When grief drove him to the desert, Lane heard the sound of silence

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 16, 1998 by Jeannette Batz

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 mother's agonizingly slow death and to somehow make peace with his father's 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 world's 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 fool's errand," he would write of his search to find meaning in pain, "it's 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, canting 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 I'd just given birth and I wanted to send her to the king's court," he said, his shrug as awkward as a boy's.

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. "I'm 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 tradition's 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 don't know what to call myself anymore," he said. "I am Presbyterian and Catholic, not totally at home in either house but loving both." Lane's next book, on John Calvin's notion of the natural world as a theater of God's 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 dog's 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 don't 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 can't talk about it anymore and you play with metaphors," Lane said. "God's love is like making love, or being at a mother's breast, but no, it's not like that at all. ... In this constructing and deconstructing, you dance around the center of something that's 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 I'm 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."