But it's the utter indifference of fierce landscapes to human life that initially sets us on edge. The desert, Edward Abbey always said, "Would as soon kill ya as look at ya." It simply doesn't care. It has a way of stripping people bare; demanding of us an utter simplicity and raw-boned honesty.

Listen to a cowboy poem out of the desert of the western plains that expresses so well this plain-spoken candor of the desert, and its rugged indifference to all the anxious concerns of our ego. It's a little poem by Montana rancher Wallace McRae, called Reincarnation.

What does reincarnation mean?
A cowpoke ast his friend.
His pal replied, "It happens when
Yer life has reached its end.
They comb yer hair, and warsh yer neck,
And clean yer fingernails,
And lay you in a padded box
Away from life's travails.

The box and you goes in a hole,
That's been dug into the ground.
Reincarnation starts in when
Yore planted 'neath a mound.
Them clods melt down, just like yer box,
And you who is inside
And then yore just beginnin' on
Yer transformation ride.

In a while the grass'll grow
Upon yer rendered mound.
Till some day on yer moldered grave
A lovely flower is found.
And say a horse should wander by
And graze upon this flower
That once wuz you, but now's become
Yer vegetative bower.

The posey that the hoss done ate
Up, with his other feed,
Makes bone, and fat, and muscle
Essential to the steed.
But some is left that he can't use
And so it passes through,
And finally lay upon the ground.
This thing, that once wuz you.

Then say, by chance, I wanders by
And sees this upon the ground,
And I ponders, and I wonders at,
This object that I found.
I thinks of reincarnation,
Of life, and death, and such,
And come away concludin': Slim,
You ain't changed all that much.

There's a deep desert truth here about not taking ourselves too seriously. The desert simply won't allow it. We come to the wilderness with all of our self-importance, all our anxious needs, and the desert couldn't care less. It ignores us completely. But as British explorer Andrew Harvey says, "We often are saved in the end by the things that ignore us."

The fourth-century desert fathers in Egypt practiced a spiritual virtue that they called indifference, apatheia, a stubborn refusal to be distracted by unimportant things. They went to the desert on purpose, in order to say "no" to a culture where consumerism and militarism and the careful cultivation on one's reputation were the highest possible values. They said "no" to what wasn't important so they could say "yes" to what mattered most. These are the basic desert questions: what do you ignore, and what do you love?

A story is told about a young brother who once came to Abba Macarius, one of the great desert fathers, asking how he could become a holy man. The old monk told him to go to the cemetery nearby and spend the day abusing the dead; yelling at them for all he was worth, even throwing stones. The young man thought this strange, but he did as he was told and then returned to the teacher. "What did they say to you?" Macarius asked.

"Well, uh, nothing," the brother replied.

"Then go back again tomorrow and praise them," answered the old man, "call them apostles, saints, righteous men and women. Think of every compliment you can."

Next day the young brother again did as he was told, and returned to the monastery, where Macarius asked him, "What did they say this time?"

"They still didn't answer a word," replied the brother.

"Ah, they must, indeed, be holy people," said Abba Macarius. "You insulted them and they did not reply. You praised them and they did not speak. Go and do likewise, my friend, taking no account of either the scorn of men and women, or their praises and you will be a holy man."

Half of the desert's work is to disrupt and to ignore, to invite us outside of ourselves and everything we've been previously taught to think so important. But the other half of the desert experience is to discover ourselves as loved; set free in some new way to renegotiate our lives as we'd never imagined before. Now there's no guarantee of this. But it's not uncommon that in letting go of what is irretrievably lost, we find ourselves "met", on the other side of that loss, in a way that we'd never expected.

This desert, by the way, doesn't have to be a distant geographical locale to which we go. More often that not, it's a broken place of emptiness that comes to us. But entering this vast and silent terrain, whether symbolic or real, you and I bring all of our fears and anxieties, our warped sense of self-importance and none of it matters at all. That stretching expanse of distant mesas cares nothing for your frail presence. Your image isn't important here. Having a Ph.D., or anything else behind your name, doesn't mean a thing here. The wind has blown over these eroded rocks for thousands of years without any help from you or me, thank you very much!

At first, that realization is deeply disconcerting, but if you stay and don't run, you begin to realize that you are saved in the end by the things that ignore you -- by what reminds you that you aren't the center of the universe after all. You sit there for a long while in the desert. You study the majestic stone face of the canyon cliff before you, and you ask yourself: How did it change on the day of your divorce? How was it moved on that day your father died when you were thirteen years old and the whole world fell to pieces? What happened to it the day you faced the shame you'd carried with you unspoken for years? You ask yourself: How did the canyon cliff change on that day? Surely the whole world must have fallen apart when your world collapsed.

But you realize that the stone cliff didn't change at all. It remained entirely unmoved. Something remained unbroken and constant in the utter depth of your pain. Something remained there for you in all its majesty, present and waiting, a silent immensity able to absorb all the grief you can give it.

Strange as it sounds, in the canyon cliff's utter indifference, you begin to know yourself as loved. You hear a word whispered that you'd never been able to hear before, because you'd never been empty enough to hear it before. The word is "love" and it's whispered by the God who had come with you into the desert all along. Suddenly that desert place begins to blossom like a rose. All that had been lost in its terrifying emptiness comes flooding back. You're accepted and loved, just as you are, in a mystery beyond all knowing.

