Wilderness Mysticism: A Contemplative Christian Tradition

By Stephen K. Hatch

As the percentage of unaffiliated seekers or Spiritual But Not Religious people or “Nones” increases in America and in the world at large, a sizable number are drawn toward a spirituality of Nature. And while many of these seekers emphasize simply the physical challenge and ignore the theological or philosophical aspect of their relationship to Nature, Wilderness Mysticism seeks to offer a spiritual / theological interpretation for those who want it. In the process, it employs insights and meditation practices gleaned from an ancient tradition – that of Christian Mysticism – and updated in a modern context.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jun 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781483484488

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Copyright © 2018 Stephen K. Hatch.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018904784

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Introduction

Why Wilderness Mysticism?

Every purely natural object is a conductor of divinity, and we have but to expose ourselves in a clean condition to any of these conductors, to be fed and nourished by them. Only in this way can we procure our daily spirit bread. Only thus may we be filled with the Holy Ghost.

John Muir

Snowmass Vigils

T he snow creaked under my hiking boots as I walked the mile-long dirt road leading to the abbey. It was 3:00 in the morning, and I was excited at the prospect of attending Vigils with the other monks. A full moon shone silver on the November landscape, illuminating thirteen-thousand-foot Mt. Sopris looming above the open end of the horseshoe-shaped valley. The monastery itself rested at the closed end of the valley rimmed by hills, with several tall pure-white summits in the background peeking up above them. A large portion of the valley meadows had been converted to hayfields farmed at one time by the monks. Now they rented them out to neighboring ranchers. The monks also supported themselves with an eggery contained in a large tin-sided building.

I was staying at a red barn, half of which had been converted into a guest quarters containing a bed, kitchen sink, a bathroom, and several shelves of books. The guestmaster brought me a loaf of fresh-baked abbey bread, and pointed out that TV-dinner trays packed full of vegetarian meals prepared by the monastery cook had been stocked in the freezer for my use. A few small boxes of Special K cereal were also lying out. He told me that I was free to donate whatever amount I felt led to contribute for my stay.

As I approached the arched wooden door of the monastery, I was greeted by groves of aspen trees processing down from the hills right up to the building. White like the hooded habits of the monks, they added an atmosphere of rich silence to the setting. I opened the door and entered the stone-floored room where I took a seat in the circle of chairs. One of the monks was stoking a wood stove. He acknowledged my presence and commented briefly – in whispers - on the beauty of the full moon.

After a few minutes, the other monks – about a dozen – entered the room. All I could hear of them was the rustling of their white habits as they walked. Sitting in moonlit silver, we sang several psalms in the ethereal phrases of a Gregorian chant. After a few moments of silence, a goose-necked lamp switched on, and a monk read a passage about keeping watch in the night. Then the lamp clicked off, a Japanese meditation bell sounded, and we entered the rich silence.

I found myself drawn like an iron filing to a nameless divine magnet whose presence I could sense welling up like a trickling spring of silence from the depths of my being. I felt that this silence loved me. Embraced in these magnetic depths by intimate arms of stillness, I barely noticed my thoughts sparkling like stars far above me.

Moonlight streamed through the large arched windows of the room. The silence was so thick it rang in my ears. Suddenly a coyote let out a howl. Moments later, answering howls, yips and barks resounded from all around the valley. But just as suddenly as they began, they all ended, disappearing back into the silence. A few minutes later, an owl hooted several times from the blue spruce growing just outside. Then all was still again. Rather than disturbing the silence, these sounds seemed rather like signposts pointing to it. For this was the richest silence I had ever known.

After a half-hour or so, like autumn leaves falling one or two at a time, the monks began to leave. It was now 4:30. They would go back to bed for a few hours before getting up for a light breakfast and then Lauds and Mass at eight. After a while, all of them were gone. I alone was left.

Wilderness Mysticism and Religious Identity

My initial interest in Christian mysticism – which began in earnest in the early eighties - was founded on its traditional use of landscape metaphors to describe inner spiritual experience. For example, in the fourth century, when Gregory of Nyssa spoke of being hemmed in on all sides by divine darkness during his experience of union with God, I pictured the intimacy of a starry night spent at Zion National Park between cliffs looming on either side. I imagined a similar setting when I heard Pseudo-Dionysius, a sixth century Syrian Christian, speak of being wrapped entirely in the intangible and the invisible.

When an anonymous fourteenth-century English monk wrote of dwelling within the cloud of unknowing during contemplative prayer, I imagined being immersed in mist high on a ridge at Mount Rainier. Or, when his German contemporary - Meister Eckhart - encouraged spiritual seekers to enter into the silent desert of God’s simple nature and into his solitary wilderness and vast wasteland, I imagined the desert spaces of Arches or Canyonlands National Parks. Eckhart also wrote of the soul’s nature as being a simple wilderness, and of the seeker’s movement into the interior desert devoid of images, where he or she becomes one with a divine presence who is greater and more vast than any theological concept. Again, I found myself imagining the wilderness spaces of southern Utah. And when a twelfth-century German nun named Hildegard of Bingen called God the greening power and referred to Christ as Greenness Incarnate, I found myself lured by images of the lush forests of Olympic National Park.

I discovered that this wilderness imagery continued as well in the writings of later contemplatives. For example, sixteenth-century Spanish mystic John of the Cross wrote that the contemplative will feel that he has been led into a remarkably deep and vast wilderness, into an immense, unbounded desert, the more delightful, savorous, and loving, the deeper, vaster, and more solitary it is. John experienced this wilderness within the depths of his own soul, and this gave me the hope that I could find something of Utah’s Arches, Canyonlands and Capitol Reef National Parks within my own being as well. Moreover, a seventeenth-century French mystic named Jeanne Guyon described the soul’s interior as an endlessly deep ocean which contains the divine presence as a magnet dwelling within its bottomless depths. Here, I pictured venturing into the ocean next to the pristine stretches of seacoast preserved at Redwood and Olympic National Parks.

