All Things Contemplative
All Things Contemplative
Episode 5: Wilderness Mysticism with Stephen Hatch
Stephen Hatch, M.A. is a contemplative teacher, thinker, photographer and writer. For the past thirty years, he has have lived as a "Worldly Monk," combining family life with meditation, silence, solitary time spent hiking and camping in the wilds, a simple lifestyle, and mindfulness. He has a B.A. from Colorado State University in Philosophy and Religion, and an M.A. from Iliff School of Theology. In the 1980s, he trained with Thomas Keating and then worked for several years with Contemplative Outreach, the organization Keating established to teach centering prayer. Formerly he was on the faculty of Naropa University, Boulder, CO where he taught contemplative Christianity.
Stephen practices Wilderness Mysticism, a wisdom tradition he developed that has its roots in Christian Mysticism. He also considers himself "Interspiritual," drawing on contemplative insights from many different traditions, including especially Buddhism and Native American Spirituality. Hinduism, Sufism, Taoism, Contemplative Judaism and the works of American Nature Writers.
On the podcast he discusses how wilderness mysticism is grounded in Christian mysticism, the use of nature imagery as a spiritual practice, divine union, awe and wonder, interspiritual practice, Thomas Keating and the practice centering prayer, a form of non-conceptual Christian meditation, the two scriptures - the Bible and Nature, naturalist John Muir’s spirituality and his role in founding the Sierra Club and the U.S. national parks, and how contemplation can contribute to healing the modern world.
Belden Lane on Geography, Landscape and Spirituality
Adam Bucko & Rory McEntee, New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living
Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self
The All Things Contemplative Blog
Speaker 1:
Welcome. This is Ron Barnett. I'm the host of All Things Contemplative, the podcast that explores the diversity of how the contemplative dimension of life expresses itself and contemplative practices that support that expression. Our guest today is Steven Hatch, and Steven is going to be sharing with us his experience, thoughts on the idea of what he calls wilderness mysticism, which I think Steven's the only person I know who has maybe coined that term. There may be others, but he can tell us if that's the case. Before we turn to Steven, I wanted to mention a couple housekeeping items. First off, if listeners have a person or a topic that you would like to see covered on the podcast, would invite you to let me know. My email address is on the podcast blog and on the podcast site, and just drop me a line and make your suggestion.
Also, if you have any comments or questions about the podcast today, the best place to raise those is on the podcast blog. If it needs a response, I'd be happy to try to respond to you. So our guest today is Steven Hatch. As I mentioned, Steven's currently living in New Mexico, but sometimes lives in Colorado. Steven is a contemplative teacher, a photographer, and an author of several books. For the past 30 years, he has lived as he describes it, as a worldly monk combining family life with two children and a wife with meditation, silence, solitary time spent, hiking and camping in wilderness. Stephen practices, as I said, what he calls wilderness mysticism, a wisdom tradition he developed that has deep roots in Christian mysticism. Steven has a bachelor's in philosophy and a religion and a master's in theology. Moreover, in the 1980s, he trained with the trap monk, father Thomas Keating, and then worked for several years with contemplative outreach, the organization that Father Keating established for teaching a contemplative practice called centering Prayer. Until recently, Steven was on the faculty of the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where he taught contemplative Christianity. Steven, welcome.
Speaker 2:
Thank you so much, Ron. It's good to be here
Speaker 1:
Today being a lover of nature. I've been looking forward to having you come on the podcast and have you enlighten us on wilderness mysticism. The question I always begin the podcast with for each guest is, what do you understand by the word contemplative? What makes someone or something contemplative?
Speaker 2:
I see the contemplative dimension is that of listening for the divine presence in all things, especially bringing a sense of awe and wonder. I remember that I asked this question to my daughter who was a teenager at the time, a decade ago. I said, crystal, what do you see contemplative as a meaning? She said, oh, dad, that's when the family sits together at the dinner table and really listens to each other.
Speaker 1:
Listens,
Speaker 2:
Yes,
Speaker 1:
And is this listening just with the ears or is there some other kind of listening that's possible?
