Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice

287 Pages·2014·1.79 MB·English

by  Belden C. Lane

Backpacking with the Saints

Backpacking
with the Saints
Wilderness Hiking
as Spiritual Practice
z
BELDEN C. LANE
1
1
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For my Dad, William Belden Curnow
Presumed to be lost on wilderness paths,
but not for a lack of love.
A man is never lost, he has only been mislaid.
—Terry Russell, On the Loose1
Stand still. The forest knows
where you are. You must let it find you.
—David Wagoner, “Lost”2
Wilderness is not a luxury, but a necessity of the human spirit.
—Ed Abbey, Desert Solitaire
There are some who can live without wild things, and some who
cannot.
—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
Simplicity in all things is the secret of the wilderness and one of its most
valuable lessons. It is what we leave behind that is important.
—Sigurd Olson, The Singing Wilderness
In the first place you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out
of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands
and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus.
When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something,
maybe. Probably not.
—Ed Abbey, Desert Solitaire
I wasn’t out here to keep myself from having to say I am not afraid.
I’d come, I realized, to stare that fear down, to stare everything down,
really—all that I’d done to myself and all that had been done to me. I
couldn’t do that while tagging along with someone else.
—Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Not being lost is not a matter of getting back to where you started from;
it is a decision not to be lost wherever you happen to find yourself. It’s
simply saying, “I’m not lost, I’m right here.”
—Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival
Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great
book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look
below you! Note it; read it. God, who you want to discover, never wrote
that book with ink; instead He set before your eyes the things that He
had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?
—Augustine, The City of God
I don’t think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the
Bible is. It is a hypaethral book, such as Thoreau talked about—a book
open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther
outdoors the better.
—Wendell Berry, Christianity and the Survival of Creation
Solvitur ambulando (It is solved by walking)
—Medieval saying, attributed to St. Jerome

Contents
Permissions xi
Prologue xiii
PART ONE: The Power of Wilderness and the Reading
of Dangerous Texts
1. The Allure of the Wild: Backpacking as Spiritual Practice 3
2. The Risk-Taking Character of Wilderness Reading 16
PART TWO: The Pattern of Wilderness Spirituality
first leg: departure (leaving the trailhead)
3. Venturing Out: The Irish Wilderness and Columba of Iona 33
4. Disillusionment: Laramie Peak and Thérèse of Lisieux 46
5. Desire: Rockpile Mountain Wilderness and Thomas Traherne 58
second leg: discipline (the practice of the wild)
6. Solitude: Bell Mountain Wilderness and Søren Kierkegaard 73
7. Traveling Light: Gunstock Hollow and Dag Hammarskjöld 85
8. Mindfulness: Moonshine Hollow and Thich Nhat Hanh 97
third leg: descent (when the trail gets rough)
9. Fear: The Maze in Canyonlands and John of the Cross 113