Many in our time consider themselves spiritual but not religious. These seekers are on an interspiritual path – also called multiple belonging - one that pieces together a variety of teachings and practices that have their source in the world’s great wisdom traditions. A sizable percentage of these seekers also say that Nature is my church, or I feel most in touch with the Sacred when I’m outside. Although quite a few of these folks focus their attention on outdoor physical activity as an end in itself, an increasing number want to reflect on and ponder their experience in Nature as part of a quest to discover the meaning of life. What they desire is a well-articulated philosophy or theology or spirituality based on revelations received while exploring the Great Outdoors.

Since the spirituality of these seekers is oriented around a direct perception of oneness with beautiful landscapes that involves both an identification with and a love relationship to the Divine present within the natural world, it is appropriate to use the term mysticism. As I use the term, mysticism involves the quest for an experience of divine union, one that moves back and forth between Divine as Self on the one hand and Divine as Beloved on the other. Here, we become one-with, identify ourselves with, and embody an element of the Divine on the one hand, yet find ourselves in a love affair and relationship with that aspect of the Divine which we have not yet embodied, on the other. Because the Divine present in Nature and elsewhere is limitless, we will always find ourselves lured by that aspect which we have not yet embodied. Therefore, the relationship aspect always remains as a simultaneous counterpart to our experience of eternal union.

Because this relational oneness occurs primarily in the context of unpeopled landscapes, I speak of "Wilderness Mysticism. Thus, Wilderness Mysticism means a direct perception of Wilderness as Self, Wilderness as Beloved – and of the Divine Presence who dwells within Nature - in which both human and other-than-human participants are constantly blending into and changing places with one another. However, I use the word wilderness to refer not only to an external reality, but to an internal one as well. In this regard, Western wisdom traditions speak regularly of entering the inner wilderness, often referred to as the interior desert. It is a place of depth and expansiveness that we visit and explore on a regular basis, after which we then come back out to the surface of our lives or restrict ourselves to dwelling within the smaller house" of our everyday concerns. As Thomas Merton reminds us, this inner wilderness is a place we cannot abuse or destroy. Since it is rooted in a Divine Source lying deeper than the reach of both will and thought, it remains forever pristine.

One of the most challenging aspects of my vocation as an interspiritual teacher is the fact that people so often want to affix a single label to my perspective, one that is tied exclusively to one of the great world religions. However, like many, I find that such labels never really work for me; they somehow seem quite limiting. Was Jesus a Christian, or was the Buddha a Buddhist? No, of course they weren’t. Each simply woke up in their own particular individual, cultural and religious context. However, there is still something inside each of us that wants to find a single label or designation which is capable of unifying and integrating all of the various elements of our religious convictions and spiritual practices into a single Whole. Each of us is of course a completely unique embodiment of the sacred, and this uniqueness cannot really be put into words. But for purposes of life in society, we need to be able to define our path in terms that others can grasp. This is especially true if we are attempting to create a community of like-minded people or make a living through teaching our own particular expression of spirituality.

People often ask me: "what are you? Meaning, what religion are you? In my search for a categorical box, I used to say that I am a contemplative; that is, a person who seeks union with Ultimate Reality through a lifestyle of silence, solitude, simplicity, service and ample time spent in the natural world. That term was OK in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when contemplative was more popular and readily recognized. But now, very few people even know what that word means. In my search for a category that makes sense, I’ve also experimented with using a regional label. For example, I sometimes say that I practice a combination of Cascadian, Rocky Mountain and Southwest spirituality – all of which are rooted in an experience of the American West. But that sort of regional approach, however true, will probably take some time to catch on in the larger society. And besides, it fails to take into account the fact that my own experience of Western Wilderness is always mediated by the filter of Christian Mysticism. Therefore, I use the phrase Wilderness Mysticism: A Contemplative Christian Tradition to describe my particular path. Or, more simply: Wilderness Mysticism. For people who don’t know what mysticism means, I tell them Wilderness Christianity or sometimes Wilderness Spirituality." These terms take into account both the religious tradition in which I was raised and have practiced for many decades, and my orientation toward the larger context of Nature. When people ask for more detail, here is what I tell them.

I am a tree, and my roots are in evangelical Christianity (my childhood faith) and Quakerism (my mother’s family heritage and that of the Pennsylvania landscape where I was raised). My trunk is made up of Contemplative or Mystical Christianity, including its Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant components. My branches and leaves, then, are composed of choice insights from Buddhism, Native American spirituality, Hinduism, Taoism, Sufism, Contemplative Judaism, Transpersonal Psychology, the spirituality of American Nature Writers, the science of ecology and Enneagram Personality Typology work. However, I actually identify more with the forest in which this tree grows than with the tree itself. In other words, the thing that attracts me most in all of these different faiths and traditions is the imagery they employ that arises within the natural world, especially in the context of the wilderness preserved in our National Parks and Monuments and in our U.S. Forest Service Wilderness Areas. Thus, Wilderness Mysticism comes closest to what I practice. But since my roots and trunk are rooted in the Christian tradition, this Wilderness Mysticism has a distinctly Christian cast. Indeed, as I will show in this book, the American wilderness preservation movement and its associated spirituality actually arose directly from certain elements of the Christian tradition. However, since the ever-evolving religion of the future – including its Christian variation - will need to be focused less on itself and more on the Earth, the title of the present book is Wilderness Mysticism: A Contemplative Christian Tradition.

