Project MUSE - Backpacking with the Saints: The Risk Taking Character of Wilderness Reading The Risk Taking Character of Wilderness Reading Belden C. Lane (bio) Abstract The lives of the saints are full of stories about the life-changing experience of reading classic texts in provocative, wilderness places. The author of this essay points to his own practice of taking classics of Christian spirituality on wilderness backpacking trips as a metaphor of the risks involved in spiritual reading generally. Drawing on Augustine’s understanding of the dynamic relationship between the reading of a text and the place in which one reads it, he examines the reading process in light of the “two-books” tradition (reading scripture and nature together), offering three vignettes from his own experience of wilderness reading. For years I have been making solo backpacking trips into the wilderness of the Missouri Ozarks. Leaving on a Friday afternoon, I'll invariably stuff a copy of one of the spiritual classics into my well-worn Kelty pack. I hike at times with John Ruysbroeck or Hildegard of Bingen, now and then with Rumi or Lao-tzu. Old mountains seem to invite the company of old teachers. Some of the oldest rock on the continent lies in the St.

Francois Mountains of southeast Missouri. The creek beds are lined with Precambrian granite and pink rhyolite, rocks over a billion and a half years old. For some reason the texts of these wizened old travelers always speak with more authority in the Ozark back country than in the safety of my office back home. It may have something to do with the community of those who attend my reading there—the white-tailed deer in the brush, red-tailed hawks overhead, even the rock itself. In the Ozark wilderness, reading becomes a far more participative, and hazardous, activity than I'm accustomed to realizing. The unpredictable land becomes an accompanying text, read alongside the bound volume I carry with me. Much has been written on reading as a spiritual practice and, to a lesser extent, on the experience of reading in a wilderness setting. 1 My concern in this essay is to use wilderness reading as a way of talking about the risk and relinquishment to which we expose ourselves in reading classic texts anywhere. Spiritual reading is always a dangerous exercise, threatening to overthrow our previous ways of looking at the world. Sometimes the place of the reading adds even more to the vulnerability we encounter through the text itself.

Claus Westermann read the psalms in a Russian prison camp, discovering patterns that changed his life as well as his approach to biblical scholarship. Eldridge Cleaver's reading of Thomas Merton in Folsom Prison, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's reading of Dostoyevsky in a Soviet cancer ward, even Karl Marx's reading of the history of capitalism in the British Museum and Virginia Woolf's reading of women's fiction in a domestic setting ("a room of one's own") all indicate the potentially revolutionary associations people make between explosive texts and the places where they read them. 2 My own practice of reading in a wilderness setting has not infrequently resulted in provocative, even life-changing experiences. My intention is to [End Page 23] Lane | Backpacking with the Saints Spiritus 8 (2008): 23–43 © 2008 by The Johns Hopkins University Press reflect on this experience in light of the long history of wilderness reading in the lives of the saints and the importance of the two-books tradition in the history of Christian interpretation.

Since John Chrysostom and Augustine, special significance has been attached to reading the book of scripture alongside the book of nature, as if creation itself (and the place of one's reading) should have a definitive influence on what one reads. I define "wilderness reading," then, as a spiritual practice, generally undertaken in solitude, in a place that puts the reader on edge, cut off from the safe assurances of the familiar. It might even happen close to home, but "home" will inevitably be redefined in the process of the reading experience. Given the unique, isolated character of this exercise, the reader will also have to test his or her conclusions by attending to the book of scripture (from the perspective of the entire Christian tradition), as well as to the habitus (the pattern of communal experience) of those who have lived in such a place over an extended period of time and reflected on its meaning. 3 All of this protects the reader from the excesses of private interpretation. Reading in the Wild: A Recurring Pattern in the History of Spirituality Repeatedly in the lives of the saints we find a convergence of texts that challenge one's thinking with places that stir the imagination.

The Christian tradition is full of stories of saints moved by their experience of reading in a wooded or exotic wilderness setting. The pattern suggests something important about the effect of the environment on the interpretation of texts as well as the nature of spiritual transformation. The surprising thing is how little attention scholars have given to the role that place plays in religious experience and the reading process generally. 4 In the solitude of the fourth-century Syrian Desert, Jerome read his Greek New Testament outside a cave to which he retreated before beginning his work on the Vulgate. In multiple paintings of the scene, Renaissance artist Giovanni Bellini celebrated the image of the wilderness saint wholly absorbed in his reading. On the rocky coast of Lindisfarne in seventh-century Scotland, Cuthbert was accustomed to reading the psalms each morning while standing waist deep in the crashing surf. As he came ashore afterwards, the brothers said that a seal would often come to lie on his feet to warm them. Savoring the view of the deep valley of the Aube outside his monastery at Clairvaux, Bernard delighted in pouring over the pages of the Canticle. Out of this passionate reading emerged his eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs. St.

Seraphim immersed himself in reading the Philokalia each day in the dense and hostile forest, the taiga, of nineteenth-century Russia beyond his monastery at Sarov. In the twelfth-century Rhineland, overlooking the monastery vineyards at Bingen, Hildegard and her sisters—fresh from their work [End Page 24] with the vines—regularly read the holy office with dirt under their fingernails. In the Kentucky woods north of Gethsemani in the mid-1960s, Thomas Merton read Meister Eckhart, his "life-raft," to the sound of rain falling on the hermitage roof. He was drawn throughout his life to a habit of reading in the woods, atop the fire tower on Vineyard Knob, or on the porch of his hermit's hut, listening to the wind in the pines. In other stories, life-changing experiences often emerge from shocking encounters with familiar texts in out-of-the-way places. In a liminal space, at a transitional moment between significant parts of their lives, the saints discover an unexpected and remarkably-textured reading of the work they encounter. It takes on new life in the offbeat, unpredictable place.

