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Healing Landscapes

(exploring desert and mountain soulscapes at Pecos)

“Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit
into the wilderness…” Matthew 4:1

Our world today is full of pilgrims, travelers, wanderers, and immigrants.  Many come from troubled worlds and broken homes.  They are all searching and finding a place in foreign lands.  Estranged from self, the world and God, they are in search for healing landscapes.

More and more, many of these “seekers” are asking either for a desert experience or simply a sharing in our monastic life.  They want to know that there is a vertical axis of meaning in life even more important than the horizontal axis of worldly affairs.  They are not looking for a “nest”, but for “a way”!

Encountering God in silence, solitude and prayer, or sharing in the Benedictine life, both are on great demand here at Pecos.  The Holy Spirit is moving them to new spiritual landscapes, to the desert of their heart where they can experience “wilderness time” and become more contemplative.  Without exaggerating, here at Pecos, retreats are “out”… deserts are “in”! 

Many who come to Pecos are seeking the healing power of mountain silence and the purifying force of desert experience.  Pecos is a beautiful landscape that can open the “soulscape” of all who are seeking this.  Many want simply to be with us in our prayer, in our reading, in our study, at our work and at our meals.  They feel that our life has something to offer to their souls.  Perhaps it is our path to simplicity, our very simple and balanced life of “Ora et Labora” (prayer and work).  Others want more solitude.  They need to be silent and alone with the Alone.  As we read in The Cloud of Unknowing, they need to love God “with a naked intent.”  They know in their hearts that God is a desert to be entered and loved and never an object to be grasped or understood.   As a desert mountain, God is high above all understanding. 

This need for separate time with God is the gift of His powerful, loving desire that is alluring so many to the desert mountains of Pecos.   In Hosea we read: “Therefore, I will now allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her…” This is the “charismatic experience” of so many today.  The Spirit is calling them to the solace of fierce landscapes, to the radical abandonment to Divine Providence, to an embodied experience of what it means to be contemplative.   They desire and long for nothing less than God!  And our deserts and mountains become “healing landscapes” of mystical encounter.

This inward sense, spiritually wedded with the outward signs, is how they discover that Pecos is truly the country of God’s affections.  God is here, patiently and lovingly waiting for them.   He is “I am that I am.”   But here at Pecos, this can be translated into “I will be present where I will be present.”

For those who are seeking out the Benedictine experience or the more ferocious and wilder experience of the desert mountains, God becomes real in the same sense that experienced beauty is real, or the feel of spring is real or that sunlight is real.  Of course, these are people who have learned to cultivate contemplative prayer with more strenuous care and discipline than others have done.  They have not been spoon-fed, they have had to go out and hunt “the wild God” in the wilderness. 

Pecos Benedictine Monastery does not have the answers, but it is seeking to build a monastic life on the great questions:  “Who is God”, “Who am I?” and “Why did God make me?”  These questions make for “plain living” as we learn to form our life on two fundamental monastic principles that can be lived only through the fidelity of our monastic calling:  purity of heart which is to will one thing, and persevering in the long obedience that moves us all in the same direction.   The Rule of St. Benedict, a gift to all who come to Pecos, helps us all discover the right balance between “the landscape” and “the soulscape”, “the home within” and “the home without”, and that somehow, ultimately, they are all one in the same. 

Abbot Christopher OSB oliv.

P. S.   I would highly recommend for spiritual reading, Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes:  Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, Oxford University Press, 1998.