Speaker 2:
No, it's with one's inner being in the silence with a complete attentiveness for what might bubble up from within or what another person is saying, or in the case of wilderness mysticism, what the natural world might be. Speaking to us,
Speaker 1:
Since you've already said wilderness mysticism, maybe we should go there next. What is wilderness mysticism?
Speaker 2:
Wilderness mysticism is a term that I coined to refer to the natural imagery dimension of the Christian mystical tradition. The Christian mystical tradition uses lots of wilderness imagery, cloud, desert, spaciousness, abyss or canyon imagery, greenness, sunlight. So it refers to that dimension of the Christian mystical tradition. However, it also can be used by those who do not primarily identify themselves as Christians, but who go out into the natural world and find that sense of oneness. That's the mystical dimension, that sense of oneness or union with the divine through the natural world.
Speaker 1:
Right. Maybe we should back up a step and just because we have a diversity of listeners on, maybe you could say a word about what is the Christian mystical tradition, kind of in a nutshell, if that's possible.
Speaker 2:
The Christian mystical tradition really comes from the beginning, really from the gospels and onward from there of that sense of oneness, Jesus, oneness with God, our sense of union or oneness with God, with the divine presence with the creator. So it's that sense of union and a special sense of non-duality that involves both union and communion. There's a relational dimension to it and that makes it specifically Christian, and yet there's a sense of also merging with the divine beloved that one is having a relationship with, and it tends to hover back and forth between those two poles merging and becoming one with the divine on the one hand, and on the other hand, having a sense of communion and relationship with those parts of the divine. That one has not yet embodied. Since the divine is infinite, that sense of communion will always abide with a sense of union for all eternity.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, interesting. So if I'm understanding you, it involves both the dual and the non-dual. So the non-dual would be the union, the oneness that would be non-dual, I think using the hot language of today of non-duality, yet the communion part, the relational part is kind of dualistic in a way. Would that be true to say
Speaker 2:
In the Christian mystical tradition, the word non-dualism has its own flavor really for the Christian mystic, the non-dual is the place in between the relational or what you're calling the dual and that sense of merging what you're calling the non-dual. So it's that place in between the two. Martin Buber, the Jewish mystic really speaks quite clearly what a Christian mystic would also say. He says Spirit is not in the eye or in the thou, but between I and thou in this case also between relationship and emerging. So one is always in that kind of liminal space, which in the Christian terminology is the Holy Spirit, or you might think of the book of Genesis of the Spirit hovering over the waters. So there's that betweenness. So rather than being beyond all things in a sort of monistic realm, it's always between. And so there's a constant shape shifting in the moment when you feel emerging. You're right back out into that sense of communion with the other. And in the very moment when you have the deepest sense of communion with the other, you're right into the realm where you've merged and become the other.