At an important point in his life, Isaac of Nineveh retreated to the desert solitude of the Zagros Mountains north of the Persian Gulf in sixth-century Persia. There he made himself blind through his constant study of the tearstained pages of the holy books. Francis of Assisi, near the end of his life, read the story of Christ's passion not only from the pages of the gospels, but from the huge, split rocks atop the cliffs on Mt. La Verna. It was revealed to him that these crevices had been opened on Good Friday afternoon when the rocks on Calvary were also rent. The awareness came to him, not accidentally, as he experienced the opening of wounds in his own body through the gift of the stigmata. The mountainous terrain and his body's interaction with it became active participants in his reading of the text. 5 Similarly, Teilhard de Chardin read mass in the wastes of the Ordos Desert in inner Mongolia on the feast of the Transfiguration in 1923. Lacking bread, wine, or altar in this faraway place, he made the whole earth his altar, celebrating the Eucharistic presence of Christ everywhere in the universe.

He, too, conceived of a desolate place on the steppes of Asia as intimately sharing with him in the mystery of transfigured glory. Outdoor Reading as Transformative Experience In the history of the saints, therefore, reading is often more than a solitary, indoor affair, pursued in the shelter of monasteries and libraries. Their narratives suggest that there are books best read outside the enclosure of walls, where pages get dirty and have to be held down against the whipping of the wind. Most of the psalms should be read outdoors, perhaps, as well as the long version of Daniel's third chapter. Francis of Assisi might best be read in Umbrian fields of red poppies, even as John Scotus Eriugena's reflections on creation come more fully alive in the Western highlands of Scotland. I once spent a week with John Climacus' Ladder of Divine Ascent, trekking through the Sinai wilderness toward Saint Catherine's Monastery. The words echoed in my dreams every night, reverberating through the rock-strewn desert in which they had been written. [End Page 25] Click for larger view View full resolution Leaving Lembert Dome, Dusk. Copyright © G.

Dan Mitchell It is not simply that classics should be read in the landscape that formed them, valid as that may be. The experience of the saints, after all, is indelibly molded by their environment. "An individual is not distinct from his place," said Gabriel Marcel, "he is that place." 6 Yet this is as true for the reader as it is the writer. Sensitivity to where we read a given text becomes an important part of what we find in reading it. Pondering the sayings of Abba Macarius in the Egyptian desert is a compelling experience. But reading him outside, in any wilderness setting where I lack a sense of control, may be nearly as good. If the place of one's reading offers a distinct entry into the text, then a wild and forbidding place multiplies even further its excess of meaning. Wilderness adds a sharp edge to the reading of any religious work. In a culture where children increasingly grow up with what Richard Louv calls "nature-deficit disorder"—a deprivation of spontaneous and uncontrolled outdoor experience—it is more important than ever that spiritual learning be exposed to the risks of the wild. 7 How, then, can we view wilderness reading as a metaphor of any serious encounter with a significant text?

What difference does it make to read spiritual classics in a rustic, wilderness environment? Does the act of reading itself subtly change when I'm far from the nearest road, unprotected from weather and exposed to the unknown, depending entirely on what I've been able to carry on my back? How does a nagging sense of vulnerability affect the hermeneutic of back-country reading? How does any experience of reading outdoors become potentially transformative? [End Page 26] St. Augustine asked himself this question in writing his Confessions . There he used the metaphor of fire to describe the process of encountering any spiritual text. As a teacher of rhetoric, he knew there is ever the risk of being burned, the danger of being set afire, by what one reads. He recognized this to be especially the case when reading is pursued outdoors. 8 He understood how the ambience of one's reading can stir the embers of a smoldering text. In relating his conversion experience, for example, he analyzed what happens when one submits himself to a particular text within a context that heightens one's susceptibility to it.

He employed the literary technique of a twinned narrative in disclosing his experience, setting it alongside an account of another individual who had similarly been transformed by reading the saints in an outside garden setting. He spoke first of his friend Ponticianus who had read Athanasius' Life of Anthony while strolling through a garden outside the walls of Trier. Ponticianus' encounter with the book had changed his life, as if reading "outside the city walls" sharpened his attentiveness, connecting him more readily to "the fecund wastelands of the desert" in which Anthony himself had practiced his faith. Augustine immediately followed this narrative with a nearly identical story of his own conversion, in which he picks up a copy of the letters of the apostle Paul while sitting in a garden in Milan. 9 He pointedly mentions having retreated "as far from the house as possible," finding refuge "under a fig-tree," when he heard the words of a child singing, "Take and read." What he read from the book of Romans in that moment cut him to the quick. The text called him, as it had Anthony, from the compulsive gratification of his desires to a new desert freedom.

The book's invitation to radical abandonment became transformative for him, partly because he read it outside the containment and safety of city walls. The place suggested a vulnerability that matched the prompting of the text. Augustine went on later, in the final book of his Confessions, to explain why spiritual reading can be so life-changing when practiced outside. This way of reading touches the human soul with such power, he says, because it occasions the simultaneous reading of two books—God's truth inscribed in writing and God's voice proclaimed in nature. These two different "texts," when read together, are ruthlessly able to cut through human defenses and draw the soul to beauty. "We know no other books with the like power to lay pride low and so surely to silence the obstinate contender," the Bishop of Hippo insisted. He knew how the majesty of a Mediterranean thunderstorm, stretching across the vault of the heavens, can be as compelling (in its own "veiled" and "tantalizing" way) as the voice of God conveyed through biblical writers. 10 The book of nature communicates a danger and beauty that stirs the senses, opening the soul to the corresponding truth one finds in the written text of scripture.