We can always say it better in a story. Once upon a time in a far and distant place, on a high mountain, a gentle rain began to fall. At first it was hushed and quiet, trickling down the granite slopes. But gradually it increased in strength, as rivulets ran over the rocks and down the gnarled and twisted trees that grew there. Soon it was pouring as swift currents of dark water flowed together into the beginnings of a stream.

The stream flowed on down the mountainside, through valleys, past forests, down cascading falls. Until at last it found itself far from its source in the distant mountain, at the edge of a great and vast desert. Having crossed every other barrier in its way, the stream fully expected to cross this as well. But as fast as its waves splashed into the desert, that fast did they disappear into the sands.

Before long, the stream heard a voice whispering from the desert itself saying, "The wind crosses the desert, so can the stream."

"Yes, but the wind can fly!" cried out the stream, as it kept dashing itself into the desert sand.

"You'll never get across that way," the desert whispered once again. "You'll have to let the wind carry you."

"But how?" cried out the stream.

"You have to let the wind absorb you."

Well, the stream wasn't able to accept that. After all, it had never been absorbed before. It didn't want to lose its individuality, abandon its own identity. And besides, if once it gave itself to the winds, could it ever be sure of becoming a stream again?

The desert replied that the stream could continue to flow into the sand, and that one day it might even produce a swamp there on the desert's edge. But it would never cross the desert so long as it remained a stream.

"Why can't I remain the same stream that I am?" cried out the water.

And the desert answered, ever so wisely, "You never can remain what you are. Either you become a swamp or you give yourself to the winds."

The stream was silent for a long time, listening to certain echoes deep within itself, remembering parts of itself having been held in the arms of the wind before. And then slowly, the stream raised its vapors into the welcoming arms of the wind and was borne upward and over the desert in great white clouds.

As it passed beyond the mountains on the desert's far side, there it began to fall as a gentle rain. At first it was hushed and quiet, trickling down the granite slopes. But gradually it increased in strength, as rivulets ran over the rocks and down the gnarled and twisted trees that grew there. And soon it was pouring, as swift currents of dark water flowed once again into the beginning of a stream.

The desert is where we learn to let go, to give up, to be ignored. But it is also where we experience transformation, where we go on once again with our lives, loved into a brand new being we'd never anticipated before. Amen.

Belden Lane: Well, I guess over the last ten years or so, since turning 40. Dante speaks of entering the dark wood, the midpoint of your life. I too experienced a keen desire, a need to go into wilderness: backpacking in the Ozarks near home, getting out to New Mexico and the desert as often as possible. I found somehow a deep sense of the emptiness in my life being echoed by that, especially along with the death of my mother by cancer in recent years, and a healing that comes through what seems to be initially the utter "threatening-ness" of the desert. It became something more than that to me.

Talbot: So that during your mother's death the desert experience was a vehicle for grieving?

Lane: It was. Very much so.

Talbot: Now, you're working on a book, soon to be available to us, that centers on sacred space and story. Tell us about that.

Lane: Well it's tentatively entitled The Solace of Fierce Landscape: Studies in Desert and Mountain Spirituality. And I'm fascinated in that to look in the history of Christian spirituality how often the image of Moses going into the desert, up the mountain and into the dark cloud becomes a dominant metaphor for those periods, those experiences of emptiness, of brokenness in our lives. When we meet God beyond words, beyond image, in the dark place that ends up not being dark and empty at all, but being filled with God, as Moses found.

Talbot: And you talk about the unattainable mountain, paraphrasing C.S.Lewis' Surprised by Joy, being aware of that which we really can't attain.

Lane: You know, there's a little piece in the book about a wonderful sixth century monk named Cosmas Indicoipleusteus, who lived at the foot of Mt. Sinai and loved it, and yet realized that the mountain was a metaphor of a larger mountain beyond it that he never saw, only saw in his dreams, that he always longed for. And of course that mountain is God.

Talbot: You made a reference to the death of your father when you were only 13. How was the desert experience for you when you finally faced that reality and the need for closure?

Lane: My father's death was very violent and sudden and hard for me to cope with at that young age. But through my mother's slow death by cancer over the last few years, there's been an opportunity to go back to that and to let go of that grief, too. And that's been maybe one of the most profound experiences of deserts and healing for me.

Talbot: Now, you do go physically to the deserts today with your family. But you don't really have to make those kinds of journeys do you, to understand the kind of transformation that you're talking about?

Lane: I'm fascinated with the desert as desert, but also as metaphor. And as I said, it's the place that comes to us, the place of emptiness that we experience from time to time in our lives that we wouldn't ask for, but we find ourselves in. And it can blossom like a rose! That's the amazing thing.

Talbot: As a Presbyterian minister and professor of religious studies, you must tell us in our final moment what your own calling was about.

Lane: Well, I served churches for about six years before teaching. I've been at St. Louis University for about 18 years and I love it. I love to tell stories. I love the history of spirituality. And in the time I've got left, I want to focus on place and story.

Talbot: Who inspired you most along the way?

Lane: A teacher I had in seminary who died of cancer himself at the age of 36. That was a traumatic experience for me in that last year when he knew he was dying, but taught me theology in a way that nobody else ever has.

Talbot: An important kind of connection, I see, that is very much a part of who you are today. Thank you, Dr. Belden Lane. Wonderful having you on the program.