Falling in Love with the Land: A Pocket Guide to Wilderness Mysticism

A new generation of Spiritual But Not Religious Seekers is falling in love with the land - dissolving into alpine lakes, caressed by canyon walls, desired by something vast and vibrant in the Earth and Sky. They have the experience. What is often lacking is the language.Falling in Love with the Land gives them that language. Drawing on five decades of wilderness experience and the full breadth of the Christian contemplative tradition, including Jesus, the Desert Fathers, Hadewijch, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, John Muir, Thomas Merton, Howard Thurman, Terry Tempest Williams, Katie Lee and others - Stephen Hatch offers thirteen chapters of embodied mystical theology and six original contemplative practices.Among the book's original contributions to the mystical tradition are: a Copernican Shift in Spirituality in which God is oriented toward the delight of the Sacred Earth rather than the reverse; Christian Animism, recovering the awareness that all creatures are ensouled and desire to relate to us; the Poetiphatic Way of knowing God through paradoxical images; and a feminine Sophianic Trinity of Mother, Daughter and Holy Soul, engaged in a love affair with the masculine Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.