[End Page 27] Both books, in other words, possess the highly provocative quality of classic texts. Classics, by definition, are dangerous and unpredictable phenomena. David Tracy says they confront us with the disturbing notion that "something else might be the case." 11 They haunt us with fundamental questions. Yet, for people like myself, challenging books may lose some of their bite when read at home in temperature-controlled comfort and artificial light. Wild terrain, on the other hand, magnifies their risk. The Irish Wilderness in southern Missouri, for example, enhances the demanding character of Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses buried somewhere in my pack. The landscape's winding streams and limestone caves create in time and space the limit-experience that the timeless text tries to promote. As I hike, canoe, and explore caves in such a terrain, my body participates in the stretching that the book requires of my mind. I'm invited to leave behind any sense of comforting security, so as to enter more fully into the experience of Moses as he treks through the desert, up the mountain, and into a cloud of inexplicable darkness.

Backpacking as Mimetic Activity So what are the advantages of reading spiritual classics by firelight, three days from the trailhead, with storm clouds gathering in the western sky? The discipline of backpacking exposes the hiker in the most vigorous way to the tactile lessons of the book of nature. It mimics the experience of the saints, cultivating wilderness virtues which enliven the process of hearing, interpreting, and practicing what one reads. For lovers of the unmarked trail, the act of wilderness reading echoes and reinforces the virtues of simplicity, attentiveness, and fearlessness that the saints themselves have written about so often and that years of backpacking have instilled in the readers as well. I read, in other words, out of a well-entrenched disposition (and need) to risk. My teacher in this is St. John Climacus, the sixth-century abbot of the monastery at Mt. Sinai. John understood the correlation between physical survival in a rugged landscape and the hardy exercise of gospel virtues. He arranged his teachings on the spiritual life after a pattern of thirty rungs leading up the Ladder of Divine Ascent. These were instructions to desert monks trying to live a life of faith in a wild and desolate land.

Three of the most important virtues, or rungs, on his ladder include: • haplotes (the simplicity of moving through the world without being attached) • agrupnia (a careful attentiveness to everything around and within oneself) • aphobia (a fearless resistance to all threats, imagined as well as real) On John's ladder they constitute rungs 24, 20, and 21, respectively. 12 [End Page 28] These are virtues the landscape itself helps to foster. In John's mind, the Sinai desert teaches them as effectively as do the words of scripture. "Unadorned simplicity" (haplotes), he explained, resists all the temptations of an urban life marked by a wealth of possessions and activities. It turns its face from the world, rejecting the clever complexities of sophisticated Roman culture. The word literally refers to a delight in "non-abundance," a quality that John saw best exemplified in Paul the Simple, one of the earliest desert monks. 13 The alertness of agrupnia is another virtue acquired by desert dwellers, who have learned to keep vigil through the dark hours of the night.

It resists the grogginess of sleep in the silence before the dawn. The wakeful monk, says John, is as alert to the psalms in the night offices as he is at meals or in lively conversation with others. Even in his sleep, there is an alertness honed by a careful attentiveness to the psalms. Similarly, the practice of aphobia grows out of a life that has faced all the fears of solitude and the unexpected sounds of the night in a desert landscape. John knows how easily "minds are unhinged" by such experiences. But "do not hesitate to go in the dark of the night to those places where you are normally frightened," he says. Armed with prayer, the soul can be unafraid, "even when the body is terrified." 14 These are virtues taught by wilderness backpacking as well. A thru-hiker on the Appalachian Trail can find them in the demands of a twenty-mile day trek as readily as in the spiritual writings carried along in his or her pack. They bring a new immediacy to the reading one practices on the trail. In wilderness, one learns to read the saints through the eyes of nature and the book of nature through the eyes of the saints.

Virtue, however, is never an automatic result of back-country experience. We have to disavow any geographical determinism that would privilege wilderness encounters as uniquely and inherently holy. I offer "backpacking with the saints" as simply a metaphor of risk-taking in reading, not claiming an experience in the wild as the only way of discovering such risk. Yet a transformed life can (and often does) emerge from a practice of sustained reading that involves the studied example of the saints, an imaginative interchange with the natural terrain, and a sustained habitus of concentrated practice. Backpacking combines all three. It teaches a simplicity, attentiveness, and fearlessness that the saints write about, but that I never understand so clearly as when carrying a forty-pound pack down a winding path through dark trees. Reading the Second Book through the Eyes of the Saints The experience of reading the saints in a forest clearing, or along a canyon's edge, yields a different cluster of meanings from when I contemplate the same text quietly at home. In reading outside, as Augustine argued, I engage two [End Page 29] books at once. The metaphor of pondering God's self-disclosure in two accompanying volumes has a long history in the church's life.

Theologians have routinely encouraged the simultaneous reading of these "complementary texts." 15 Studying the first book of scripture alongside the second book of nature allows for the interweaving of multiple modes of discourse. It supplies mutual commentary and suggests a wider play of the imagination in the difficult work of interpretation. This is no less true of one's encounter with scripture as sifted through the writings of the saints. The "two-books" tradition thrives in the work of classic writers in the Christian tradition who have celebrated creation as a genuine revelation of God's wisdom, goodness, power, and love. Anthony of Egypt, when asked how he could live a devout life in the desert without holy books, answered that "My book is the nature of created things and any time I want to read the words of God the book is there before me." John Chrysostom observed that even the illiterate can read God's truth in the book of nature. It doesn't require the knowledge of any particular written language. 16 Bonaventure spoke of a duplex liber, a double book containing the mystery of the Holy Trinity in scripture and the vestiges of the Trinity discernable in the natural world around him.

