Fierce Landscapes

I'd always heard that Israel was a land of contrasts. But I'd always thought that was the classic cliched hyperbole that you expect from tourist advertising. Of course there are contrasts - few countries are geographically uniform. But what is striking is the sheer magnitude of the differences within a few miles. From the shores of the Sea of Galilee to the fertile headwaters of the Jordan to the abandoned Syrian tanks of the Golan Heights takes little more than an hour to drive.

Somehow - I imagine thanks to my Children's Illustrated Bible - I had imagined this to be a more pastoral land, echoing the gentler contours of New England rather than the harsher reality of a land formed of volcanic eruption, earthquake, and erosion.

Imagine Jesus sailing on a lake that one moment is mirror still, and the next whipped by winds tearing past a hill that looks like it has been attacked with a meat cleaver, walking northwards through green fields spattered with stone, along a marshy stream that eventually becomes the Jordan River, and towards the cliff face in whose shadow the city of Caesarea Philippi was built, and where Peter confessed that Jesus was the Christ. His own understanding of himself and his mission must have been shaped by these places. No wonder that the Jesus of the gospels is not so much "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild" as a man of passion and grace in equal measure, one who healed a synagogue leader's beloved daughter and spoke woe on the scribes and the pharisees.

About ten years ago I read a book called "The Solace of Fierce Landscapes" by Belden Lane. In it, he speaks of the relationship between spirituality and landscape: the ways in which the way we experience God is shaped by our environment. The extremes of the land echo the extremes of our lives, birth and death, and their reverberations in between. And so often, it is in those extreme and liminal places that we not only meet God, but find our faith reshaped and renewed.

The Rev. Dr. Raewynne J. Whiteley, Canon Theologian