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The screams began at midnight.

I bolted to my feet, still in my sleeping bag. After an eight-mile, rain-drenched solo hike on a wilderness island in Lake Superior, I had reached the deserted campground at dusk. It was early in the season, cold and buggy. Most backpackers would wait until later in June to arrive, when the weather was more favorable and the mosquitoes weren't quite so ferocious. But I was hoping for quiet and solitude, away from cell phones, e-mail, and the demands of family life. After stripping off my soaked clothing and changing into dry longjohns, I heated hot water for coffee and ate some gorp, then fell into an exhausted rest.

The Wisdom of Wilderness: Experiencing the Healing Power of Nature by Gerald May HarperSanFrancisco 224 pp.; $24.95

Until the screaming.

I reached for my pocketknife and stumbled over my gear, peering out into the foggy dark. Now, it was quiet, the deep silence of wilderness.  The only sound was my adrenaline-crazed heart, thumping loudly. Clutching my knife, I pulled my sleeping bag around me and convinced myself I had been dreaming. But in moments, the screams started again. Something wet trickled down my hand --in my terror, I had cut myself. Sucking the wound, I felt pure fear. And I realized I was helpless to do anything to alleviate it.

In The Wisdom of Wilderness, the final book Gerald May penned before his death, he writes about his own baptism of terror. He awakes in his tent, alone—but not alone, because a growling bear is brushing against the canvas. "For the first time in my life, I am experiencing pure fear," he writes. "I am completely present in it, in a place beyond all coping because there is nothing to do." When the bear leaves, he experiences overwhelming gratitude. "Fear, like any other strong emotion, can make you exquisitely conscious of living, perfectly aware of being in the moment."

This is what the writer Mark Buchanan—in his book The Rest of God—calls being "fully immersed in the here and now." In Buchanan's case, the impetus came from a pride of lions surrounding his jeep in Tanzania.  It's not so much about fear as it is about being present to our lives, letting our senses go on full alert. It's about paying attention to what is happening in the moment rather than focusing on what we need to do or should be doing. What a concept for Christians, who can become, as the old chestnut says, "too heavenly minded to be much earthly good."

We don't like for things to be out of our control. We don't like to feel things too deeply. It hurts. It frightens us.  May, a psychiatrist and theologian, writes that he spent much of his professional life helping people cope with their emotions, tame them. But he comes to believe that coping can be a bad thing. "Wild, untamed emotions are full of life-spirit, vibrant with the energy of being. They don't have to be acted out, but neither do they need to be tamed." What he's advocating here is not letting it all hang out in a hurtful way (such as screaming at our spouse) but staying in touch with our deeper self. Letting ourselves feel, and giving ourselves enough room—apart from busy schedules and demanding people—to stay in touch with our God-given inner life. For May, wilderness was where this happened.

Letting ourselves feel our emotions is only one piece of wisdom May says he learned from being outdoors, where he encounters what he calls the Power of the Slowing. He writes that he had many experiences of what he'd call Divine Presence indirectly—through the birth of his children, the love of family and friends, the beauty of sunsets and music.  These he saw as evidences of God. But he yearned for more: "I could not help my desire." He feels the Power of the Slowing as a feminine presence, which, although it will trip some Christians up, is a helpful way to free us from some of our ingrained preconceptions about how God works through creation.

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August (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50