Cotton Mather declared nature a "publick library" available to everyone, even as Meister Eckhart, echoing Psalm 19, insisted that all creatures—even caterpillars—are words clearly spoken by God. 17 Many in the tradition recognize that one's ability to read and interpret this "second book" aright is limited because of human sin. Catholics as well as Protestants caution that the book of nature ought always to be read in the light of scripture, lest one be tempted to exalt the beauty of the creature over the magnificence of the Creator. Some, emphasizing Romans 1:20, suggest that the knowledge of God received from nature serves as little more than a basis for judgment, marking those who claim an insufficient knowledge of the divine as being "without excuse." 18 On the other hand, fifteenth-century Spanish theologian Raymond of Sabunde could go so far as to argue that "the book of the creature" provides a more reliable reading of God's truth than the bible, being less susceptible to impious interpretation. 19 His idea was rejected by the Council of Trent as failing to honor the priority of scripture and tradition.

But the prospect of heresy has never prevented saints and scholars from extolling nature as an authentic "mirror," "school," or "theatre" of God's grandeur and providential care. The enduring popularity of the "second book" in the Christian imagination is undeniable. From the hexaemeral literature in the early church and widely-read medieval bestiaries to Puritan emblem books in the seventeenth century and contemporary writers like Annie Dillard, Christians have regularly turned to the tome of nature as an eloquent source of spiritual insight. My own habit of back-country reading is but a sharing in this longer tradition. [End Page 30] Experiments in Wilderness Reading The best way to explain the dynamics of the two-book tradition in spiritual reading may be to share three examples of my own wilderness encounters with particular texts. Hopefully these offer a deeper entry into the desert virtues of John Climacus as well as a better grasp of how the reading of words and the reading of landscape potently interact in human experience. The three places visited in a given calendar year are found along the Eastern edge of the Ozark bioregion, known for its spring-fed streams and karst geology.

It is a rugged and beautiful landscape, a text never exhausted by a single reading. Bell Mountain: John Bunyan on Simplicity It is late October and I'm bushwhacking my way down a ridge in the Bell Mountain Wilderness Area toward a ribbon of water sheltered by yellow and orange maple trees in the hollow below. I'll camp there along Shut-in Creek tonight, falling asleep to the sound of running water. I'll probably wake up in the middle of the night to the haunting cry of coyotes in the distance. But I'll recognize familiar stars and sleep through the rest of the night with the deep contentment that only wilderness affords. Half of the beauty in coming here is the simplicity it demands. Backpacking reminds me of how little I require to be happy, how light I can travel, how many of the resources I imagine I need are actually superfluous out in the wild. "We need great vigilance in all things," said John Climacus, "but especially in regard to what we have left behind." Haplotes, the deliberate abandonment of unimportant things, is a spiritual practice that wilderness teaches supremely well. I'll eat simply tonight, bread-on-a-stick baked over an open fire, washed down with creek water.

Here I'm reduced to a life that John Climacus described as "simple and uncompounded." 20 I've brought along on the trip a copy of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress , an apt choice for reflecting on simplicity and non-attachment. In Bunyan's allegory of the Christian life, his pilgrim undertakes a long trek through the wicket-gate into the wilderness and toward the Celestial City. He stoutly leaves behind every distraction in embracing the path before him. His route passes through the Slough of Despond where he nearly drowns. He loses the trail as he takes what seems an easier way through By-pass Meadow. He trudges up the Hill of Difficulty and through the Valley of Humiliation. Disoriented again and again, he recovers the path as he sights the wooded slopes of the Delectable Mountains in the distance. Beyond them lies his destination. I think of his difficulties as I recall how many times I've been tricked while hiking into or out of this winding hollow at the foot of Bell Mountain. The similar-looking ravines leading into it twist in different directions.

I've often been convinced I was on the right one, only to find myself an hour later several [End Page 31] miles from where I had expected to be. One has to trust the compass in hiking such terrain. The easier or most obvious path is often the wrong one. Nor are there openings in the trees where seeing the distant mountain can restore a clear perspective. Careless misjudgment is a weight one can't afford to carry in these woods. A prerequisite to hiking the Ozark wilderness is being stripped of one's certainties and preconceptions. It's never exactly what I expect. Only by trusting the map and relinquishing the presumptions I bring along with me can I move lightly enough to find my way. Bunyan speaks of Christian starting his journey with a heavy burden. This isn't a backpack with basics to sustain him along the trail. It is a heavier, inner burden that falls from his shoulders only as he passes overhanging cliffs, ascending a hill to the place of a cross. 21 One invariably carries two packs when hiking into wilderness. I can adjust the straps on one easily enough, but releasing the other is always beyond my skill.

It holds all the things I come here to relinquish—my stubborn insistence on going the wrong way, the fragile reputation I try to nourish back home, the failure to hold myself accountable as husband, father, and friend. The work of the trail is to loosen the grip of this inner baggage, reminding me how little control I have of anything out here in the wilderness. "A snake can shed its old skin only if it crawls into a tight hole," John Climacus wisely observed. 22 Bunyan had penned his classic tale from a tight place of his own, having spent twelve and a half years in a Bedfordshire prison between 1660 and 1675. He had been convicted of preaching without a license as a non-conformist Protestant in Restoration England. His jail cell was located on a bridge overlooking the River Ouse. Deprived of everything but a Bible, the sound of flowing water, and his own dreams, he wrote from a place of forced simplicity. He gradually came to learn what this Ozark hollow tries to teach me as I wind my way over slippery, moss-covered rocks toward the singing creek in the distance.