Speaker 1:
It's
Speaker 2:
Very intriguing in that way
Speaker 1:
Sort of oscillating back and forth kind of Correct, yes. Okay. But you would feel that both using that term non-dual is appropriate within this context? Certainly,
Speaker 2:
Yeah. As long as we realize there are varieties of non-dual experience, and it varies with the different religions, and so I think it's important to realize, I think that Christian Contemplatives went through a time when they were sort of trying to be the Eastern mystics. They sort of thought they had less and they wanted to use all the same terms that the Eastern mystics did and Hinduism and Buddhism for example. And I think there's more of a realization now that actually the Christian mystical tradition contributes something unique of its own to the interreligious dialogue about non-duality. So there's various types of non-duality and what some of the eastern traditions would call non-dual. I suppose the Christian mystic would say that's the monistic. And so for the Christian mystic, the non-dual is between or oscillating back and forth between the monistic and the sense of relationship, the divine beloved.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. I know you studied with Thomas Keating and he certainly has been a leader in the Christian world of particularly in the past 10 years. For those who may not know him, he passed away two years ago, but in particular in the past 10 years of his life, he really was focusing on the non-dual it seemed, and his writings and his talks he gave. And we're going to circle around a little bit later because since you did study with him, he would be an interesting person for us to touch on. So wilderness mysticism, circling back to it, imagery, say something about imagery. I've always found imagery interesting. I trained in a type of spiritual psychology called Psychosynthesis that was developed by an Italian named Roberto Asli, and he sort of went beyond Jung in a way where he posited that there was this higher self and that one could, if there weren't too many obstacles in the personality, that one could live from that higher dimension or higher self. So it uses a lot of imagery in that work. So anyway, tell us a little bit if you could, about the nature in imagery that you find and use in
Speaker 2:
Wilderness. I find I practice several different forms of meditation, some of them sitting meditation, and so the contemplative prayer dimension uses canyon or abyss imagery, and that's quite traditional in the tradition, but that's that sense of descending into a canyon or abyss. And the divine presence is like a magnet dwelling in the infinitely deep center of that abyss, and one's thoughts twinkle like stars above that canyon. Or you might also use old growth forest imagery and what is sitting at night toward the base of say, a Sequoia forest and sinking deeper and deeper into that sense of being magnetized by the ground of being while your thoughts twinkle like the stars and wave like the tree branches far above. On the other hand, there's a form of Christian wilderness mysticism that involves spaciousness, and that would be wilderness insight meditation where one merges with and becomes the spaciousness of the sky of the ocean, the seashore, the desert Meister Eckhart uses a lot of desert imagery, and there the thoughts emerge clouds out of the sky of the divine awareness or echoes emerging in the middle of a desert.
Now, this imagery is interesting that the images are used then to transcend the images. So for example, you can think of a canyon that has definite walls and has a certain depth to it, but that actually takes you to a bottomless canyon into which that you sink in continually. That is then beyond images. Similarly, the spaciousness imagery evolves into a sense of infinite or limitless spaciousness. You might think of the medieval image that uses a circle and it says that God is a circle whose circumference is nowhere yet whose center is everywhere. So there you're using the image of a circle and then kind of expanding it infinitely and exploding it till it becomes kind of a non image.
Speaker 1:
By the way, it sort of sounds like a zen koan.
Speaker 2:
It's it really is. And the problem that I had was so much, so many of the Christian mystical teachers had a tendency to disparage imagery that that was just going to keep you confined to the finite and they wanted to go beyond that. But I didn't experience it that way. I experienced the images as a means to the image list, and indeed Thomas Merton says exactly the same thing, especially in the last years of his life. He said, those who go beyond words, it presupposes. They've already used words to the N degree. They have analyzed and they have found the juicy, the beauty in the words, and that leads them beyond the words. I believe that if we're going to take care of this earth, we need to not get beyond images too quickly, but actually use them to bring us to that other place that goes beyond images.
And then it constantly self empties itself back into images, into fresh images. But here I was very influenced by a mystic named Pseudo-Dionysius the Ameopagite, a Syrian Christian mystic in the fifth or sixth century. He said, when we meet God, we don't meet the essence of God, but we go to the place where God dwells. And for him, that was the darkness, the dark cloud and that sense of night. Belden Lane, who is a modern reformed Presbyterian mystic talks about that in his books, including landscapes of the sacred and the solace of fierce landscapes. So we go into the temple of the Divine, which is the wilderness, and there within that temple we move into that place of no thingness.
Speaker 1:
What is the relationship, let me say it this way, what is the relationship between the imagery like the depth canyon imagery and the actual physical geophysical place that you are? I assume with this you need to be out in wilderness, right? So for example, do you go to a canyon and then have some meditation using the depth imagery? How does that work? What's that relationship between the image and the actual geography that you're in?
