Bret Marfut alternate reading 2 Lane

In this class, we talked about the role of wilderness in general in facilitating sacred experience. Lane’s book, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, talks about specific kinds of landscapes that are best suited to providing encounters with the sacred. The first kind is beautiful places, normally with trees, because the beauty easily awakens the senses, but it also encourages self-forgetfulness. The second, and best according to Lane, is the more solitary and austere option. Often these places are deserts or barren mountains. This kind of place is valuable in terms of sacred experience because it strips people of all distractions. The last kind of place described in Lane is a place chosen by God to be a site of sacred encounters. This passage in Lane just shows the likelihood of sacred encounters in different places, however, because between the three kinds of places, a spiritual encounter could occur in literally any kind of place.