For the first few decades of my life, I experienced wild country merely as a place in which to seek spiritual wisdom. It was simply the field in which I gathered the flowers of insight. But after years of seeking in this way, I came to realize that the natural world has colored almost every insight I’ve ever had. Specifically, I came to an awareness that the presence indwelling the Sacred Earth and Sky is more fundamental for me than any of the world’s great religions. Or, more accurately, everything I know about Buddhism, Native American spirituality, etc. – and especially about my Christian roots and trunk – has come while hiking, meditating, journaling, thinking, reading and praying in the Great Outdoors. I’m convinced, in fact, that it is important to remind ourselves that whenever any of us think, feel, theologize, or practice in any of these traditions, we have Nature’s air permeating our lungs, her rivers and lakes coursing in our blood, and Earth’s food nourishing both us and our spiritual search. In addition, as Sigurd Olson - a great American Nature writer from the North Woods - points out, every vision of the Divine embodied within the world’s great religious traditions actually had its origin in the experience of beauty, silence and far horizons. It is the intangibles of the wilderness - long vistas, solitude, quiet, silence, cyclic rhythms, beauty and a brooding sense of peace that sinks into the spirit - that are at the root of all that is true in religion.

Panentheism, Not Pantheism

Because many people are used to being taught a duality or separation between Creator and creation, they automatically think of the word pantheism when they hear any talk about a spirituality rooted in Nature or wilderness. However, these opposites of dualism and pantheism are not the only options. There is also a third option, called panentheism, which means "God - or the Divine - in all things. Pantheism, in my view, is analogous to taking the words contained in literal biblical texts as the gospel truth. In a Christian context, this is called Biblicism." However, a more mystical approach seeks truth within and beyond the words, in a sacred presence that dwells within the text but cannot be reduced to it. Similarly, in Wilderness Mysticism as in contemplative traditions in general, we seek meaning within Nature’s landscapes and creatures. In other words, it is present under the surface, hidden at the core of things. Here, for example, external beauty leads of necessity to an inner or cosmic beauty, a movement that is stimulated by our awareness of the fact that external beauty is ephemeral, continually appearing and disappearing in an endless number of permutations. Hurricanes, diseases, earthquakes, droughts, and famines are external realities that are usually difficult to come to terms with. But they push us to bore deeper into the heart of Nature and to exercise our creativity in discovering fresh meaning in the cosmos of which they are a part. They elicit a search for the Divine present within the scripture of Nature rather than as Nature.

Here we seek a monastic or lectio divina (sacred reading) approach applied not so much to the written scriptures as to the scripture of Nature. Just as stumbling blocks, inconsistencies and contradictions encountered within a reading of the literal scriptural text make us seek for a deeper meaning hidden within that text, so it is with Nature. The challenges that the natural world provides cause us to look deeply for this inner meaning.

In this connection, I’m told that for the Navajo or Dine’ peoples, every feature of the natural world contains three distinct levels of meaning: an outer form, an inner form, and a secret form. The outer form refers to a natural phenomenon – like a mountain, lake, plant or animal - as a scientist would study it, or as we would encounter it in ordinary life. Secondly, the inner form is the same phenomenon as a shaman or medicine person would encounter it. This involves getting in touch with the spirit that indwells the natural phenomenon. The rest of us might encounter this inner form on a vision quest as well, or in special moments of revelation. However, there is also a third form, which involves this inner form speaking to us from within our own emotions. This is the secret form. Wilderness Mysticism focuses ultimately on the hidden and secret forms present within Nature rather than on the outer form. While science involves studying the outer form of a thing, mysticism and spirituality seek to encounter the inner and secret forms hidden within the outer form. While the five senses, observation and scientific experimentation are the means through which the outer form is discovered and catalogued, myth, metaphor, imagination and love are the means through which the inner and secret forms are found and experienced. It is these second and third aspects of Nature that are the primary focus of the present book.

However, a panentheistic worldview includes an understanding that the Divine who indwells the world – and the core of each creature - is also changed thereby. In Process Theology (originating in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and further developed by thinkers like John B. Cobb and Charles Hartshorne), this truth is expressed by the realization that the Divine Presence has two complementary natures: a primordial nature and a consequent nature. The primordial nature is stable, changeless, and eternal. We might say it inheres in the changelessness of Love, and it serves as a lure that draws all of creation to incarnate this love in ever-deepening ways. The consequent nature, on the other hand, is that part of the Divine which dwells within creatures and evolves as they evolve. Here, the growth and experience of each creature adds richness and fresh insight to the Divine.

In the ninth century, Irish theologian John Scotus Erigena put it this way: We should not understand God and the creature as two things removed from one another, but as one and the same thing. For the creature subsists in God, and God is created in the creature in a wonderful and ineffable way. We might say that this being created aspect of the Creator results from God’s self-emptying kenosis, which is a major theme in Wilderness Mysticism. In the words of John Muir, "All of these varied forms, high and low, are simply portions of God radiated from Him as a sun, and made terrestrial by the clothes they wear, and by the modifications of a corresponding kind in the God essence itself. Using Trinitarian language, Meister Eckhart writes in a similar vein when he exclaims: Out of the purity the Father everlastingly bore me, His only-born Son, into that same image of His eternal Fatherhood, that I may be Father and give birth to Him of Whom I am born."