Speaker 2:
Just as people go to a monastery to sort of get a booster shot of contemplative spirituality for their everyday life. So the wilderness mystic will go to prized wilderness places throughout the year in order to find a booster shot for that sense of finding the presence of the divine in the inner canyon or in the spaciousness. And then when they go home, they use that imagery in the very beginning of their meditation and then it sort of fuzzes out and they enter what I call the cloud of mutuality and they rest in the ground of being. Yes, there's definitely times to go into the wilderness to renew once sense of that. I think several times a year where I love slot canyons, slot canyons in the American southwest are canyons that are just wider than your body, and you can hike through some of them through miles, one of them here in the four corners areas 16 miles long. So if you go to a place like that, it really renews your sense of being in the Interior Canyon. So when you go home to your life in town, you can bring up that imagery and so it serves you all year long.
Speaker 1:
I see. Yeah. As you're talking, it reminds me of the Grand Canyon and description. I've never been myself. That's on my to-do list to make it out for a raft trip. But descriptions, I've read some descriptions, it's almost, they don't use the word spiritual, but they oftentimes talk about the sense of going backwards into time or back to origin or back to source experience that they have as they're cruising down the river. Is that related, that kind of experience related at
Speaker 2:
All? Absolutely, especially in the Grand Canyon when you've got billions of years of earth history. In my opinion, geology is innately spiritual because it takes you into deep time. And in one of the forms of meditation that I practice, wilderness insight meditation, there's a sense that all of your thoughts and perceptions are like echoes of a never spoken divine word that arise from a primordial primeval realm. So there is a sense that your very thoughts and perceptions are arising out of some kind of primordial realm and echoing here in the present, Thoreau talked about this as well. He talked about how echoes have that sort of primordial dimension. So similarly when we treat our thoughts and our feelings and our perceptions that way, there is a sense and it's part of the practice as seeing them as arising from a primordial kind of realm. And so yes, the Grand Canyon with billions of years of Earth definitely brings you into that kind of space as well.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I have a friend who was actually on the podcast recently. He's a long distance open water marathon swimmer. In fact, he's done the English channel and lots of other, that is the word he often uses when he's in solitude, swimming in silence is primordial.
Speaker 2:
Primordial. He
Speaker 1:
Says it's like a primordial experience that is delightful. He says,
Speaker 2:
Yes, I relate to that. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. So Steven, you sort of touched on this earlier about that one could, if practice is the right word, one could practice wilderness mysticism if you're a Christian or if you're not a Christian. And so this question is what if any, is the place for religious doctrine or doctrine? It sounds like it's not mandatory, but anyway, just be curious to know what your view on that is.
Speaker 2:
I think that doctrines and teachings as well as established practices of the religious traditions are like as Ken Weber calls it, the microscope or the telescope through which you then look toward the divine. So in the case of the telescope, that would be the night sky. In the case of the microscope, it would be the pond scum or whatever you're examining. However, once you learn to use that microscope or telescope, that is a set of basic teachings and practices, you're going to discover new things. Any good astronomer is going to discover new galaxies and whole new ways of looking at things. Same with the biologist. So you're not going to reinvent the wheel, but you're going to use that wheel to take you to new places. But of course in our time we have many people who are interspiritual and what they find is they piece together insights or teachings or doctrines from various traditions. And I very much support that kind of move, which I've seen, especially among the young.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, that raises an interesting question about spiritual dilettantism.
Houston Smith, the very famous philosopher, professor of comparative religion once talked about the importance of sticking with one tradition and he likened it and he, besides being a scholar, Houston Smith also practiced kind of what he researched and what he wrote about. And I heard him talk once and he was talking about this very issue of exploring different traditions, and he said, the problem is if you only, it seems like digging a well for water and you're wanting to hit water, if you don't go deep enough with one tradition, you'll never really tap the water table that you're searching for and aiming for so that if you dig a hole here, shallow dig another hole. And I guess there seems to be some truth to that. How do we reconcile that with the great interest as positive as it is in the context of inner spiritual, not just dialogue, but inner spiritual practices that, I mean, you've already said you've got a Christian practice, you've got Buddhist practice.
