Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice
Belden C. Lane
Jul 2019 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Jim Denison
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11 hr 25 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
Carrying only basic camping equipment and a collection of the world's great spiritual writings, Belden C. Lane embarks on solitary spiritual treks through the Ozarks and across the American Southwest. For companions, he has only such teachers as Rumi, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Thomas Merton, and as he walks, he engages their writings with the natural wonders he encounters, demonstrating how being alone in the wild opens a rare view onto one's interior landscape, and how the saints' writings reveal the divine in nature. The discipline of backpacking, Lane shows, is a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Just as the wilderness offered revelations to the early Desert Christians, backpacking hones crucial spiritual skills: paying attention, traveling light, practicing silence, and exercising wonder. Lane engages the practice not only with a wide range of spiritual writings, but with the fascination of other lovers of the backcountry, from John Muir and Ed Abbey to Bill Plotkin and Cheryl Strayed. In this intimate and down-to-earth narrative, backpacking is shown to be a spiritual practice that allows the discovery of God amidst the beauty and unexpected terrors of nature. Adoration, Lane suggests, is the most appropriate human response to what we cannot explain, but have nonetheless learned to love.
About the author
Belden C. Lane is a Presbyterian minister and Professor Emeritus of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University. His books include Backpacking with the Saints, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, and Ravished by Beauty.
Jim Denison is an AudioFile Earphones Award winner and a Society of Voice Arts and Sciences (SOVAS) Voice Arts Award nominee. He has experience as an actor on a variety of television shows and movies, appearing on Netflix, HBO, the National Geographic Channel, and other networks.
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