Spiritual Landscape Series-Designing the Spiritual Landscape

“We are surrounded by a world that talks, but we don’t listen. We are part of a community engaged in a vast conversation, but we deny our role in it.”
Rev. Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul.

This Adult Education series explores transcendent, passionate experience that is elicited by beautiful, mysterious landscapes. This experience — some call it mystical — is part of our Christian heritage, though it is often underappreciated. Let us see how others have responded to the landscape throughout the ages, that we may learn to listen again – more fully and spiritually – in our own time.

April 7  Designing the Spiritual Landscape

Mr. Michael Vergason is a landscape architect and founded Michael Vergason Landscape Architects Ltd. in 1987 in Alexandria, Virgina. He has designed many memorable public spaces in our region and beyond and will discuss how he has approached the spiritual dimension in several of the sacred places he has designed, including the Normandy American Cemetery Visitor Center, and the landscapes of the Washington National Cathedral.

April 14 Virginia Landscapes and the English Sublime

The Rev. Miller Hunter served for many years as the Rector of St Paul’s Ivy and also Trinity Episcopal in Little Washington, Va. He is currently on the board of the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont, a newly designed 15-acre public pleasure garden in Charlottesville. He has visited and studied many private and rarely seen estate gardens in both Virigina and England and will discuss their mutual influences and aesthetic principles as they evolved from the seventeenth century onward.

April 21   Worldwide Spiritual Landscapes: Ancient, Pre-Columbian, Japanese, Imaginary 

Dr. Kent Myers (OPMH member) will take a ‘romp’ through foreign cultures where landscapes have been deeply felt. This is an interfaith journey, ranging from the holy mountains of the Middle East, to the ancient mounds of Illinois, with a lengthy tour of Japan’s sophisticated gardens, sacred groves, and contemplative mountain walks. What landscapes — those lost or to come — do we long for in our contemporary imagination?

April 28   Christian Landscapes

The Rev. Dr. Larry Golemon (OPMH member) is Director of the Washington Theological Consortium and the Reformed Institute of Metropolitan Washington. He will review the Christian experience of landscape, from Medieval through Celtic traditions, then the Reformed experience through the Dutch Golden Age, the passionate (and forgotten) green Calvin, the Puritan appreciation of God’s beauty in flinty New England, and contemporary lament and hope for our earthly home.