Speaker 2:
Sure,
Speaker 1:
Comment.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it's a worthy concern. And I think if the temptation is simply to develop practices that sort of tickle your ego, that's not a very helpful approach. However, I think there's another way to look at this, and Mirabi Starr, who is one of the chief Interspiritual teachers grew up at the Llama Foundation in New Mexico. She says, well, inter spirituality is digging a single well with a multitude of different tools. And there's a book entitled The New Monasticism in which this very question is brought up. And in that book, let's see, it's called the New Monasticism and Interspiritual Manifesto. They make the point in that book, that actually
Speaker 1:
Book, is that by Adam Bucko?
Speaker 2:
Yes, Roy McEntee, I think. Yes.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah. I want to get one or both of them on the podcast because I think they have something important to say.
Speaker 2:
Well, they make the point that it's a very challenging, it's actually a very challenging path because you can't rely on the certitudes of certain spiritual masters or a tradition. You're constantly analyzing and examining everything and listening to your heart and sifting, and there's a lot of doubt and uncertainty and a dark night. So it's a very challenging kind of path and disciplined. But the way they speak of dealing with this issue that you talk of is they recommend that an interspiritual person, they give three senses of spirituality. But the one most common is a person who doesn't identify with any one tradition, but they piece together insights from various, their recommendation is that such a person has a kind of a spiritual director or guide who comes from one of the established traditions who has the depth in one tradition, and so can help them avoid some of the ego traps that would occur.
For me, I see the wilderness as it is a tradition. It is a place, it is a place you can go to and it has a kind of singularity to it. It's a place, it is a temple in which the divine can speak to you. So there's a sense in which for me, even though I would identify myself with Christian mysticism, to me that can morph into a sense of finding God and Christ in the wilderness. I think it's a very real concern. But in actuality, a person who develops an interspiritual path with integrity realizes it's actually quite a challenging path.
Speaker 1:
Can one follow the wilderness mystical path without having a belief in a God?
Speaker 2:
Absolutely. Every person has a different way that they experience the religious ultimate. I prefer if I were an atheist, I would prefer to be called something else. I would not like to be defined by my lack of belief in God. I would prefer to be called say as Edward Abbey would say, an earth or a humanist or a naturalist. But no, I think there's a sense in which there's some sort of a religious ultimate that takes you into a more broad and more deep kind of realm, which I think is the definition of spirituality. It takes you outside the confines of just your own single self or your family or your community or your nation or your race, and broadens you into a reality that is more vast and or deep. And there are many names for that, and I think everyone finds their own way with that and they find their own way of speaking of that ultimate.
For a while, Thomas Keating talked about it as the ultimate mystery, and I found for myself, I tended to use that word, the great mystery, the ultimate mystery, the great sacred for decades. Then after a while I thought, you know what? I'm not going to give up the word God to the fundamentalists. I'm going to reclaim that word and show how it isn't identified with the old patriarchal al man sitting in the clouds or whatever, that actually it has a very deep meaning to it, but certainly every person is going to have their own way describing that spiritual ultimate.
Speaker 1:
I recently came across Jane Goodall's autobiography that she wrote and her description in it of being in the forest in Gambia and having a full-blown what we would call a mystical experience that came out of the blue. And not only were her senses, all of her senses heightened to the nth degree, but she also experienced this oneness. There was no reference to a God, but that I think she uses the term the spirit of nature. That was the closest she came to it, but obviously a very profound experience. And she went on to say that in terms of how it influenced her life, that anytime that she met adversity in her life, either as a scientist or as an environmentalist, that she would often recall that experience that sort of shored her up and gave her a resilience to persevere with whatever the issue was.
Speaker 2:
Yes, precisely.
And I think in any spiritual tradition, there comes a time when, let's say in the Christian tradition, when God becomes not so much an object that you are gazing at, but becomes the lens or the eyes through which you look at, and this is very important, the world, so that each spiritual tradition is just a different lens for looking at and finding the sacredness, awe and wonder of the world. And to me, that is the ultimate goal of any spiritual tradition is that sense of awe and wonder that we have in this world. You don't have to be a theist to have that. And in fact, I think the best scientists have a spirituality in the sense that they bring that sense of awe and wonder. I think of people like Carl Sagan. I mean, he was a spiritual guy, and yet I don't know if he believed in God, but it didn't matter because he brought this sense of exuberance and excitement and awe and wonder about the magnificence of the world that is spiritual.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. You mentioned the world. It's in the state, it's in, I'll put it that way. How does the contemplative or contemplation do you think? Does it have any healing potential for healing the world?
