"My own simple story fits this larger pattern-with its idealized flight to a redemptive wilderness, a renewed innocence never quite realized but always sought, a quest for the holy that is fulfilled finally in accepting the ordinary [italics mine]." (Landscapes of the Sacred, Belden Lane, p. 18).
After spending a day searching for a meaningful encounter, his own story happens when he eventually experienced the sacred in an ordinary field in a brief moment of time. This theme of experiencing the sacred in seemingly ordinary moments is a common theme in religious experience. Siddhartha Gautama is underneath of a fig tree when he has a religious revelation, Jesus is baptized in the muddy Jordan river, and countless other religious experiences take place in a variety of relatively normal landscapes. The sacred turns the ordinary space into a holy place. I think of some of my own moments or religious experience. Just this past summer in the woods of North Carolina, I encountered the Other in a relatively normal landscape along a path carved out by some friends. I was seeking answers, and I went on a walk to vent some of my frustration at not understanding some questions I was wrestling with. Honestly, I had mostly expected to just stroll through the woods and come to peace to not having the answers yet. Although I will not share the details of what happened, I will say that I was stopped dead in my tracks far back in the woods by trees swaying in the wind and a deep, powerful sense of the Other. An ordinary path in an ordinary forest moved by an ordinary, gentle breeze struck me suddenly, powerfully. This tendency is intriguing. For many, the Other is majestic and powerful. Why would It choose to manifest in ordinary places?
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