In terms of the myths presented in this book, this experience of God created in creation could be intriguingly expressed as "echoes of the Father’s never-spoken word of love returning in another voice, and with words added on that he never intended to speak. Or as the mirror-image of the Father suddenly taking on new gestures which he never made, and in a new form which then flirts back with him. Or as the Mother’s self-caressing hand and fingers attached to an arm that suddenly shapeshifts into that of Someone Else, a presence whose shoulder, neck and head lie at the end of a never-ending horizon, and who hence can never be found." In all of these cases, it is the distinction between the creator and the created that allows for the sense of awe, wonder and surprise which occurs when the two suddenly shapeshift into one another. And in all of these cases, what starts out as an ephemeral creature – e.g., an echo or mirror-image of the Father – can also be viewed, from another perspective – as a second coequal Divine Person – that of the Mother. Or vice versa in the case of the self-caressing hand. This occurs when the echo adds words or resounds in a new voice, or when the mirror-image turns into someone else who then flirts back, or when the fingers shapeshift into a transparent arm that heads off toward the endless horizon.

National Parks and Wilderness Areas as a Locus for Revelation

While urban and suburban environments definitely include elements of Nature, it is our National Parks and Monuments that are a major locus for Wilderness Mysticism. After all, some of the first framers of the National Park idea intended that the Parks would exist as an American counterpart to the great cathedrals of Europe. Since 1872 – the year when Yellowstone became our first National Park – Americans have always made pilgrimages to these sacred sites, bringing attitudes of awe, joy and hope for a transformative experience. Like the towns that built European cathedrals, we Americans have sacrificed many resources in the formation of ours. We’ve surrendered mining, timber, grazing, natural gas and real estate rights in the act of creating our National Parks. And I believe this is as it should be. The principle of sacrifice has always lain at the heart of spiritual transformation. Only when we offer some part of ourselves or relinquish something important to us do we become vessels of the sacred Mystery flowing through our minds, hearts and spirits.

As I mentioned earlier, Sigurd Olson believed that religious belief has its origin in the ancient concept of far horizons, beauty, and silence. Accordingly, we might say that we discover divine transcendence or beyondness beckoning to us from within our experience of far horizons. Beauty soothes and energizes us and leads us to speculate on the harmony and order of the Sacred. And Nature’s silence elicits in us an experience of the blissful, non-verbal and listening aspects of God.

John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, first campaigned for the preservation of exceptional landscapes within National Parks because of their spiritual value. He viewed forests as God’s First Temples, and mountains as God’s Cathedrals, and tried to get others to see them that way as well. Muir believed that every purely natural object is a conductor of divinity, and understood that the earth as seen in the clean wilds of the mountains is about as divine as anything the heart of man can conceive!

John Muir: A Christian Wilderness Mystic

The reader will discover that the writings and insights of John Muir occupy a large portion of the present text. Although Muir has been presented by some commentators as a Western Taoist or even as a pantheist, I would argue that he maintained his Christian perspective throughout his life, enabling it to morph within his creative vision into a Nature-based spirituality that is attractive to current day Nones or Spiritual But Not Religious seekers who want to maintain both wings and historical roots in their quest for union with the divine. It is for this reason that I consider Muir a major fountainhead of Wilderness Mysticism as a Contemplative Christian tradition.

In a 1966 lecture entitled, The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis given at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and later published in the journal Science, historian Lynn Townsend White, Jr. conjectured that a Christian worldview was the root cause of the ecological crisis of the 20th century and beyond. Citing the Genesis creation story, he argued that Judeo-Christian theology had swept away the ecologically sound pagan belief in the sacredness of Nature and normalized an exploitation of the natural world. He listed the Bible’s seeming promotion of human domination of Nature and the idea that non-human creation has no soul or reason as primary reasons for this exploitation. White suggested adopting St. Francis of Assisi as a model in imagining a democracy of creation in which all creatures are respected and humanity’s rule over creation is delimited. However, this latter point was unfortunately often neglected by his followers and commentators.

The upshot of the article in their minds was the belief that the Judeo-Christian tradition – and especially Christianity – should shoulder the majority of the blame for the ecological mess we are in. Since the publication of White’s article, it has been the standard conviction among many ecologically-minded thinkers and activists that if a person is going to be concerned about the fate of the Earth, they will need to jettison Christianity and adopt indigenous, Hindu, Buddhist or Taoist philosophies. This attitude has then carried over into the study of John Muir. The general attitude has been that whatever Muir’s religious position was, he definitely could not be called a Christian.

By contrast, Wilderness Mysticism understands that much of the American preservation and conservation movements – including the seminal ideas of John Muir - are actually rooted in ecological elements of Christian thought. Muir in fact interpreted many biblical passages in terms of metaphors drawn from the American wilderness – particularly the California Sierras and Alaska – both drawing from the tradition and morphing it into something new. For he possessed a spiritually ecological consciousness far ahead of his time.

Viewing the Divine in Terms of Metaphors Drawn from Nature

Muir was not a theologian; he was more of a wilderness explorer who experienced God in Nature. Many theologians and writers have of course, over the past few decades, devoted themselves to articulating a Christian spirituality of the natural world. Sallie McFague, Thomas Berry, Matthew Fox, Paul Santmire and Willis Jenkins are prime examples. But I’ve often wondered: what if our theology extended beyond simply seeing God manifested within Nature, to employing primary metaphors for God and Christ that are rooted in natural landscapes? Philosophers and theologians like Plotinus, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite and Jonathan Edwards did precisely this when they envisioned God as a spiritual sun that created through emanation, radiating the creation outward like sunlight from the sun. This is precisely the sort of thing I have done in my development of Wilderness Mysticism. And it is Muir’s imagery that has inspired much of my work in this area.

