Jitterbugging for Jesus

Your Jitterbug Theology thought for the day:

Take your stresses and strains to the woods, the wilderness, the riverside, even the park with its still ponds nearest you, and cast your burdens to the Lord.

The moonshiner’s art is a slow and demanding one. The corn has to soak in a wet burlap sack for ten days. The mash has to be fermented with water, yeast, and malt for another ten days or more. Then, in being gently heated over a low fire, the alcohol has to evaporate, passing through a copper coil inside a barrel of cold branch water, dripping leisurely into a stoneware jug. The process can’t be hurried. Nothing should be rushed in Moonshine Hollow.”

— Presbyterian theologian Beldon C. Lane

The branches at “Moonshine Hollow,” a uniquely holy place.

Belden C. Lane is a Presbyterian professor of Theological Studies at St. Louis University, a Jesuit school, who writes some genuinely original stuff about contemplative spirituality based on his time spent in the wilderness.

His books have included the one I’ve read and like a lot, titled Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality. He has a new book due in December that I look forward to reading someday called Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as a Spiritual Practice.

The Zen Buddhist Journal “tricycle” has an excerpt from the book, in which Lane meditates on the power of certain places we love and return to in order to “get away from it all” and slow down–places that hold a bit of spiritual power over us because they are wild and earthy.

It’s a heck of a good writer, and Belden is that, who can wax wise about moonshining as a spiritually contemplative practice in a place where lawless whisky runners cooked their grog.

Here’s more from his book in which he reflects on his special getaway in the wilds called “Moonshine Hollow”–a place he goes to attain spiritual “mindlessness”:

Several times I’ve hiked into this glen on a Friday afternoon halfway through the semester, needing to escape the city and the university—seeking what Gerry May calls “the power of slowing.” I come to practice mindfulness, a habit that isn’t easy to sustain amid the distractions of academic life. Simone Weil argued that school studies can be an aid in the exercise of prayer. If you think of praying as primarily a matter of paying attention, then memorizing geometric theorems and mulling over Anselm’s argument for God’s existence might help. She was right, up to a point.

Prayer does involve a discipline of practiced attentiveness, but it’s more than a concentration of thought, a knitting of one’s brows. Contemplative prayer is what gets you out of your head entirely. That’s what I come to wilderness for—a deeper practice of mindfulness, a virtue that Buddhists and Desert Christians have both held in high esteem. The mindfulness that wild terrain evokes is actually a sort of “mindlessness,” an end-run around rational analysis that seeks an immediacy of presence.

Your Jitterbug Theology thought for the day:

Take your stresses and strains to the woods, the wilderness, the riverside, even the park with its still ponds nearest you, and cast your burdens to the Lord.

*Excerpts from Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as a Spiritual Practice by Belden C. Lane and reprinted in “tricycle” with permission from Oxford University Press, Inc. Copyright © 2014 by Oxford University Press. The book will be released on December 1, 2014.