Only when we have the courage to cross the road and look in one another's eyes can we see there that we are children of the same God and members of the same human family.
~ from BREAD FOR THE JOURNEY by Henri J.M. Nouwen
The spiritual function of fierce terrain (in the apophatic tradition) is to bring us to the end of ourselves, to the abandonment of language and the relinquishment of ego. A vast expanse of jagged stone, desert sand, and towering thunderheads has a way of challenging all the mental constructs in which we are tempted to take comfort and pride, thinking we have captured the divine. The things that ignore us save us in the end.