Accordingly, what if we viewed the transcendence or beyondness of a masculine-flavored God not only as a sun of love, but as an endlessly deep canyon of love, a limitless, spacious sky of awareness, an endless horizon of inspiration, a solitary redrock desert of unity, a spontaneous lightning flash of insight, a fire that consumes all duality? And what if we viewed the mind and heart of Christ as an expression of God’s spacious, awe-filled gaze on beauty – like a stunning alpine lake-eye – or as a mysterious, hidden light-source of spiritual alpenglow, a radiant, sun-filled meadow of vastness? A Christian perspective would of course add an awareness that all of these non-anthropomorphic images are actually alive with personality, animated with presence. Accordingly, even traditional Trinitarian language would be reinterpreted in terms of landscape features. Here, for example, the Father would mean boundless sky-like spaciousness filled with presence. The Son would be a bounded form of spaciousness – again, filled with personality - in which echoes of a divine love-word (the Word) resound, to the awe and wonder of all. The Holy Spirit would be the mutual space in between these other Two – the place where we dwell – again filled with presence. Alternately, the Father would be an infinitely-deep canyon experienced at night. The Son would be the canyon rim and the stars and meteors appearing in the sky above, which form a kind of light-filled gaze capable of looking into the limitless abyss and giving it self-awareness. The Holy Spirit would again be the place located in between these Two, where we human beings dwell. Here, Father and Son would not refer to male beings, but to the masculine qualities of beyondness, transcendence, emptiness, transparency and solitude, all of which are filled with a sense of presence.

Such a vision, based as it is in a natural world that always includes both male and female elements, would include a sacred feminine – Sophia, as she is known in the Christian tradition - as a major aspect of spirituality. Christianity – like many of the world’s major religions – is not known for being especially feminine-friendly; in fact, it has historically been downright oppressive to women and to the feminine dimension of all of us, regardless of our sex or gender. However, the recovery and elevation of a principle of sacred femininity that has always been present within the tradition is definitely one of the positive trends among current progressive Christian thinkers. Life in Nature is rooted, after all, in the complementarity of two gender principles, masculine and feminine.

And so, what if we complemented God’s masculine spaciousness, beyondness and transcendence with a Sophianic, feminine, immanent or this-worldly aspect of the divine - a seamlessly flowing river of life, an ecological web of life, a sacred presence dwelling within the principle of energy and form? And what if we had a feminine Trinity composed of Mother, Daughter and Holy Soul? Here, the Mother would be the principle of form-and-and-energy filled with personality and presence. The Daughter would be the billions of creatures – each again filled with personality - that embody this principle in a multitude of ways, giving her individualized knowledge of her glory, beauty and grandeur. Here, each expression of the Daughter would contain a mirror that reflects every other creature back to itself in a fresh way. The Holy Soul would be the seamless flow linking all of these together in a continuous river of living water. Alternately, the Mother would be a mythical hand, the Daughter would be the multitude of fingers composing this hand, and the Holy Soul would be the planet-wide self-caress whereby every creature touches and brings alive every other creature. Humanity would dwell in the midst of all these elements, drawing them together in fresh and creative ways. Here, Mother and Daughter would not refer to female beings, but to the feminine qualities of immanence, this-worldliness, fullness, substantiality and community, all of which are filled with an intimate sense of presence.

And what if we viewed the interface between particular beings and both God and Sophia – Father and Mother - in terms of mythical images drawn from Nature; images containing a playful intrigue, like that of the Native American coyote or raven trickster-archetype? Accordingly, what if we saw all things as echoes of the Word of a blissful, ecstatic God that never had a chance to be spoken? Or, as masculine echoes returning in a feminine voice? Or as mirror-images with no Original, a condition brought on by the humble self-emptying of God? Or as mirror-images of a masculine spaciousness that suddenly shapeshifts into feminine form-and-energy? And what if we viewed each creature as a blood globule somehow able to leap out of the seamless, infinite bloodstream of Sophia, or as her caressing fingers taking on a mysterious life of their own and then shapeshifting into a transparent masculine arm that heads off toward the endless horizon but never arrives at any shoulder, neck or head? Such playful metaphors and myths are what Wilderness Mysticism is all about.

Every Creature is a Bible or Word of God

Traditional Christianity tends to focus on the Bible as the Word of God. Accordingly, it uses the historical text as the basis for all subsequent theologizing. This approach has value, I believe, because it enables modern seekers – Christ-followers, in this case - to ground their insights in the accumulated wisdom of the past. This is important not because biblical insights are necessarily more true than the fresh wisdom revealed today, but because so many millions of people spread out across the centuries have concentrated their energy, contemplation and devotion on those sacred texts, thereby imbuing them with a surplus of meaning. Because these seekers have focused so much love on those scriptures for so long, the Bible has become a special place of revelation. If we can show the ways in which our current insights are connected to the traditional scriptures, the potential for spiritual transformation is thereby increased. Thus, Wilderness Mysticism seeks to show the ways in which fresh insights gleaned from the realm of Nature can be related to the biblical scriptures. The present book is filled with many such attempts. In addition, the vision of a God of love and hope presented by the Bible can help us find a corresponding love hiding within the aspects of Nature – hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions and plagues, for example – that at first do not seem to be very loving or transformative.

However, the Bible itself is an amalgamation many different views, and can be read from numerous perspectives, depending on which passages one emphasizes, and which verses one wants to deemphasize. Each group picks their favorite verses and explains away opposing passages. Each possesses, that is, a different filter for interpreting the Bible. Unfortunately, however, almost no one admits to having a particular filter; all believe they are in fact looking at the Bible through clear glass, devoid of any personal, historical, philosophical or cultural coloration. As a result, each position fights with the others, and this behavior has resulted throughout history – sadly - in untold suffering.

