Quotes from Belden C. Lane

Intimacy in all human relationships—especially with God—can occur only as vulnerability and inadequacy are owned.

To love someone is to grant him or her the gift of one's pure and undivided attention, without preconceived expectations of what the other person needs, what we imagine to be best in the situation, what particular results we want to engineer.

Divine love is incessantly restless until it turns all woundedness into health, all deformity into beauty, all embarrassment into laughter. In biblical faith, brokenness is never celebrated as an end in itself.

God can only be met in emptiness, by those who come in love, abandoning all effort to control, every need to astound.

Simone Weil was surely right when she asked, "Isn't it the greatest possible disaster, when you are wrestling with God, not to be beaten?" God's invitation to the spiritual life is a call to the high-risk venture of being loved more fiercely than we ever might have dreamed.

People who pay attention to what matters most in their lives, and who learn to ignore everything else, assume a freedom that is highly creative as well as potentially dangerous in contemporary society. Having abandoned everything of insignificance, they have nothing to lose. Apart from being faithful to their God, they no longer care what happens to them.

The spiritual life involves risk. There's no way around it. The paradox of biblical religion is that God cannot be understood, much less managed. Coming to terms with ultimate mystery is always dangerous. But to our amazement, encountering the Holy can also mean being strangely and unaccountably loved.

The high desert landscape of New Mexico is a sparse terrain, bearing the trace of stories long forgotten. It's a good place to study the parlance of wind and flowing water, to ponder ravens on the wing and the play of shadows among the rocks. The land here cuts through you like a knife, enticing you to relinquish one trusted language for another- or for none at all.

We're surrounded by a world that talks, but we don't listen. We're part of a community engaged in a vast conversation, but we deny our role in it. We haven't the courage to acknowledge our deep need for what we can't explain. The soul feeds on what takes us to the edge, but we don't go there willingly. Our longing is an echo of the Earth's.

I shoulder my pack and hit the trail, realizing I'm being called to a memory deeper than my own, to a language my body has known all along. The desert speaks- out of lifetimes of patience and pain-with a subtle but insistent voice. My role in the Great Conversation isn't finally to understand, only to listen and love.

The threat to natural wilderness forces us into the inner wilderness of the human psyche where wonder, grief, and longing are storming within us as well. Every experience in the natural world invites us to a corresponding work of the soul.

Something similar (to bird migrations) draws human beings on pilgrimages as well… Pilgrimage is a spiritual as well as biological impulse, cutting across species. It's even a cosmic mystery. The Earth itself follows a 584-million-mile path around the sun each year. We're all defined by movement.

Wind varies in its emotional effect on humans depending on ions in the atmosphere. A hot, dry, dusty wind-generates positive ions that cause increased tension and irritability…on the other hand, waterfalls, pounding surf, and the aftermath of a thunderstorm release negative ions that clear airborne particles, relieve stress, and boost energy.

Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me." Hildegard of Bingen

One's self is ever a tenuous thing, discovered only in relinquishment.

There is a certain nonacquiescence, a noncooperativeness that is the common outgrowth of a life of contemplative prayer.

There cannot be such a thing as true life without praise. Praising and no longer praising are related to each other as are living and no longer living." —Claus Westermann, The Praise of God in the Psalms (1965)

A saccharine, easy grace is no grace at all.

Only at the periphery of our lives, where we and our understanding of God alike are undone, can we understand bewilderment as occasioning another way of knowing.

We seem to have an insatiable thirst for places that don't exist, for griffins and wondrous dragons prowling the antipodes of a world we hardly recognize. They symbolize states of growth we haven't yet achieved.

The connecting web is a mystery embedded in the ordinary. My falling in love with a tree has been a profound experience of the sacred…I increasingly encounter God's presence in the rough touch of bark and the sound of rustling leaves. In the ordinary.

The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is- it must be something you cannot possibly do." Henry Moore

Mountains cover 24 percent of the Earth's surface, accommodating 12 percent of the world's population in 120 different countries. They tend to be hotspots of cultural diversity. In the Hindu Kush of the Himalayas alone people speak more than a thousand different languages and dialects.

Poet W.S. Merwin once mused that in order to adequately describe the forests of eastern Pennsylvania where he grew up, he'd "have to speak in a forgotten language." He was aware that a shift in consciousness is necessary for certain forms of communication and that it's easy to lose ancient languages we've long ceased to practice. How, then, do we speak of the languages that we may need in renewing the Great Conversation?