Fierce Landscapes and the Indifference of God

Belden C. Lane

Belden C. Lane is professor of Theological Studies and American Studies at Saint Louis University in Saint Louis, Missouri. An avid backpacker in the Ozarks, he is the author of Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality (Paulist Press, 1988) and of a forthcoming book from which this essay is extracted and edited, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Studies in Desert and Mountain Spirituality. "Fierce Landscapes and the Indifference of God” originally appeared The Christian Century magazine.

Travel agents, especially those arranging religious tours, rarely book passage to the most fascinating places in this world. Most people aren’t interested in roaming the sparse desert near Mount Sinai, trekking the mountain passes on the road from Lhasa, or walking the Scottish Highlands on a wintry day as a cold wind sweeps down from the Hebrides. Yet these are places where people have frequently encountered a God of fierce indifference that seized their imaginations. This was the experience of the children of Abraham, of Tibetan devotees of the Dalai Lama, and even of Scots Presbyterians who made their way to New England in the seventeenth century. In each case, their God was no less foreboding and captivating than the landscape through which they moved. Their haunting vision of the holy, growing out of such austere spaces, reminds us of the inevitable correlation that exists between one’s spirituality and one’s sense of place, "Tell me the landscape in which you live,” wrote Jose Ortega Gasset, "and I will tell you who you are.” There is a special intrigue in the images of God that come to us out of harsh and rugged landscapes, those that remain so utterly indifferent to our pressing human concerns. We are sometimes drawn, both spiritually and geographically, to that which most ignores us.

I am increasingly uncomfortable with current images of God, as often found in books and workshops that mix popular psychology with a theology wholly devoted to self-realization. They seem to reverse the first question in the catechism I studied as a child declaring that "the chief end of God is to glorify men and women, and to enjoy them forever." I really don’t want a God who is solicitous of my every need, fawning for my attention, eager for nothing in the world so much as the fulfillment of my self-potential. One of the scourges of our age is that all of our deities are housebroken and eminently companionable: far from demanding anything, they ask only how they can more meaningfully enhance the lives of those they serve.

I often tell my students that if I weren’t a Christian, raised in the Reformed tradition, I would probably be a Jew, and if I weren’t a Jew, I’d be a Buddhist. These three traditions engage me by the power of their stories, the seriousness with which they address the meaning of suffering, and their strange, even fierce, attitude toward God. The people of these faiths, formed by mountains, desert and tough terrain, celebrate, oddly enough, a sense of God's indifference to the assorted hand-wringing anxieties of human life. In their grand notions of divine sovereignty and the embrace of the void (with its prerequisite emptying of the self), they undercut altogether the incessant self-absorption that preoccupies the American mind. They discover in the vast resources of divine disinterest a freedom: and a joy that cut through much of contemporary pop theology.

These three landscapes and three traditions call us back to the mysterium tremendum evoked by the image of the Great Mother, Yahweh, Kali, and Calvin’s God of sovereign majesty. They can teach us about the renewed importance of an apophatic spirituality, with its recovery of the via negative, its attention to renunciation, and its emphasis on the importance of being drawn beyond ourselves into the incomprehensible greatness of God. The austere, unaccommodating landscapes of desert, mountain and heath remind us of the smallness of self and the majesty of Being. They point again to what theologians once described as the deity of God, a divine indifference that has as its goal the ultimate attraction of, that which it at first repels.

Occasioning this line of thought for me was a phrase that has rumbled for two years in and out of my consciousness like a nagging koan, teasingly promising a meaning that it never quite fulfills. "We are saved in the end by the things that ignore us." I found it in a book by Andrew Harvey, a Britisher from Oxford writing about Buddhist meditation, the landscape of northern India along the borders of Tibet, and his own pilgrimage in search of a self he meant to lose (A Journey in Ladakh, Houghton Mifflin, 1983). Near the Land of Snows, at the roof of the world, he traveled with eager anticipation from one monastery to another, passing rows of large stone stupas erected along the high passes, spinning the copper cylinders or “prayer wheels” that symbolically intone the ancient mantra “om mani padme hum.” Moved by the magnificence of the mountain landscape and the esoteric mystery of the lamas, he found himself searching for a Great Experience, wanting to be transformed by what he saw, desiring as a tourist some deep, spiritual memento of his trip. Yet this self-obsessed "wanting” was precisely what kept him from obtaining enlightenment.