By contrast, Wilderness Mysticism admits from the start that the primary word of God is the one spoken in the heart of the individual. Here, each person is sensitive to a different divine word, and growth comes from piecing together the unique word one has received with those occurring in the hearts of others. This interior word is in fact the Inner Light, the indwelling Christ that historical Quakers talked so much about. We might say, in fact, that each of us is a unique word of God. This word is not communicated primarily in literally-interpreted words, but in paradoxical poetic images revealed to – and created by – the sacred element present within a person’s imagination. Because each of us has never before been here on this Earth in the present form, no one can teach us about the word we are except God, our source. As Ralph Waldo Emerson says, Every true person is a cause, a country, and an age, and requires infinite spaces … We lie in the lap of immense intelligence … Insist on yourself; never imitate … That which each can do best, none but his maker can teach him. No person yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. What is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great person is unique … Is not a person better than a town? … Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. For, from the perspective of Wilderness Mysticism, each of us is a unique, never-before-spoken word of God.

However, a true realization of this insight leads not to narcissism, but to union with the Greater Whole. For each of us – as a true word of God - is not and never have been a self-enclosed ego; rather, each is a different perspective on the single word that God speaks and that resounds in the depths of all things. In this understanding, God’s word is not simply a thing occurring separate from us. Each of us is that word, and each of us adds our own accent to God’s speaking of this word, both through our own response – which echoes God’s word in our own unique voice – and through our receptive awareness of the sacredness of the world around us, a contemplative silence which amplifies that word.

So many potential conflicts could be avoided if we viewed the person standing before us – different from us, perhaps, in ethnicity, religion, personality or sexual orientation – as a Word of God spoken to us in this very moment. Instead, unfortunately, religious adherents have historically have judged the Word of God standing before them by the things stated years ago in the written scriptures, many of which are true only in the context in which they were originally spoken. This has led to untold misery throughout human history, including discrimination, cultural genocide, terrorism and needless wars. Shouldn’t the Word God is speaking in this moment take precedence over our interpretations – developed thousands of years after the fact – of a past Word? Wilderness Mysticism adheres insistently to this principle.

Some would argue that an insistence on the presence of a divine Word indwelling all things is based merely on a wishy-washy liberalism that uses buzzwords like tolerance and diversity, and is actually secular in orientation. However, nothing could be further from the truth. A rigorous asceticism is required to set aside our prejudices and to remain faithful to the Word of God being spoken to us in this very moment. Often this Word comes to us in the form of a person who is quite different from ourselves, or in a landscape we are in danger of losing through industrial expansion. Attention to the Word being spoken to us in this moment is a spiritual discipline, one that requires an often painstaking process of distinguishing the untransformed rind or husk which so often encases that Word in order to reveal the sweet fruit present within it.

Here we might envision an alien landing on earth with her flying saucer. Upon meeting her first earthling, she asks him: Please tell me something about the sacredness you find in the plants, animals and human beings who live around you. The stunned earthling then responds: Wait a minute, please; I need to go consult a book written two thousand years ago before I can answer your question. The alien would of course turn away in disbelief at the obvious ineptitude of the poor earthling’s undeveloped spiritual capacities! It is my conviction that humanity’s spiritual evolution is leading us more and more into a capacity for reading God’s word – present in the form of landscapes and other people - standing right before us each moment, and less into a dependence on the words of a historical text, the original meaning of which has in many cases most likely been lost.

In saying that God speaks through everything that is, we understand that the individual is always part of a community. And the primary community is that of the web of life, the Earth, a multi-faceted Divine Presence. As John Muir once wrote, Rocks and waters, etc., are words of God and so are humans. We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favoured races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating and fountainizing all. This is a core conviction of Wilderness Mysticism.

Gender, Non-Gender and Wilderness Mysticism

Wilderness Mysticism focuses a lot of attention on the masculine and feminine aspects of the Divine. This makes sense, since Nature is rooted in male and female forces. Applied psychologically and spiritually, this corresponds to the fact that each of us – regardless of our naturally-given sex – embodies masculine and feminine qualities that are rooted in the Divine. Accordingly, one of the chief teachings of Wilderness Mysticism is the realization that – just as with the reproductive processes found in Nature – Ultimate Reality or the Source consists in a dipolar Creator, a masculine aspect and a feminine aspect. These we refer to as the Father and Mother poles of the divine. In the philosophy articulated in this book, the aim is to retain the traditional Christian Trinitarian language – that of Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and yet balance it with a theological articulation of the reality and experience of a feminine Trinity: Mother, Daughter and Holy Soul. In the context of Wilderness Mysticism, these are then interpreted in terms of natural phenomena, like vast skies, deep canyons, echoes in the desert, or as endlessly-flowing streams, a spider-web of creatures, or an Earth-wide caress. Within the chapters of this book, I often refer to the two Trinities in abbreviated fashion as Mother and Father, or as God and Sophia. And sometimes, for convenience’ sake, I use the singular word God or Creator or Source or Beloved to refer to both Father and Mother.

In the view of Wilderness Mysticism, Father, Son and Holy Spirit make up the transcendent or masculine Trinity, while Mother, Daughter and Holy Soul compose the immanent or feminine or Sophianic Trinity. Between these two, the human soul-and-spirit – and perhaps that of other creatures as well – exists as the mediating force, tasked with bringing the Two together and embodying their union in the world. Here, in this middle place, humanity functions a lot like Emerson’s transparent eyeball, which is able to look in both directions, toward the Mother on the one side and the Father on the other. Residing in this middle place, each human being has, on the one hand, a soul that is a participation in the feminine Holy Soul, and a spirit, on the other hand, that is a participation in the masculine Holy Spirit. Viewed together, soul-and-spirit serve as the connecting link between the two Trinities.

Although we use the terms Father and Mother – or God and Sophia, or God and Goddess - to describe these two cosmic spiritual forces (each indwelt by a personal masculine or feminine Presence), we recognize that some spiritual seekers and practitioners may decide to use other terms that reflect their own experience more accurately. And although she and he are used for convenience’ sake, (since they are more simple and poetic in tone than saying continually the sacred feminine and the sacred masculine"), those pronouns may be replaced with whatever terms are meaningful to each reader.