The path toward wholeness invariably demands a stark simplicity, a letting go of many things I once thought important. Book and landscape alike are coconspirators in teaching an unsettling back-country truth. They both ask how much I can leave behind. Whispering Pines Trail: Jean-Pierre de Caussade on Attentiveness Several months have passed since my trip with Bunyan into the hollows below Bell Mountain. A January thaw has now arrived in Eastern Missouri. I've camped this time in a stand of red cedar trees on a bluff overlooking the River Aux Vases. It's a site along the south loop of Whispering Pines Trail in Hawn State Park. Surrounded by sculpted sandstone cliffs and canyons, this is a stunning landscape shaped by thousands of years of rushing water. I noticed clouds rolling in as I set up camp this afternoon. The temperature is beginning to drop and I ask myself if I've attended to everything necessary as [End Page 32] night comes on. I've tucked the ground cloth under the edges of the tent, suspended my backpack and food from a nearby tree, even put a Nalgene bottle of hot water in the bottom of my sleeping bag.

Paying attention to details is as natural here as it is necessary, particularly at this time of year. At home I'm easily distracted, often inattentive to the things around me. But surviving in the woods forces me to practice a sense of presence that carries over to home as well. This morning on the trail I was aware of the "bare ruin'd choirs" of a winter forest—shag-bark hickory and ironwood trees identifiable even without their leaves. I noticed deer tracks in sandy glades and gray-green lichens with their stunning red markings. I kept an eye out for bald eagles that sometimes nest here at this time of year. Learning to attend to the world through which I move is another virtue the wilderness teaches well. Click for larger view View full resolution Merced River & Ililliouette Canyon, Autumn. Copyright © G. Dan Mitchell The economic and ecological precariousness of the depressed counties in southeastern Missouri is readily apparent. I can't hike this section of federal land without being aware of its fragility as an ecosystem, the various dangers [End Page 36] that confront the bear I have just met, for example.

These include recent plans to sell parts of the Mark Twain National Forest to huge logging companies. Mining interests also pose a threat to wilderness land and to those who suffer from poverty in the surrounding area. Lead mining has endangered the health of children in this region for years. On the drive to the trailhead yesterday, I passed the Doe Run Company in Herculaneum and huge mounds of mine tailings near the old, abandoned smelter in Leadington. Such industries are responsible for unsafe levels of lead in local children's blood, far exceeding the national average. Moreover, the contamination reaches beyond our region. Doe Run currently operates a subsidiary plant in the mountains of La Oroya, Peru, where children suffer from lead in their blood at levels far higher than anything found in Missouri. 28 The land and its people cry out for justice, even as the wilderness itself evokes a fearlessness in speaking on its behalf. Julian of Norwich knew the imperilment of everything that lives in the natural world. Her visions speak of the whole of creation as sharing in the sufferings of Christ. 29 In her thinking, the earth (including the Ozarks) is like a hazelnut held in the palm of a woman's hand.

It's amazing that it exists at all; so easily it can fall into nothing. 30 Yet she knows ultimately that all will be well. There is nothing to fear. The God who commands our work for justice holds everything lovingly in her hand. The storm-swept top of Lindsay Mountain, the black bear coming through the brush, the economic threats facing the land and its people—all these elicit the fearlessness that John Climacus expected of his desert monks. In late antiquity the practice of aphobia often provoked controversy. At times it made the desert fathers politically dangerous. 31 In its early usage, the word implied a "lack of reverence," a refusal to defer, for example, to the authority of Imperial Rome (or to the intimidating power of companies who neglect their social responsibilities). What are the implications of aphobia for someone hiking in a place like this? As I go back home, I'm not at all sure of what it may demand of me. Lectio as Active, Engaged Reading What fascinates me in experiences like this is the quality of the reading that occurs when the "two books" are joined. What happens when one practices spiritual reading in a remote wilderness setting?

If lectio divina in the Benedictine tradition is a more circular than linear affair, involving a slower, more right-brained manner of reading, how does pursuing it in the backwater solitude of a national forest enhance still further the contemplative character of its meditation? 32 How do I account for the uncommonly rich interplay of factors that influence my practice of lectio alongside a spring-fed creek on the Ozark [End Page 37] Trail? There I give myself to a chosen text (protected from rain in a zip-lock bag), to the saint behind the text (bringing another world crashing into mine), to the multifaceted, sensuous earth around us (full of unexpected things), and to the mystery of myself (made newly vulnerable on the trail). For help in understanding what happens in such a moment, I reach haltingly for phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and literary theorists like Roland Barthes. Both insist there is nothing passive about the reading that transpires when I move with Bunyan, de Caussade, and Julian across the landscape of Sainte Genevieve County in southern Missouri. The places themselves participate in the understanding that emerges from my adventurous encounter with the texts.

The winding hollow at the foot of Bell Mountain, the falling snow along Whispering Pines Trail, the trickster character of a landscape always full of surprises—each of these is active, alive, and animate in the perception I have of them and the text alike. The same is potentially true of any place where we are intensely engaged in reading. When Merleau-Ponty contemplates the blue of the sky in the countryside of southern France, he is so immersed in the mystery of its reciprocal presence as to exclaim, "It thinks itself within me." He recognizes that the perceived as well as perceiver are both engrossed in the shared experience of perception. 33 We read with our bodies as much as we do with our minds. A complex inter-subjectivity becomes an inextricable dimension of wilderness reading as our bodies relate to the pulsing life-world around us. My collaborative interaction with the phenomenal world is far more apparent in the wild. Reading there is a "reading with." The "improvised duet" that goes on between my body and "the fluid, breathing landscape it inhabits" molds my perception of the text, as David Abram observes.

The sounds of rushing water, birds and tree frogs, the wind sweeping down the ridges all subtly suggest the origins of language—the mimicry of nature that first gave rise to human speech. 34 In the complementary differences between human and plant respiration, I'm aware that the trees and I virtually "breathe" each other, exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide. Thought patterns interact with the terrain. Reading becomes a personal encounter, an acquisition of wisdom as well as knowledge. I move with the flow of the life around me. Indeed, lines become hard to distinguish between my body, the world of the text, and the back country into which I've come. "For some people," says Barry Lopez, "what they are is not finished at the skin, but continues with the reach of the senses out into the land." 35 I experience that along the trail. Too often I live under the illusion of the unmistakable difference between myself and everything else. The "me—not me" distinction seems so clear.