It was only as the vast grandeur of the land drew him beyond himself that he began to find what he had sought. Walking one day to a remote monastery at Rde-Zong, he was distracted from his self-conscious quest for spiritual attainment by the play of the sun on stones along the path. "I have no choice,” he protested, "but to be alive to this landscape and this light.” Because of his delay, he never got to the monastery. The beauty of the rocks in the afternoon sun, the weathered apricot trees and the stream along which he walked refused to let him go. He concluded that "to walk by a stream, watching the pebbles darken in the running water, is enough; to sit under the apricots is enough; to sit in a circle of great red rocks, watching them slowly begin to throb and dance as the silence of my mind deepens, is enough.”

Compelling his imagination the most was that the awesome beauty of this fierce land was in no way conditioned by his frail presence. It was not there for him. The stream would continue to lunge over the rocks on its way to tile valleys below long after he had gone. The apricot trees would scrape out a spare existence and eventually die entirely apart from any consideration of his having passed that way. Only in that moment of the afternoon sun in Ladakh, as he abandoned thought of hurrying on to the monastery, did he receive back something he had unconsciously offered. Hence he declares, "The things that ignore us save us in the end. Their presence awakens silence in us; they refresh our courage with the purity of their detachment.” Having become aware of a reality that exists entirely apart from the world of cares that keep him in turmoil, he was strangely set free. By its very act of ignoring him, the landscape invited him out of his frantic quest for self-fulfillment.

Judaism and Christianity have a similar tendency to view the divine apatheia as a rich and subtle way of teasing us out of ourselves and into relationship with God. The Book of Job poignantly addresses the nagging question of God’s indifference. Why does God seem to ignore Job altogether? The answer given in chapters 38—41, weak as it may at first appear, is directly connected with the fierceness of landscape. When God finally speaks out of the whirlwind, it is to conduct a tour of the harsh Palestinian countryside. God points to the wine-dark sea, the towering clouds over a desolate land, the storehouses of snow and hail in the distant mountains. And God asks Job what all this has to do with him. Does the wild ox pay him any attention? Does the calving of a mountain goat on a rocky crag depend in any way on his frail knowledge? Does the eagle mount up at his command to make its nest in the tall cedars? Does Leviathan speak to him a single word? The rich mystery of life continues, stubbornly separate from all of Job’s anxious longings. His anxieties are absorbed into a dread landscape that goes on apart from him, when it would seem that nothing could have continued in the bleak corridors of his own imagination. This ultimately, of course, isn’t an answer. But somehow, for Job, it is enough. It drives him outside himself and his need for vindication and fulfillment. In the silence that is left when the whirlwind subsides. Job finds what he sought most all along. "1 had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear,” he cries, “but now my eye sees thee.” Job is given no answer, but in being drawn out of himself he is met by God.

This is a strange dimension in Jewish spirituality. It is Moses’ experience at Sinai (Exod. 19), Elijah’s in the cave on Mount Horeb (1 Kings 19), and Second Isaiah’s as he offers “comfort” to Jerusalem by pointing to an awesome God entirely removed from the vanity of human fretfulness (Isa. 40). This is the God who “sits above the circle of the earth, with all of its inhabitants like grasshoppers.” It would be easy to miss the subtlety of this religious experience by dismissing it as scaremongering patriarchal primitivism. There is more to it than that. What ancient Israel found in this context of untamed landscapes was a Fierce Mother, as well as Gentle Father, who woos her children to a relationship of deeper maturity. One is astonished, in standing nakedly before the divine resplendence, to discover that a grand and new wholeness comes to replace all that has been lost. John Newton, the ex-slave ship captain and hymn-writer, knew this well when he spoke of a “grace that taught my heart to fear and grace my fears relieved." The indifference of God turns out at last to be but another form of God’s insistent love.

In the fixed idea of divine sovereignty that forms the heart of Reformed spirituality, one must discern more than a worn-out devotion to a stern God of patriarchal splendor. Ernst Troeltsch argued that such a theology was also rich in implications for the understanding of the self. A focus on the divine majesty brought with it a corresponding tendency to de-emphasize the ego and its inordinate concern for self-aggrandizement. In Calvinist spirituality, “a constant preoccupation with personal moods and feelings is entirely unnecessary." For Calvin, the chief concern was not with a self-centered personal salvation, but with the glory of God.