The gist of the gendered aspect of Wilderness Mysticism is this: masculine and feminine energies do not exist primarily in human beings or in other earthly creatures. Rather, they have their source in the larger reality of the Divine Presence. Discovering and embodying the feminine and masculine aspects of this Presence has been a major passion in my life for the past twenty-five years. The current fad of pretending these two do not exist - or exist solely as cultural constructions – reveals, I am convinced, a profound disconnectedness both from the natural world and from the union with our cosmic Father and Mother that is a major part of our spiritual calling as human beings. Ultimately, we do not project them; they project us. It may take us many millennia to hone our understanding of the precise nature of the traits of these Two, but that does not make them fictitious.

If anything, our arrogant anthropocentrism, which insists that we create the sacred Masculine and the divine Feminine with our language and concepts, is the real fiction. The current fad is also a product of the spell of Nominalism that Western culture has been under since the fourteenth century, when the philosopher William of Ockham set forth the view that only individuals and collections of individuals exist. Theologian Paul Tillich talked about this trend quite frequently and bemoaned its prevalence in the world today. In Ockham’s view, universals occur in name only and thus have no real existence. In modern times, this philosophy manifests itself in the mistaken belief that there is no such thing as divinity, humanity, masculinity or femininity. There is no Ground of Being and no Universal Awareness. All we have are rootless individuals and collections of individuals as the ultimate reality. Thus, meditation turns into merely me and my mind. Yoga becomes me and my body. And time spent in the Great Outdoors becomes me and my experience of Nature. Wilderness Mysticism aims to overcome this nominalistic approach by grounding human experience in divine realities, including the sacred masculine and sacred feminine – the Father and Mother – dimensions of the Ultimate Mystery.

I find it strange that many people these days insist upon giving up so easily the task of elucidating the masculine and feminine traits that all of us - men, women, and everyone in between - manifest within our personalities. It seems they’ve jettisoned the best aspects of ancient wisdom traditions, of Jungian psychology, and of humanity’s grounding in the larger world of Nature, which for over one billion years has expressed itself through masculine and feminine forces. They almost always use the pejorative term oppressive binary to describe any attempt at discovering the nature of these two fundamental energies. What leaves me scratching my head is the lack of imagination that many people these days seem to have. Saying that there is no way the goal of elucidating masculine and feminine traits could ever succeed, they seem to be throwing in the towel prematurely. Imagine Thomas Edison giving up on developing a fully functioning light bulb because the first 1,000 attempts failed! However, while I continue to maintain the masculine-feminine polarity, I understand that these combine in an infinite number of different ways within the seven billion members of the human race. All one has to do is look at the 400,000 flowering plant species in the world - most of which contain flowers possessing both male and female parts - to see that masculinity and femininity are capable of combining in a seemingly endless number of ways. But the attempt by modern theorists to understand masculinity and femininity solely as products of human cultural construction reveals instead how disconnected our society is from the world of Nature.

Even given the possibility that each person – spiritually speaking - may exist as an empty container that is neither masculine nor feminine yet which can become the locus for both energies to express themselves, some seekers bristle at the idea that there may exist any kind of universal divine masculine and feminine energies at all. They see the attempt at ferreting out the two sets of traits solely as a means of boxing people into restrictive stereotypes which arise ultimately from an oppressive patriarchy. These folks believe instead that there exist as many genders as there are individuals. I certainly resonate with one aspect of this perspective, for I believe each individual’s indefinable uniqueness is indispensible to the full self-realization of the Divine. After all, this kind of approach to gender is in fact one side of the equation. But to insist that jettisoning universal divine masculine and feminine traits in favor of a fluid individuality is the only correct way to go risks adopting a black-and-white, either/or approach that is thereby just as patriarchal as the static dipolar view of gender one is attempting to discredit. Wilderness Mysticism goes for a both/and approach that values both the attempt to discover universal masculine and feminine archetypes on the one hand and the opportunity for each individual either to choose their own set of spiritual traits to embody, or not to specify them at all.

People often wonder where the non-gendered aspect resides in a theological system such as the one articulated here. It can be found in several places. First, the position residing in between the transcendent and immanent Trinities – in the middle ground between Father and Mother – is the place where the human soul-and-spirit can be found. On the one hand, this between is indeed gendered insofar as it is a participation in the union of the feminine Holy Soul and the masculine Holy Spirit. On the other hand, this liminal space is also a non-gendered reality. Although in the realm of biological reproduction, a male parent and a female parent join to produce offspring that are either male or female (or sometimes both), the process is different in the realm of spirituality. Here, the sacred masculine and the sacred feminine produce individuals whose spiritual core is neither male nor female, masculine or feminine. For spiritual purposes, we might say that each of us is in fact an empty container in which an utterly unique combination of masculine and feminine forces – both of which come from an Ultimate Reality located beyond us – take up their residence, begin to shapeshift into each other, combine, and become embodied in the world at large. While our sex may be male, female or both, and while our gender may be masculine, feminine, both or neither, our spiritual core is always a genderless container that serves as home to a unique and never-to-be-repeated combination of both sacred femininity and sacred masculinity. For it is these presences who are our ultimate Parents, our primordial Source. In spiritual terms, we really can’t say that we have a masculine core with a feminine side, or a feminine core with a masculine aspect. Rather, our spiritual nature subsists as a non-gendered container capable of hosting both energies as they come from beyond us to indwell our inner being.

