Dwelling in the Wilderness: Landscape, Place and the Sacred Among Catholic Monks of the American West

A monk’s purpose is to seek God, and monks in the Roman Catholic tradition are specifically called to seek God in place. This is why twelfth-century Trappist monk Stephen Harding called monks lovers of the place. By devoting their lives to a single community often located in remote and secluded places, monks find God in the eccentricities of fellow monastics, and in the particularities of the created order. To “dwell in the wilderness” might seem like a paradox to contemporary ears, but for the monk whose sole purpose is to seek the paradise of God in the wilderness of the human heart, it is a way of life.