This offers an important corrective to the simplistic self-help theologies in religious circles today. To be engrossed in the self is, paradoxically, to lose it altogether, as Jesus suggested (Mark 8:35). Reformed theology j would insist that the liberation of the true self in Christ comes only by ignoring the false self, as it is overshadowed and driven to utter silence by / a God “in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes.” When the self has been i wholly abandoned, only then is there the possibility of seeing it restored in Christ. Having lost one’s life, it comes rushing back as divine gift.

The desert has always been a good teacher. Poets and theologians alike have known this from Antoine de Saint-Exupeiy’s Wind, Sand, and Stars to Carlo Carretto’s Letters from the Desert, from Edward Abbey’s classic Desert Solitaire to David Douglas's recent Noted in the Desert Silence. The harsh and arid land of the American Southwest, in particular, has spurred the spiritual imagination of many. Southern Plains Indians have for centuries located their most sacred places in the vicinity of the "four corners," the desiccated terrain where the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado meet. Spanish Catholics in the seventeenth century spoke ironically of Death Valley as la palma de la mano de Dios, the palm of God s hand. They were accustomed to finding God in the fierce indifference of barren mesas and cracked earth.

Fierce landscapes can be read in many ways. Always unpredictable, they are frightening as well as indifferent, a terror to some and a solace to others. They offer no guarantee of God, even though the three traditions considered here are accustomed to experiencing the sacred in the threatening emptiness of space. Not everyone discerns the holy lurking as a dread presence in a dark canyon before a summer storm. Edward Abbey was one who exulted in the fact that the desert offers absolutely nothing. Its hold on the imagination is the power of subtraction, the abandonment of all names and meanings.

Visiting the remote gorge of Nasja Creek in Arizona one summer, Abbey walked along its amber stream in the deep shadows of canyon walls towering hundreds of feet above on either side. At one point he made his way toward the distant sun in a slow and pathless ascent along the east wall. No human being had been that way for years, he thought, maybe ever. But as he reached the canyon rim, breaking into the bright light of the vast desert floor, he saw the remains of an arrow design laid in broken stone near the edge. It pointed off to the north, toward more of the same purple vistas and twisted canyons that he had seen for the past week or more. He searched in that direction for some irregular line on the distant horizon, an old ruin or sacred site to which the ancient arrow might have pointed. There was nothing. Nothing but the desert ... and its blessed indifference. Nothing but a desolate silence that filled the earth with its emptiness. Nothing. With a savage and unaccountable joy, he descended the gorge once again, knowing why it was that he had to walk and write about deserts. The .sheer nothingness of it refused to let him go (The Journey Home, Dutton, 1977).

The power of Abbey’s encounter, and others like it, is found in the fact that what is met cannot be named. It can be painted perhaps, as Georgia O’Keefe learned, giving a spare beauty to the dry bones of the New Mexican desert she had come to love. But it can’t be named. Fierce landscapes offer none of the comforts of reason. At the extremities of geography, beyond the civilized precincts of all that is safe, we enter the dread terrain of our own extremities as conscious selves. Yet in that fearful ending we discover also a joyous new beginning.

Stretched out over the edge of a deep precipice, one hand clutching the branch of a blue juniper growing from the rock, we peer down as far as we dare. We see nothing—only the motionless soaring of red-tailed hawks in the canyon far below. We are drawn, though, by an indifference, whose other name is love. We sense an invitation to emptiness. It begins to j grow in us, like a vast silence. There is fear, knowing that in hanging there, we will be destroyed. The roots of the juniper begin to loosen from their crevice in the rock. Yet a senseless joy bids us stay. And when we fall, it is a long, slow descent, feathers being unfamiliar to us. We wing our way across the borders of a new consciousness, adjusting uneasily to warm air currents drifting upward. The circling hawks we had studied from above 1 have drawn us by their indifference far more than we might have imagined. With them, we become part of a great void that seems strangely akin to love. The sky opens out into a thin, orange line over the dark horizon and we head with the others toward home. “We are saved in the end by' the things that ignore us.”