My skin, as the set boundary of my body, precisely differentiates between me and the miscellaneous objects in my office—the book shelves and stacks of paper "out there." [End Page 38] But in the woods, I pass in and through the world with more fluidity—wading through water, breathing in air filled with the scent of honeysuckle and pine, extricating myself from briars that penetrate my clothing. What seems to be "me" doesn't stop at the fixed boundary of my skin. Every time I go backpacking, I come back with the sun having deeply penetrated this apparent barrier, like the rain or cold I've found there, not to mention the chiggers and ticks that move right across this "thin boundary of me" with complete abandon. My skin isn't a rigid line of demarcation, but a permeable membrane that opens me to continual interchange with the environment. What results is an astounding sense of interdependence. Thich Nhat Hanh would say that the wind, trees, insects, and my body—even the text I carry—"inter-are." They move in reciprocity, with an "inter-being" that connects each part to the other. 36 Perception becomes fluid.

The text ceases to be an object I regard, but a traveling companion, in dialogue with me and everything else on the trail. Consequently my reading is less distant and critical than it might be elsewhere—slower, more pensive. I move my lips, speaking the words aloud. Lectio naturally begins to take on a monastic quality. A habit of wilderness reading has remarkable similarities to ancient patterns of meditative reading that developed in early Christian monasticism. These were deeply influenced by the silence and solitude of a desert landscape. The terrain itself fostered a sparseness of language, a careful attentiveness to the power of the words that were spoken and read there. Monastic reading, as a result, became more aural than visual. The monks perceived the words they read as "living things." They possessed a talismanic quality able to protect and to heal. 37 Reading in the early and medieval church, therefore, was a much more "active," oral, and embodied experience than we are accustomed to practicing today. Twelfth-century Benedictine monks used a highly sacramental language, rich in nature imagery, to describe their experience of "eating," even "digesting," the words they voiced in reading.

They spoke of Peter the Venerable as constantly "ruminating" the sacred words, like a cow chewing its cud. They celebrated John of Gorze who murmured with his lips, reciting the psalms like the buzzing of a bee. Monastic reading, like wilderness reading, required "the participation of the whole body and the whole mind." 38 It remained deeply sensitive to its environment, never far removed from the daily (and earthy) tasks of manual labor. Through much of the Christian tradition, the process of reading has been a dynamic and animated affair. Roland Barthes says that reading any classic ideally elicits an investment of risk and inventiveness that actively adds to the pleasure of the text. Reading, at its best, "makes the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text." He or she thus "gains access to the magic [End Page 39] of the signifier, to the pleasure of writing." 39 Monastic reading, with its highly oral and participative character, regularly occasioned this magical experience, drawing reader, text, and place into dynamic relation. I've seen it happen myself with the turning of pages by candlelight at an Ozark campsite.

Reading becomes an explosive, uncontrolled event, as whimsical as wilderness itself. Backpacking with the saints, like any deep investment in the risks of reading, isn't an exercise for the faint-hearted. While it requires no particular strength or skill, it does exact a willingness to travel lightly (jettisoning one's preconceived ideas), a readiness to listen to all the voices that speak from the surrounding terrain, and a courage to act without fear in responding to needs that arise. Reading dangerous texts in unfamiliar places can be profoundly disturbing, prompting new ways of thinking and acting. The written word and the landscape in which one reads it illuminate (and prod) each other, entangling the reader in the middle. In each of these narratives, my experience of a spiritual text is enhanced by its being read in a wilderness setting. The physical place plays an important role in the intricate process of interpretation, as I read "two books" simultaneously. Increasingly today, in a consumer society of digitized information and relentless activity, the retreat to the wilderness (much less with a book in tow) may seem an absurd reversion to a romanticized past.

Yet stunning books like Gerald May's The Wisdom of Wilderness still point to the rejuvenating power of the back country to challenge and to heal. 40 My deepest concern is to recover the risk-taking character of spiritual reading. For me, that usually involves wilderness experience. Others may vividly encounter the same text in a library reading room, as I have myself in a place like Duke Humfrey's Library in the Bodleian at Oxford. An advantage of wilderness reading, in my experience, however, is its ability to nurture a profound sense of interdependence among all living things. The future of wilderness (given the current fragility of public lands protected from development) requires our getting over the idea of our human disconnectedness from the earth. Only at deep risk to ourselves and to our world, do we extract the intellectual exercise of reading (and of thinking in general) from the pulsing life-world around us. After years of hiking in the desert expanses of Utah and Arizona, Craig Childs realized, "All this time I had thought that the land was something other than me." 41 It's a misconception shared by the whole of Western culture, cutting us off from the life-breathing cosmos that sustains a community larger than ourselves.

A return to wilderness reading (and the reading of wilderness), therefore, may ultimately be as important for the earth as it is for our own spiritual transformation. Paying attention to wherever it is we read can anchor our experience of a powerful text in an equally powerful landscape. [End Page 40] Belden C. Lane is Professor of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University. His books include The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (Oxford, 1998) and Landscapes of the Sacred (Johns Hopkins, 2001). lanebc@SLU.EDU Notes 1. On spiritual reading, see Paul J. Griffiths, Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in the Practice of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), and his chapter, "Reading as a Spiritual Discipline," in The Scope of Our Art (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 32–47. See also, Stephanie Paulsell, "The Inscribed Heart: Reading as a Spiritual Practice," Lexington Theological Quarterly XXXVI:3 (2001): 139–154; Lawrence S.