A second place where the non-gendered aspect of Wilderness Mysticism can be found is in the non-personal dimension of landscapes, skyscapes and seascapes. While Wilderness Mysticism recognizes that these various aspects of Nature are indwelt by the presence of a personal Father and Mother (and hence the panentheism of Wilderness Mysticism), they themselves are non-personal in quality. This is of course precisely what we need to transcend our personal and societal problems and challenges, and to unite us with the 4.6 billion year history of the Earth. It is in fact this momentary escape from having to maintain our social role that so many of us seek in the non-personal dimension of wilderness landscapes.

The non-gendered aspect of Wilderness Mysticism manifests itself in a third way as well. I’ll talk more about this later, but here let me just say that there is a nameless, mysterious suchness (Buddhism) or still desert into which no distinction ever peeped (Meister Eckhart) or virgin point (Thomas Merton) or mustard seed of faith (Jesus) or Spark (Marguerite Porete) that lies at the core of our individuality which balances out the gendered, masculine-feminine approach. In one sense, this still-point" is masculine in its utterly solitary identity. It is also feminine in the fact that it is perceivable only when we move away from it, a participation in the seamless flow of the sacred feminine. On the other hand, it is also non-gendered in its incomprehensible nature. I believe we need to hold both gendered and non-gendered approaches together in creative tension if we are ever to get a complete picture of reality. Jettisoning the reality of sacred masculine and feminine poles in favor of viewing reality only in non-gendered terms is just as oppressively patriarchal as the historical tendency to see reality only in gendered terms. True spirituality – rooted in Sophianic wisdom – understands the importance of taking a both/and rather than an either/or approach to life.

In this connection, some readers will wonder how the mystical "Godhead existing beyond image and concept" including – in this case – gendered language, fits into the picture. And here I would remind them that the impulse to transcend or move beyond personality and beyond gender is precisely a masculine quality. Masculine energy tends to focus on the impersonal, transcendent dimension of things. Hence we have the male preoccupation with machinery, the aesthetics of male and female bodies, and abstract ideas. It is for this reason that Wilderness Mysticism situates the ultimate non-gendered dimension not beyond the reality of Father and Mother (which actually is a masculine move), but between Father and Mother or God and Sophia, in the liminal space between the Two. And this insight implies that masculinity, femininity, and the non-gendered realm between the two all remain, both now and forever.

One of the joys of intimate human relationship is a discovery of the various ways in which masculine and feminine traits intermingle and shapeshift into each other. Here we might say that what is most attractive for many of us is something feminine performed by a man in a masculine way, and something masculine performed by a woman in a feminine manner. Both men and women love to see something of themselves embodied in the other sex, some trait that takes on the flavor of the other. It’s like looking into a mirror and seeing an attractive person of the opposite sex flirting with you. In terms of the mythical world of Wilderness Mysticism, it is the Father looking into the mirror of his own stillness and seeing the Mother flirt back at him in all of the particulars of the world. Or, it is the Mother caressing herself in the leap of energy present within each creature and event, only to discover that her own fingers are attached to the transparent arm leading to a mysterious Father who dwells on the endless horizon, yet whom she could never find, no matter how far she traveled in that direction.

In practical terms, this shapeshifting of gender might mean - for example – that a man who takes an interest in a field that some would consider feminine – like flowers, for example – is especially attractive when he does so in a masculine manner, e.g., analyzing and classifying them according to the overarching categories developed by botanists. John Muir was one such man. Similarly, a woman who does a masculine act – like creating rules for office protocol that apply equally and non-personally to everyone, regardless of their individual needs, for example – may seem especially attractive when she performs the task in a feminine manner. For example, before she creates the rules, she might spend a few days familiarizing herself with each employee’s job to see what their particular needs are. It is this intermingling of masculine and feminine traits that makes human interactions especially enlivening.

One of the fascinating things about a Wilderness Mysticism worldview is the fact that some aspects of sacred masculinity and sacred femininity already indwell each other. Here we might think in terms of Carl Jung’s contrasexual dimensions, where a feminine anima indwells a predominantly masculine nature, and a masculine animus dwells within a predominantly female nature. For example, if distancing and solitude – or transcendent otherworldliness, the vertical dimension of life – are masculine traits, we can see – if we look deeply into the matter - that these qualities contain an innate element of feminine relationship or this-worldliness. After all, solitude is only attractive when it empowers the development of insights that then can be shared with others, and with the world at large. Solitude all by itself is not solitude at all; it is rather an experience of alienation and loneliness. As contemplative practitioners are well aware, it is in solitude that we actually encounter the deepest part of others. John Muir understood this principle when he wrote: The deeper the solitude the less the sense of loneliness, and the nearer our friends. In our solitude, we discover the solitude of every other person and creature as well. For all are rooted ultimately in the solitude of God. It is like descending into our own solitary inner well in order to contact – at its root – the spiritual aquifer that connects all individual solitudes into One. In other words, the deeper we delve into true masculine solitude, the closer we come to feminine connectedness.

Similarly, if the capacity to emphasize relationship – the horizontal dimension of life - is a feminine quality, there is an innately masculine component already present within it. Accordingly, I only have something to give uniquely to others if I’ve spent time by myself, discovering who I really am. Here, the masculine quality of distancing and boundary-setting is already a constitutive element of the capacity to share something of real value with others. Thus, femininity contains masculinity as a constitutive element on the deepest level.

We also see the quality of masculine distancing present in women during the early weeks of dating. Put in terms of male-female relationships, a woman knows subconsciously that because an intimate relationship with a man may be costly to her individuality if she ends up getting pregnant, she generally puts up quite a few walls – a masculine move - in the beginning as a means of playfully testing his capacity for patience, perseverance and sincerity. This was especially true before the advent of caesarian sections, when a higher percentage of women died in childbirth. This kind of masculine distancing enables a woman interested in a potential partner to create the test