Spiritual Journey in the Highlands of Scotland

This class involved an experiential exploration, hiking several trails in the highlands of Scotland, learning how mountain landscapes relate to religious experience, and encountering the highland culture. Eleven class members participated in the learning process through reading, journal writing, and interpersonal communication concerning the way religious peoples have experienced their environment as a form of religious rhetoric. Prior to hiking the trail each class member read Beldon C. Lanes's study of landscape as a communication of religion in both The Solace of Fierce Landscapes and Landscapes of the Sacred. We hiked for three weeks, visiting various locations in Scotland while trekking on the “West Highland Trail,” the “Great Glen Way,” and day hiking on the Isle of Skye. Along the way we learned through the communication practices of informal talks around the camp in the evenings, talks along the way, and everyone kept a trail journal.After returning home everyone wrote a paper and submitted it.

Christopher

Jeff and Alan

Will

Sarah, Caroline, and Caleb

Zack, Kip, and Matt on the Isle of Skye

Justin with Loch Ness

BJ and Meghan on the Isle of Skye

Paper authored by Betty Joan Chapman: "Water: Its Many Forms and Life-Sustaining Properties"

Class lecture in Loch Lomond

We arrived in Glasgow in the late morning and spent our first night at the Euro Hostel. Everyone rested through the early afternoon and then explored the city. After rising early and having a quick breakfast, we walked through the city and found the ten mile approach trail that follows the River Kelvin, breaks out in the rolling farmlands, and terminates in Milngavie (pronounced milguy).

Elyse, Patrick, Frederick, Kristine, Christopher, and Caroline rest at the River Kelvin after walking through the city.

Zack Alan and Caleb use an abandoned shopping cart, walking along the River Kelvin in Glasgow

The beginning of the West Highland Way in Milngavie

A brief reflection on the interaction between the person engaged in spiritual journey and the participation of the place wherein the journey happens, taken from Landscapes of the Sacred: Belden C. Lane, in writing of “giving voice to place,” outlines the phenomenological perspective, noting the interaction between landscape and those who perceive it. He writes, “Our embodied presence demands that we cannot know the world without also being actively engaged in it” (53). We are first and foremost embodied beings. We interact with the landscape as bodies encountering an environment that is also embodied. We are not Cartesian minds separated from extended bodies, able to know the world independent of an embodied experience. This affects our knowing so that objective distance is an imaginative exercise, but can never give us a complete understanding. Lane continues, “To relate most fully to any given terrain, according to David Abram, is to respect its role as ‘sentient subject’ as well as our own role as ‘sensible object’” (53). Here the empirical object has been identified as a “sentient subject,” a being who is aware of its own being. How can this be? This is not what so much of our schooling has taught us to believe. It will be helpful to have read some of Martin Buber here. He notes two basic relations, I and It as well as I and You. The first relation is between the sentient subject I, and the object it. The second is between the sentient subject I and the sentient subject You. I recognize You as being aware of yourself as I am aware of myself. I also recognize myself as a sensible object for you. Lane is pointing to an experience of the particularities of landscape where it is transformed into a You, and I am its sensible object. How has this happened in your own experience of some significant place? Lane continues, “One’s actual embodied experience in encountering a place perceived as sacred is crucial, then, to the sense of magic or awe that one finally attributes to it. The place is ‘known’ only to the extent that we participate in the various affordances it offers, responding to the striking geographical features it projects, adjusting to its changing visual, auditory, olfactory, and kinesthetic qualities” (53).