This book is dense and layered and I feel like any attempt I make at summarizing its content would fail to do it proper justice. It is a study of intertextuality.

This book is an extended meditation on the nature of the physical landscape of desert and mountain's and their relationship to the desert and apophatic spiritual tradition (mostly) within Christianity (mostly). Lane's exploration of this theme is interposed with stories of Lane's own exploration of mountain and deserts and the story of his mother's diagnosis with cancer and Alzheimer's and death. The themes and stories are organized by the Christian tradition's stages of the spiritual life: purgation, illumination, union.

I found this book intermittently fascinating and frustrating. The central premise saves the apophasis from denigrating into neo-platonic encounter with an abstract Nothing. The apophatic tradition was in fact a theology of place where the spiritual insights of monks and mystics were reinforced and sometimes taught by the location they lived and worked in. It is the desert, where physical death always threatened that the desert father's articulated dying to the ego. The mountains taught mystics of a world that defied and transcended their understanding.

Lane contends that the physical experience 'of desert mountain territory and the personal experience of "spiritual dryness" are mutually illuminating horizons of meaning"(7).

In my exploration of a theology of place, this was helpful in getting me to think about how different environments shape the insights of those who live, work and pray there. ( )