Speaker 2:
Yes. The contemplative dimension of every tradition and every non-tradition brings a sense of expansiveness. So that means that you are going to find both a part of yourself in the other that is the person of the other race, the other gender, the other species, whatever it might be. There's a sense that they're a part of your extended self, and so you'll care about that other person or race or species because you realize that you need them, they're part of you, and the sense that the other is a beloved, there's a sense of a love affair with something larger than just one other person. And I think it's that falling in love with the world, with other races, with other species, with other genders, with other sexual orientations that really helps us to care for the other. Joanna Macy once wrote an article called World as Self, world as Lover, and that's very much what the contemplative dimension is about.
So that sense of expanding our identity and expanding the sense of what the beloved is automatically leads to a care for the world, and that's desperately needed because we need more than just morality, like we should care for the other, or ethics, it's right to care for the other. We need a sense of beauty, aesthetic, love, attraction, wooing, and a sense that the other is a part of our deepest self, and many, many mystics have had that sense of a love affair with the divine and whatever context they experience it. And for the wilder wilderness mysticism, the natural world is both a larger self and is a beloved. And when you love someone, you care for them and you want their best interest. So very much is that the case?
Speaker 1:
I would go further actually in saying when that is the case, when you're dwelling in that love and in the identity that in a way self and other, there is no self and other, there's just oneness, that the caring seems to flow naturally. I mean, it's not like an obligation, well, I have to go do something good, but it just virtually comes out of being
Speaker 2:
True. Yes,
Speaker 1:
All this Huxley once said, good being results in good doing. And that seems related. Steven, to sort of tie this to another question I had, which has to do with community, when I first heard your idea and your description of wilderness mysticism, I just sort of conceived it probably wrongly as a very solitary enterprise. And I began to think about, well, what about community? What about the group? And could you say a word two about that?
Speaker 2:
I think that each of us might find ourselves in the midst of a group of people that are like-minded, whether we're a part of a church SGA synagogue or whatever, or just a group of people that like to go hiking together. However, I come from a tradition in the Christian mystical tradition, a Protestant tradition that talks about itself as the invisible church. This tradition arises from the 16th century Germany, and this group of people are called the contemplative spirituals, and they described community more in a sense of time than space. That is community is less a sense of one group of people gathered together in a single space, and rather it's something that's spread out throughout the day. So there's a sense that you might get up in the morning, you have a conversation, you meditate with your partner, you hear some coyotes of that brings you into that state of union and a sense of awe and wonder.
You might go out and do an errand, talk with another person, have a meaningful connection. You might then go to some sort of spiritual meeting where there's a connection. You might go for a hike, you might meet a mountain lion or see a sunset. There's a spiritual connection there. So the community is strung out throughout the day. And Rufus Jones, a famous Quaker theologian who taught just a couple of miles from where I grew up in Pennsylvania, talked about the contemplative spirituals as kind of the Heraclitus of the spirit. Heraclitus was a Greek philosopher who said, you never step into the same river twice. So in other words, your community each day is never the same two times because each day it's different. So yeah, for the wilderness mystic, there is that sense of always being on the lookout for that next interaction that brings that sense of community, that Sangha,
Speaker 1:
John Muir, someone dear to your heart, I know for those who may not know who he is, who was John Muir and how is he related to wilderness mysticism and the contemplative?
