“… Ever distrustful of grace, I assent more readily to being destroyed than to being loved. It’s too much to presume that I might he the object of God’s deepest longing, profoundly loved by that which frightens me most. Why am I drawn to desert and mountain fierceness? What impels me to its unmitigated honesty, its dreadful capacity to strip bare, its long, compelling silence? It’s the frail hope that in finding myself brought to the edge – to the macabre, stone-silentr edge of death itself – I may hear a word whispered in its loneliness. The word is ‘love,’ spoken pointedly and undeniably to me. It may have been uttered many times in the past, but I’m fully able to hear it only in that silence.”
Belden C. Lane, excerpt from The Solace of Fierce Landscapes – Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality
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