Enlightenment Town. Jeffery Paine

up one of those fourteen-thousand-foot peaks, and from there, looking down, obtain a last atavistic view of lost, virgin America. Below, the valley spreads out seemingly without end, and from this height it appears unscarred by human history or habitation. It is no Garden of Eden, for it is not verdant or rich in luxuriant vegetation. Rather, imagine the harsher landscape that Adam and Eve stumbled out into afterward, where the taunting wind sighed, “It is not too late. Something else there yet may be. Let us try once again.”

      Crestone: Sacred Turf?

      Spirituality is Crestone’s cash crop. Imagine that every genre of Hollywood film got spliced by a crazed editor into the same surrealist movie. A religious version of that movie — mixing together holy hermits, a bearded rabbi, monasteries, ashrams, crucifixes, goddess statues, Buddhist stupas, a Middle Eastern ziggurat — is playing daily in Crestone, with no need for projector or screen. Hindu nuns in saris umpire at the local baseball games. At the Christmas Mass at the Carmelite monastery, whole rows get taken by Buddhist monks in their flowing draperies. It’s like a League of Nations of spirituality, assembling five continents and three thousand years of religious history. This — the cohabiting of so many of the world’s religions, all breathing down each other’s necks — has never happened before.

      What would you like to do? Sweat it out in a Native American sweat lodge? Be frum (devout) at the Yom Kippur services in the old 1880s schoolhouse? Meditate in an old mine shaft, which serves as your hermit’s cave? Twenty-five religious groups populate Crestone, but the most important one may be the twenty-sixth, the culminative effect of all of them together, which you need not attend services to be part of. Elsewhere spirituality is the Sunday or Sabbath singularity of the week; here it is the week. You can hear the hum of religion, even when you are not listening. When those you bump into at the post office are practitioners, when it’s what you see all around you and take in without even trying, when it’s in the jokes told, even as a nonbeliever you can be an uninfected carrier of spirituality.

      But is Crestone itself — is anywhere — sacred land? The answer to such a question could influence how we treat our natural surroundings, whether we exploit or preserve them. Let’s explore three possible answers as to whether Crestone is sacred turf.

      1. No. Some folks here spill their fantasies over the landscape like a can of overturned paint. Some have even moved to Crestone expecting that living in a spiritual place would ameliorate their problems — a marriage gone sour or unmanageable children. Harsh remote surroundings, where diversions and distractions are few, however, can actually make those troubles worse. Many arrive bearing a bundle of hopes and later leave, forgetting to take that bundle with them. “Crestone’s one renewable resource,” Kizzen Laki, the newspaper editor, jokes, “is disillusioned visionaries.”

      2. Yes. That yes once would have been the Native Americans’ unqualified response. Although no one could live in such a harsh, charged environment, or so they believed, the Hopi and the Ute and the Navajo undertook pilgrimages to these mountains, regarding them as a spiritual entity. Before horses were reintroduced into America, travel in this high valley meant inching across it, allowing the landscape to migrate inside you. Here, where Earth heaves up almost to touch heaven, they found a fine place to meditate, to fast, and to pray, and the best place of all to die. (With the winds blowing against the mountains, Walter Roan said, the departed’s spirit could only go up.)

      3. Yes and no (or no and yes). Einstein asserted that for an intelligent adult there exist only two possibilities: either that nothing is miraculous or that everything is. Two construction workers in Crestone, Jack Siddall and Pattison Kane, decided to work only on sacred buildings, and with that decision carpentry lost its tediousness. Pattison is now working on a Buddhist temple high up in the mountains, and as he reflects on the temple’s purpose and all who will benefit, he gets excited, as though each detail he carves or paints is a holy icon. When some residents claim that the Sangre de Cristos are divine handiwork, that belief may impose on a matter-of-fact piece of physical geography lustrous associations and cloak it in an intangible aura, whether real or imagined.

      About whether or not Crestone is holy ground, why have so many great Tibetan masters in exile made a beeline to here, I have wondered, when it’s so off the beaten track, hard to get to, and offering little in the way of potential students or influence? This is the answer told to me: Centuries of Native Americans on sacred pilgrimage to Crestone have seeded the ground here with blessings and infused the atmosphere with their lingering prayers. How could anyone evaluate a statement like that? Besides, it only pushes the question back a notch in time: Why, then, did so many great Native Americans make a beeline here?

      Perhaps what drew them is that in few other places have hardship and majesty married each other so well as they have here. With its tall mountains on the right and a vast valley on the left (or if you’re standing the other way around, then the other way around), majestic Crestone certainly is. But it can be hard to live here. In spring unrelenting winds howl for weeks on end — saturated with agricultural chemicals blowing up from the valley — and can make you half-crazed. In winter you can be snowed in for weeks and, when snows stop, the black ice on the roads can still keep you housebound. At such times it is just you and the mountains and vast, empty space — no way and nowhere to hide — and everything within you may rise up and you will have to meet it as never before. “Crestone is not the best place to come if you want pleasurable experiences,” one practitioner here (Esteban Hollander) observed. “But a great, great place if you want to ‘wake up.’”

      You cannot buy a digital gauge on eBay to measure the spirituality of a place. Perhaps the only measure is whether it makes its citizenry consistently more thoughtful, more generous, and lighter and kinder. Crestonians, in my unofficial census, often do display more helpfulness, open-mindedness, and playfulness than most other locals I know. I am writing this book, hoping that vicariously it might do something similar for some reader (and for me as well).

      And with that thought, we can supply the answer to the multiple-choice quiz earlier in this chapter. It is (a): where the story now gets under way.

      1 An earlier sign on the Baptist marquee had read: GOD’S FAVORITE WORD IS COME! When a couple, Mark Jacobi and Chris Canaly, decided to get hitched, they lewdly draped themselves over the sign and used that lascivious photo on their wedding invitation — COME. The Baptist minister’s wife then ran into Chris at the grocery store and, innocent of the sexual meaning of the word, gushed, “You used our sign on your wedding invitation. Aren’t you just the sweetest, sweetest people on earth!”

       PART II

       RELIGION

3. “Gimme That Old-Time Religion!” Or Is the New-Time Better?

      About religion, that most controversial of subjects, one question never goes away: Is religion a good thing, or is it bad, bad, bad?

      The answer to this question must wait in line, however, while a prior one gets answered first. Since so many contrary practices go by that name, what is the common denominator — if there is one — that makes them all religion? My Sunday school teachers could have dispatched that question with ease. Religion for them was God “above” and moral behavior “below,” and where to find it would be inside a church or temple and when would be Sunday or Easter (or if you’re Jewish, Saturday and Yom Kippur). Now one could almost weep for such innocent simplicity, when God looked like Michelangelo’s portrait of him on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Faith back then was as simple as believing what the Bible or your clergyman said. And now? Now there are books bearing titles like Religion without Belief and even Religion without God, and in them God floats in a vapory cloud of abstraction. Rilke described God as a direction and Rabbi David Cooper, formerly of Crestone,