Meeting God Through Terror

Katy Pelchy
Meeting God Through Terror
Solace of Fierce Landscapes

“... the apophatic tradition, despite its distrust of all images of God, makes an exception in using the imagery of threatening places as a way of challenging the ego and leaving one at a loss for words. If we cannot know God's essence, we can stand in God's place --- on the high mountain, in the lonely desert, at the point where terror gives way to wonder. Only here do we enter the abandonment, the agnosia, that is finally necessary for meeting God.”

I wholly agree with this statement. It is only after we’ve lost everything that we are free to do anything, and this applies to be open to God. Going to a desolate, fierce place that we’re sure we can dominate and tame and overcome, it is easy to think we are on top of the world and indestructible. But once we are there, and come face to face with something terrifying, we see that it is actually incredibly more than we gave it credit for. Especially with landscapes, for it is easy to imagine a place in the mind, but once there, standing on the edge of something so vast and great and wondrous, it is easy to lose the sense of confidence we had a moment before.

Once the ego has passed, and the terror has passed in reluctant acceptance, the wonder is allowed to show through. People don’t like to be humbled, but we will be humbled every time when compared to an enormous mountain or an endless desert. To meet God, we must accept that He is greater than ourselves. What better way to do that than to stand next to His creation, awestruck, unable to comprehend the enormity of it all? When we subject ourselves to his wonder, we can then meet him, for we have humility and the desire to learn and be open to what is more than ourselves. I have had this experience many times. Especially at the Badlands, where I stood on a huge cliff I worked for an hour to climb and looked out over a million such cliffs that went off into the distance as far as I could see. There is no feeling such as humility, but it is through this feeling that we learn the most.