Cunningham, "On Reading Spiritual Texts," Theology Today 56:1 (1999): 98–104; and Nancy Malone, Walking a Literary Labyrinth: A Spirituality of Reading (New York: Riverhead Books, 2003). On reading in a wilderness context, see David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Random House, 1997), Douglas Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and Ian Marshall, Story Line: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail (University of Virginia, 1998). 2. See Claus Westermann, The Praise of God in the Psalms (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1965); Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968); Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Cancer Ward (New York: Dial Press, 1968); Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production (London: W.

Glaisher, 1909); and Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991). 3. On the relationship between habitus and habitat see Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 9–14. 4. In addition to Douglas Burton-Christie's work, see Philip Sheldrake, Spaces for the Sacred (London: SCM Press, 2001); Belden Lane, Landscapes of the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2001); and Fernando F. Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert, eds., Reading From This Place: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in Global Perspective (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1995). 5. See Omer Englebert, Saint Francis of Assisi: A Biography (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1965), 306. 6. Quoted in Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion Limited, 1976), 43. 7.

Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2005). 8. He writes, for example, of being inflamed by his reading of the psalms while on holiday out in the country. "I read on and on, all afire," he recalled. Augustine, The Confessions , IX, 4, 8–11, trans., Maria Boulding (New York: Random House, 1998), 178. See Margaret R. Miles, "On Reading Augustine and on Augustine's Reading," The Christian Century (May 1902): 510–514. 9. Confessions, VIII, 13–29: 157–168. 10. Confessions, XIII, 17: 316–317. 11. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 102. See also Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics? (New York: Vintage, 2001).

12. See John Climacus: The Ladder of Divine Ascent, trans., Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 81–84, 196–200. 13. Climacus, The Ladder, 215–217. 14. Climacus, The Ladder, 196–200. See John Chryssavgis, Ascent to Heaven: The Theology of the Human Person according to Saint John of the Ladder (Brookline, MS: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1989). 15. Early examples of Christian writings that used observations from the natural world as commentary on the scriptural text (particularly the six days of creation) include the Hexaemeron of Ambrose and Basil of Caesarea's Homilies on the Hexaemeron . 16. Anthony of Egypt, quoted in Thomas Merton, Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers (New York: New Directions, 1960), 62.

John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Statues, IX, 5–9, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, ed., Philip Schaff (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), IX, 401–404. [End Page 41] 17. Bonaventure, Breviloquium, ed., Trophime Mouiren (Paris: Editions Franciscaines, 1967), II.xi.2. Cotton Mather, The Christian Philosopher, ed., Winton Solberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 18. Meister Eckhart, Die deutschen Werke, eds., Josef Quint and Erster Band (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1958), I, 156. On the tradition of the two books, see Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967): 203–205, 239; George H.

Williams, "Christian Attitudes toward Nature" Christian Scholar's Review 2:2 (Spring 1972): 112–119; and Kenneth J. Howell, God's Two Books: Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern Science (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). 18. This view has been expressed in the Reformed tradition, from John Calvin in his Institutes (I.V.14–15) to Karl Barth's rejection of natural theology in his Church Dogmatics (II:1, 57–58). 19. Raimundus Sabundus, Theologia Naturalis seu Liber Creaturarum, ed., Friedrich Stegmüller (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1966), CCXII: 312–315. 20. Climacus, The Ladder, 82, 216. 21. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (New York: New American Library, 1964), 41. 22.

Climacus, The Ladder, 257. 23. Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence, trans., John Beevers (New York: Doubleday, 1975), 24, 36–43, 57. 24. Climacus, The Ladder, 75, 196. 25. De Caussaude, Abanonment, 27; Climacus, The Ladder, 191–193. 26. Julian of Norwich, Showings, trans., Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (New York: Paulist Press, 1977), 149–151. 27. Johann Baptist Metz, "Communicating a Dangerous Memory," in Communicating a Dangerous Memory: Soundings in Political Theology, ed., Fred Lawrence (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), 47. 28.

An August, 2005 study of children under the age of six living near the smelter in La Oroya found that 98% of them had blood lead levels exceeding international standards, with many of them having four times the amount permitted by the World Health Organization. Dr. Fernando Serrano of the Saint Louis University School of Public Health conducted this study, observing that company efforts to curb the pollution have been very slow in coming. 29. "All creatures able to suffer pain suffered with him" at Golgotha, she affirms. "All creatures which God has created for our service, the firmament and the earth, failed in their natural functions because of sorrow at the time of Christ's death, for it is their natural characteristic to recognize him as their Lord, in whom all their powers exist." Julian of Norwich, Showings, 210. 30. Julian of Norwich, Showings, 130–132. 31. Not a few of the Desert Christians were draft dodgers and tax resisters, sought out by magistrates who tracked them into the desert. As anyone must do in a wilderness setting, they had to identify real fears from those that were only imaginary.

"Fear is danger tasted in advance," John Climacus reminded the brothers, "a quiver as the heart takes fright before unnamed calamity." Climacus, The Ladder, 199. 32. On the nature of reading in the Benedictine tradition, see Michael Casey, Sacred Reading: The Art of Lectio Divina (Liguori, MO: Liguori Publications, 1996), and Griffiths, Religious Reading . 33. Quoted in Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, 53–56. 34. Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, 53. 35. Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986), 279. [End Page 42] 36. For his concept of "inter-being," see Thich Nhat Hanh: Essential Writings, ed. Annabel Laity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 53–69. 37.

Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, 61–62, 107–129. 38. Jean Leclerq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New York: New American Library, 1961), 89–93, 19. See also Douglas Burton Christie, "Listening, Reading, Praying: Orality, Literacy and Early Christian Monastic Spirituality, Anglican Theological Review 83:2 (Spring 2001): 197–221, and Harry Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 39. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans., Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 4–5, 200. See also his The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1975). 40. Gerald G. May, The Wisdom of Wilderness (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2006). 41.

