In the practice of contemplation, one comes eventually to embrace an apophatic anthropology, letting go of everything one might have imagined as constituting the self — one’s thoughts, one’s desires, all one’s compulsive needs. Joined in the silence of prayer to a God beyond knowing, I no longer have to scramble to sustain a fragile ego, but discern instead the source and ground of my being in the fierce landscape of God alone. One’s self is ever a tenuous thing, discovered only in relinquishment. I recognize it finally as a vast, empty expanse opening out onto the incomparable desert of God. ~ Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes
The Solace of Fierce Landscapes looks like it will be a good book. I tend to flee emptiness, but Lane sees it as an asset, a precursor to the spiritual life.
