Getting Biblical in the Desert
June 13th, 2008 Posted by Jim in ReviewsMany of us find a spiritual connection with the desert landscapes in our lives, but few of us have made a direct connection between the church we may attend and the desert spaces we visit except in a very personal way. We don’t usually have religious services in our favorite washes, but we do, sometimes, find a bit of God in them. But for most of us, whether we are environmentalists, spiritual seekers or Bible aficionados, the tendency has been to keep the scripture in the books, synagogues, and churches, walled off from the Creator’s natural world by dogma, history, and other accouterments of civilization.
Rabbi Jamie Korngold’s little book attempts to bring the spirituality we find in nature into the textual, historical, and dogmatic roots of Christianity and Judaism which, after all, began in the desert. Written in a self-help style that owes as much to American practicality (think Benjamin Franklin, Thoreau, and Alcoholics Anonymous) as rabbinical wisdom, the book is tightly structured in seven chapters of “lessons,” each based on biblical passages familiar to both Jews and Christians. After presenting the biblical roots of each lesson, Korngold shares her experiences with us and offers practical suggestions to bring spiritual concepts into our daily lives and especially, into our outdoor life. Although it begins at the Grand Canyon, this is not a necessarily desert book, nor is it really a nature book, but it is a book that lays some of the groundwork for a way of thinking about our religious lives that includes, chapter
and verse, the natural world. God in the Wilderness has a wonderful simplicity about it that reminds me of works such as Allan Watts’ The Book or Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life; its message, delivered in her “Afterword,” is an easily-accessible one straight out of Abbey’s Desert Solitaire.
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