Last night’s superb Denis Duncan Lecture given by the Revd Dr Richard Tiplady may well have whetted your appetite to delve more deeply into the subject of mountain spirituality – so where better to go next than to Richard’s recently published Grove Book, Following Jesus in the Great Outdoors: learning about discipleship from the mountains.
Spiritual experiences are not rare on mountains. In his writings, John Muir reflects frequently on what might be termed ‘spiritual encounters’ with nature. In The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd writes of her Cairngorms wanderings as bringing a (proto-Buddhist) awareness of ‘the essential oneness of all things’. And in his new Grove book, Richard Tiplady offers a Christian ‘take’ on the mountain wilderness experience. Based on his own experiences in the mountains and drawing on wide reading from across the mountaineering literature, Richard structures the book around an understanding of the human condition as one in which we are separated from God, from others, from the environment, and from ourselves, and the Christian understanding of salvation as reconciliation in all four dimensions. He then explores how the mountain wilderness can offer foretastes of all four of these.
The book can be ordered online at Grove Books here.
A review of the Lecture (with a link to the video on YouTube) will be posted on this website next Monday. This will be being contributed by the Revd Canon Paul Watson, Rector of St James the Less, Bishopbriggs, seen to the right of Richard in this photo of a recent mountain trek.
Photographs courtesy of Richard Tiplady