Speaker 2:
John Muir grew up in Scotland in the early 18 hundreds, and his dad brought the family to the United States to Wisconsin to work a farm. And then after Muir left home, he became a kind of inventor. He was quite a genius, actually invented all sorts of machinery. One night a file slipped and it hit his eye and he went temporarily blind for a few weeks and he had a kind of wake up call. He said, I realized I want to study the inventions of God, not man. So he'd always had a connection to nature, but he had a real awakening to nature. Ended up on a thousand mile hike from Indiana to Florida, caught malaria, had a mystical experience, and eventually ended up at Yosemite. He became a sort of troubador for Yosemite. It was kind of a born again experience is the way he described it. And he found himself baptized in Yosemite Falls and in the other waterfalls there. So he applied his Christian experience to the wilderness that he found at Yosemite, and then he went on to become a wilderness preservationist, and then he went on to help found the Sierra Club, and then he went up to Alaska and explored Alaska. And so he's a real inspiration to many, and he is been an inspiration to me since the third grade when I first encountered one of his stories in a reader about him and a little dog in Alaska.
Speaker 1:
Would it be true to say using the language of modern times that he was a spiritual but not religious person? Absolutely. Would that be pretty accurate if he took a survey now and saying, what religion do you belong to? Would it be He might respond
Speaker 2:
Spiritual but not religious, although a lot of scholars are seeing that he actually continued the reform tradition, the Calvinist tradition into the direction of wilderness mysticism. In fact, there are many scholars who are saying that the American Wilderness preservation movement is actually founded in Calvinism. And that's a very fascinating thesis. I love it that the group that everyone loves to hate, the Puritans and the Calvinists actually were responsible for much of the connection to nature in our American history, one of the great paradoxes of history.
Speaker 1:
And you've written a book on John Muir, correct?
Speaker 2:
Yes. I've written books. One is the contemplative, John Muir, where I compiled passages from his writings about spirituality, including many that hadn't been published before. And then I have a second book called Wilderness Mysticism that includes Muir and my own thought, and a third called Rocks and Waters or Words of God, John Muir's ecological reading of the Bible.
Speaker 1:
So Steven, is there anything else that you'd like to say about John Muir?
Speaker 2:
Yes, he's been an inspiration to so many. His exuberance and his sense of joy and the presence of the landscape really is inspiring to so many in this sort of passionless era, and I find him immensely inspirational in the way he evolved in his lifetime and his views. At first, he didn't know much about Native Americans. He met a few isolated individuals in California and didn't have a very positive view of them. And then he went to Alaska, found whole tribes still living in their villages, and he realized that they had a form of life that was more in line with his own and his own philosophy, and he realized that they had much more true spirituality and connection to the earth than most of the dominant society at the time.
Speaker 1:
And wasn't he influential in setting up the National Park systems right as well?
Speaker 2:
Yes, and he went camping with Teddy Roosevelt when he was president at Yosemite and was very influential in getting the state of California to seed back the Yosemite Valley up to the federal government so it could be a part of Yosemite National Park.
Speaker 1:
Right. A very influential individual in terms of nature preservation, environmentalism,
Speaker 2:
Very much so.
Speaker 1:
I don't even know that word was even coined back then, but he was certainly a leader and innovator in that area.
Speaker 2:
He was, but he was also a mystic. He had a sense of union and oneness as well as a sense of a love affair with the natural world. And this perspective comes out in his journals, and I try to highlight that in my books. Also. He was a person who was a scientist, so if you read his journals, you'll have one page where he makes scientific observations and sketches. The next page, he'll have some mystical reflections. The next page, he'll have some more sketches. The page after that will have more mystical reflections. So he was very much a person who could go back and forth between the two sides of the brain or between the mystical and the scientific.
Speaker 1:
Oh, very good.
Speaker 2:
Yeah,
Speaker 1:
A great ideal and model sounds a little bit like Einstein was able to do that
Speaker 2:
Certainly
Speaker 1:
In some of his descriptions of things, because Thomas Keating was really the inspiration for me in starting this podcast. I don't want to let you go, certainly because you studied with him and did retreats with him. I don't want to let you go without saying something about him who was Thomas Keating because some of our listeners may never have heard that name before. Who was he and what is the centering prayer that he promoted, I guess is a good word?
