transcending theological lines.
I dont know what to call myself anymore, he
said. I am Presbyterian and Catholic, not totally at home in either house
but loving both. Lanes next book, on John Calvins notion of
the natural world as a theater of Gods glory, is taking him back to his
Reformed Protestant roots.
Calvin spoke of the earth as a very fragile thing ... [a]
cast of thousands, that gives glory to God. How? By their very
being, he said. The dogs dogness gives honor, as does ... the
way the water flows.
What about the desert -- does it give praise? Surely it
does, he said. But cautiously. I dont want to presume to
speak too much for the desert because it takes back everything you say about
it. There is, he said, a sense that the desert forces you to a
cessation of all speech.
When Lane wrote The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, it was as
a performance of apophatic spirituality, a spirituality that emphasizes our
inability to know or define God.
You go to that place where you cant talk about it
anymore and you play with metaphors, Lane said. Gods love is
like making love, or being at a mothers breast, but no, its not
like that at all. ... In this constructing and deconstructing, you dance around
the center of something thats hidden. For the lucky ones, he said,
something happens, something in the center reveals itself, and you find
yourself loved when you never thought you could be.
Watching the trees
God knows Im not a pray-er, he said. But through
desperation, he went nightly to his back yard, first following the Jesuit
tradition, examining the day, then listing the people he prays for, and finally
just lying there watching the trees or stars, letting go of all thoughts
and images, without putting any meaning into what I might be
experiencing.
Lane stays silent a few seconds. Then he grins. Sometimes it
means ending up falling asleep. And sometimes it means suddenly noticing that
40 minutes have gone by, and I didnt know where I was.
More questions about contemplation only make him nervous.
The danger is that someone will take a book like this as a handbook.
Theres also a danger in thinking that the desert experience is a very
individualistic one, that you just do your own thing and enter into bliss. My
reading of the desert mothers and fathers and this whole desert tradition is
that its incredibly communal. It is a life together that the desert
invites us to and demands of us.
All of that stuff we tend to think of as so messed up in
organized religion ... all of that is desert, too. What matters is simply to
stay in one place and be still, he adds. Its very much
like a Zen master. They dont give you any of the things you want to hear.
What do I do? You dont do anything. You go about your daily work, weave
palm fronds or teach classes or write books, and while you are doing that you
pray and pray without ceasing. Staying in community, staying in your
place.
Ah, but in America at the end of the second millennium thats
awfully hard to do. Lane nods, conceding the point partially. It seems
kind of obvious to say that this is utterly countercultural. The desert
Christians were renegades, they rejected a Greco-Roman culture that was given
to militarism and consumerism and they took on another practice that was
radically different. That much hasnt changed. Today, there are so many
people longing for authenticity, for an ability to pay attention, to be present
to God, to find community that is meaningful. The same desires are there. We
just dont know how to do it anymore. We want to get out in the wilds and
we take our 24-foot motor home.
The desert does not, Lane hastens to add, seek the destruction of
the self. Nor does it preach a contemptus mundi, a scorn for the world.
I teach American culture. Im fascinated with it, he remarks.
Its not a dropping out that Im after, but the adoption of a
discipline, within the midst of everything else, that allows us to be who we
want to be.
In the midst of materialism
Many find that desert freedom smack in the middle of materialism.
Lane mentions the desert mothers and fathers hes watched at
Karen Catholic Worker House in St. Louis; and the people in AIDS hospices and
addiction programs. This whole apophatic tradition leads to
justice, he observes. The danger in reaching out for social
justice, though, is that we get so caught up in our ego, thinking of ourselves
as a person who cares. The apophatic tradition insists on a kind of nakedness
of intent.
You cant start the journey with your eye on the prize. You
must be content with nothingness, free to act without expecting anything at all
in return.
And, in return? There is a meeting and being met, Lane
said quietly. You cant talk about some great spiritual experience,
even though you have a sense that you have been met and loved.
He talks a moment about the purity of a love that lets you sit
with someone -- his wife of 31 years, for example -- in long periods of
silence, expecting nothing. But theres self-love, too, in keeping still.
Belden Lane has been, for years, a man so eager to help and please, even if it
meant serving on 300 dry university committees and advising 3,000 students in
extremis, that he finally put up a framed sign to himself: Say no. One of the
quotes he chose for this book came from social analyst Ivan Illich: The
emptiness of the desert makes it possible to learn the almost impossible: The
joyful acceptance of our uselessness.
Joyful sounds, at first, like a word superimposed on dreary
maturity to gloss it up a bit. Yet when Belden Lane says hes a different
person now, hes referring to his release from despair. Friends say
hes wittier now, more playful, less intense.
I have a sense of having moved from desolation to
consolation, he confides. I know Ill discover loss again. But
right now Im wandering in meadows and delighting in it.
National Catholic Reporter, October 16,
1998
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