Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice

I enjoy hiking. There’s something refreshing about being out on a trail somewhere, away from stuff and buildings and noise and traffic. Most of my hiking has been the day-hike variety. Arrive at a trailhead at some point in the morning, lace up my boots, grab the hiking pole, and head out on a 5-10 mile route carrying a small daypack with water and some trail mix—maybe lunch.

Day hikes are a good getaway refresher, but in recent years, I’ve come to appreciate backpacking far more. A backpacking adventure involves hiking for multiple days, carrying food and sleeping equipment for the duration, and allows for more extended freedom from everyday routines, responsibilities, and distractions. Consequently, I get more time to think and reflect. On my few backpacking trips, I discovered many parallels to the Christian life as well as reflections of spiritual truths in nature.

With that personal experience as a background, the title of Belden Lane’s book —Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice—jumped out at me.

 “The discipline of backpacking, Lane shows, is a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Just as the wilderness offered revelations to the early Desert Christians, backpacking hones crucial spiritual skills: paying attention, traveling light, practicing silence, and exercising wonder.”

That was enough for me. I purchased the hardcover edition and dove right in when the book arrived. I found the author’s writing style engaging; his descriptive language brought the various wilderness places to life.

The Approach

Professor Lane’s approach to the wilderness adventures in this book was to determine a location for a multi-day backpacking trip and select the writings of a spiritual writer, mostly from the past. Out in the wild, apart from everyday-life distractions, he would read slowly and meditate long on what he read, hoping for some truth or insight to impact him in a profound way. I’ll discuss later some of his reading choices.

Wilderness Adventures

What kept me engaged with the book was the author’s experiences in various wilderness places new to me. Most of his destinations are in the Missouri Ozarks, and Lane’s descriptions entice me to consider exploring some of those places. He also recounts adventures in Canyonlands National Park and the Mudlick Mountain Trail in Utah, Laramie Peak in Wyoming, and the Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness Area in Arizona.

On each backpacking journey, he learned something of value for life’s journey, even if from failure. I appreciated his humble candor as he shared a failed effort to summit Mt. Whitney, due mostly to inexperience, lack of preparation, and fear (I wrote about that in an earlier blog post).

One of the most disturbing places Lane describes is Times Beach in the Meramec River region of Missouri. A one-time summer resort community, Times Beach fell victim to toxic chemical waste from a nearby producer of Agent Orange. Animals died, the soil became horribly polluted with dioxin and PCBs, and the once-thriving community became a ghost town. Unfortunately, the pollution affected a far wider area than Times Beach, reaching into the surrounding wilderness, as well.

Think on This

Some of the ideas I highlighted in my reading demonstrate how instructive Lane’s practice can be.

• Encountering texts—even familiar ones—in out-of-the-way places at moments of significant change has an unnerving way of prompting new insight. The book assumes a fresh life in the offbeat, unpredictable place. (17)
• Attending to the world around me is a virtue the wilderness teaches very effectively. (23)
• Referring to Augustine, he notes, “The book of nature communicates a danger and beauty that stirs the senses, opening the soul to a corresponding truth found in the text of Scripture.” (25)
• Part of the grandeur of nature is that it cares so little about the things that absorb us so much….It shares its gifts with a prodigal extravagance, even as it ignores our imagined self-importance. (31)
• Now and then we need something arduous to shake us out of our lethargy. (34)
• “When I am in the cellar of affliction,” wrote Puritan Samuel Rutherford, “I look for the Lord’s choicest wines.” (59)
• Our highest nobility as humans…is our insatiable longing for beauty. (67)
• Each of us has to negotiate our own dance between the solitary and communal life. It differs for everyone. When we ignore the balance of the two, we run the risk of severe loss to ourselves and to others. (75)
• We amass an all-encompassing catalog of experiences without being present to any of them. (94)
• It isn’t what you know in your head, but what you’ve become that matters most…in backpacking as well as in life. (102)
• The most important “mountain” in one’s life offers no pride of accomplishment, only the unwelcome gifts of inadequacy and incompletion…. Every failure is an invitation to growth. Mistakes are occasions for grace, opportunities to choose a different path. They make forgiveness possible. (129)
• In our consumer-driven society, an image of flawless proficiency is crucial to success. To admit failure in a world that judges value by polished surfaces is to lose your edge as a commodity in the marketplace. (135)
• The seemingly perfect man isn’t perfect at all. He’s just better than others at hiding his shadow. (137)
• Far from being just another worldly distraction, wilderness…has an uncanny power to check the ego and quiet the soul. (148)
• Aloneness at its best is firmly grounded in relationship…. Only by being alone do we recognize the ties that bind us to everything else. (169-70)
• “Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain-passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action.” — John Muir (216)

Disappointments

While I enjoyed much in Backpacking with the Saints, I honestly didn’t appreciate the author’s acceptance of the evolutionary theory of origins. I had hoped that a Professor of Theological Studies would perceive the created world from a creationist perspective. His frequent references to a millions-of-years process of evolving aggravated my young-earth sensibilities.

I also struggled with Lane’s unqualified acceptance of non-Christian mystics from Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim traditions. He refers to their writings as being on an equal spiritual plane with those of Christian writers. On the one hand, I did benefit from some of the insights; on the other hand, however, the book offers no explanation of the limitations of those insights. In other words, given Hinduism’s or Buddhism’s view of the origins of nature, can their insight really help me get to know better the God of nature?

And that brings up my greatest disappointment with Backpacking with the Saints—the inherent mystical approach to gaining spiritual truth. Instead of starting with God’s revelation in Scripture and seeing it reinforced or perhaps even clarified in the wilderness adventure, the author meditates on various spiritual mystics’ writings. Those writings and his own “spiritual experiences” serve to reinforce the spiritual truths he perceives. Honestly, most of those perceptions are fine; but a few along the way either contradict or undermine the authority and/or sufficiency of Scripture. The naïve reader will assume that Brother Lawrence, John Bunyan, Martin Luther, the various “Desert Fathers,” Jelaluddin Rumi, and Mohandas Gandhi are equally credible. Further, one might conclude that the insights of Christianity, Buddhism, the Sufi tradition of Islam, and Hindu’s Lord Shiva carry the same weight of authority. Lane’s indiscriminate use of these non-Christian writers could easily lead one to become a Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim–or at least consider their writings to be spiritually authoritative. 

Conclusion

A mature, discerning Christian with a love for hiking, backpacking, or solitude in nature will enjoy the descriptive writing of Backpacking with the Saints. He or she will be able to recognize and affirm biblical truth, even when expressed by non-Christian mystics. One whose senses are not so well exercised to discern truth from error (Hebrews 5:14) would be better advised to pass on this book.

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Belden C. Lane is Professor Emeritus of Theological Studies, American Religion, and History of Spirituality at Saint Louis University. He is author of The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality and Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality. I read a review that resonated with my own experience.