Speaker 2:
Thomas Keating was a Trappist monk. The Trappist are a reform of the Suter who were a reform of the Benedictines, and they practiced a lot of silence, and he was a Trappist monk from a very young age. He actually became the Abbott or the head of a Trappist monastery in Massachusetts. He started getting interested in other traditions, would bring various gurus and ROEs and Ches and other teachers to the monastery. And then eventually there was a split in the monastery. Some monks liked it and some didn't. He resigned. He had started teaching centering prayer, which is a form of Christian meditation that involves silence and letting go of thoughts while he was Abbott. But after he retired from being in Abbott, I think it was in 1981, he moved back to the monastery and Snowmass Colorado where he really began his career of going out and sharing the tradition of centering prayer with everyday people in the world. And he was very generous in that he didn't have a big distinction between lay people and monastics or religious. He thought that people in the world could have more mystical stirrings than people in a monastery. He was very humble, very unselfish, had a great sense of humor, and he was really one of a kind.
I met him in 1982 at the monastery. He had just retired, resigned as the Abbot at the monastery in Massachusetts. He was the guest master. And I remember I had all of these burning questions as a young man in my twenties, but my wife and I were there and my young daughter was there who was about one, and I think he had more interest in playing with those little Fisher-Price people toys than answering my burning questions. He was trying to gently nudge me away from my intensity to appreciate the sacredness that was occurring around me, including what my own daughter who was playing with her toys.
Speaker 1:
I see.
Speaker 2:
He is a wonderful man. Yeah. I just wanted to say one other anecdote. When I first started trying to practice Christian meditation or centering prayer, I tried so intensely that I broke out and boils all over my body. I had to go to the doctor and get an antibiotic. That's the tendency. The way I've tended to approach everything is in intensity. What I told him about this, instead of him saying, oh, no, no, you did it wrong, he laughed and said, oh, I'm sure God appreciates your generosity, but really you don't have to use any effort in this type of prayer. So that was his way. He was a very kind hearted father, and he really made up in my own life. I went through a period when my own father couldn't support my own spiritual journey as it expanded, and Thomas became a kind of spiritual father to me.
Speaker 1:
Good, good. Yeah, you're very fortunate and I'm sure you're very grateful, thankful I can hear it in your description of him. And in the show notes, we'll include a reference to his book on centering prayer, open heart, open mind, in case listeners want to follow up and learn a bit more about him.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely.
Speaker 1:
So Steven, before we end, anything that you would like to say or share, this has been a very illuminating discussion. I have found anything you'd like to leave us with.
Speaker 2:
Yes, that is that the divine presence is here with each one of us. Each of us has our own spiritual journey that is completely unique. There's never been anyone on the planet just like you. And so take seriously what the spirit speaks to you within your own heart and mind. And I would encourage each of us to seek out those natural areas where we feel most nourished. For some it might be the desert, the sea coast, the forest, the mountains. Seek out that place or those places which are most spiritually nourishing for you, where you feel the most at peace at home, and go there and really listen because the natural world as the Christian mystics from very early have always said is actually a second Bible. There is the Bible, the scriptures, and there's the Bible, the scripture of the natural world. And if we don't learn how to read the scripture of the natural world, we won't take care of it as we want to. So I would encourage each person, each listener, to get out into those wide open spaces, let the breezes blow through you, clear out all of the fog, and bring spiritual presence, the spiritual insight to your being and encourage you. Then take out your journal and write down the insights that you find. I find that my journal, which I use whenever I'm out in the natural world, really is a kind of Bible for me.
Speaker 1:
Sounds like good guidance all around. So Steven, I want to thank you Effusively for coming on the podcast. Thank you about wilderness mysticism and enlightening us as to what that is.
Speaker 2:
You're
Speaker 1:
Welcome, Ron. Yeah, very good. And for our listeners, peace and I'll see you down the road. And with that, this episode of All Things Contemplative comes to a close. I hope you found it interesting and informative and will join me for the next episode piece.