Craig Childs, Soul of Nowhere: Traversing Grace in a Rugged Land (Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 2002), 209. Copyright © 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press Pilgrim’s Progress, The (unabridged) – Naxos AudioBooks The Pilgrim's Progress (unabridged) Reviews Never out of print since 1678, but who has read the whole of this most influential allegory? Christian’s trials and temptations on his journey to the Celestial City are part of our language: the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair; Doubting Castle where his protector Greatheart slew the Giant Despair; Appolyon the winged Destroyer. It’s uncannily cinematic – Christian spies the light of the Celestial City through the shepherd’s ‘perspective glass’ – and the narration highlights Bunyan’s biblical and colloquial rhythms. Rachel Redford, The Oldie John Bunyan’s classic allegory tells the story of Christian, who searches for salvation amid a world of temptation and deceit. As the story is presented in the framework of the author’s dream, Christian must follow his path to redemption by discerning between friend and foe.

Narrator David Shaw-Parker speaks clearly and often slows his pace for Bunyan’s lengthy explanations. The story has a barrage of metaphorical characters, and Shaw-Parker handles each distinctly. Christian himself speaks earnestly and emphatically. Because of the abstract nature of the story as well as its seventeenth-century English, The Pilgrim’s Progress is challenging in audio form. Readers may even find themselves listening to sections again. This is no fault of Shaw-Parker, who gives an excellent performance and directs listeners steadily down Christian’s path. D.M.W., AudioFile Booklet Notes The Pilgrim’s Progress was first published in 1678, and swiftly achieved the popularity which it has retained ever since. Further editions and revisions soon followed, and in 1684 Part Two was added. Its author, John Bunyan, wrote much of The Pilgrim’s Progress in prison, probably in the county gaol rather than in the tiny lock-up in Bedford which legend used to claim as its birthplace. Bunyan had been imprisoned because he refused to accept the demands for religious conformity imposed after the Restoration of 1660.

He had in earlier years served in the Civil War on the Parliamentary side; he had also undergone a severe crisis of faith in which he struggled to hold on to his religious belief. The first literary fruit of this crisis was Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, an intense autobiographical account of his period of spiritual turmoil. The Pilgrim’s Progress followed, in which he turned this personal material into the great work of fiction we know today. The Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegorical account of the heroic journey of Christian towards heaven and salvation. The story clearly has something of the quality of an epic, and also echoes the older English tradition of the knightly romance – much of it is couched in terms of a holy war between Good and Evil. There is, too, an obvious echo of Everyman, the medieval morality play, yet its memorable opening – ‘As I walked through the wilderness of this world…’ – has a poetic urgency which recalls that other medieval classic of spiritual journeying, Piers Plowman. That urgency, that yearning for salvation set against the terror of damnation, is to sustain the narrative throughout.

His style is of dignified colloquialism As an allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress inevitably relies on personification, but there is nothing strict or pedantic about Bunyan’s equivalents: the characters Christian encounters frequently rise above mere function to become vividly realized figures – people like the self-serving, hypocritical Byends, whose language is full of smooth, would-be courtly evasions. For him, religion must be made an easy thing: ‘My wife is a very virtuous woman, the daughter of a virtuous woman. She was my Lady Faining’s daughter, therefore she came of a very honourable family, and is arrived to such a pitch of breeding, that she knows how to carry it to all, even to prince and peasant. Tis true, we somewhat differ in religion from those of the stricter sort…’ Modern readers may be shocked by Christian’s abandonment of wife and children. We should remember, however, the powerfully personal emphasis on Calvinist doctrine: Christian must create his own relationship with his God, achieve his own salvation – and perhaps there is a recollection, too, of the way in which Christ’s disciples had to be ready to give up family and work to follow Him.

At any rate, Christian passionately urges his family to accompany him, but the appeal falls on stony ground. Thereafter, Christian goes through the various stages of full conversion to the faith. He begins by becoming ‘convicted of sin’ – aware of his moral and spiritual shortcomings – and moves on to a process of instruction (the House of the Interpreter), before shedding the burden of his sin by the Cross and receiving the roll which represents his guarantee of salvation as one of the elect. From now on he must resist all temptation as he travels the hard road to the Gates of Heaven. Part Two tells how Christiana (his wife) and their four children follow his example and, indeed, his road. Some of Part One’s dramatic power is sacrificed for a gentler, more pastoral, narrative. Accompanied and protected by Great-Heart, Christiana, her friend Mercy and the children never seem to be in real danger, but Bunyan’s thoughtful treatment of ‘the problems of the small urban community of Nonconformists’ (Roger Sharrock) offers much in compensation for this reduction in intensity.

The natural, almost domestic, way in which the pilgrims are eventually called to their reward provides a moving conclusion: ‘So he passed over, and the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.’ What of Bunyan’s language? His style is a triumph of dignified colloquialism, always able to achieve a plain tenderness – as in the description of the Delectable Mountains – or a domestic simplicity which owes much to the Authorized Version of the Bible: ‘Now while they lay here and waited for the good hour, there was a noise in the town that there was a Post come from the Celestial City… the contents whereof was, Hail, good woman, I bring thee tidings that the Master calleth for thee, and expecteth that thou shouldest stand in his presence, in clothing of immortality, within these ten days.’ Yet Bunyan is also equal to the demands of the sinister, the smoothly hypocritical, or the depiction of vigorous action, as in the great fights with Giant Despair and Apollyon. Throughout, he makes the ordinary extraordinary – suffusing the simple good things of everyday life with a sense of their ultimate source, God. Notes by Perry Keenlyside

Question: """As I walked through the wilderness of the world"" are the opening words of which classic literary work?"
Answer: 'PILGRIM'S PROGRESS'