Enlightenment Town. Jeffery Paine

grocery shopping or carrying out the garbage or texting?

      Crestone is a made-to-order laboratory for investigating such matters, for here the old, the new, and the strange of religion jostle side by side.

      Christianity

      Father Dave Denny, a Carmelite monk in Crestone, was asked an unusual question, one he hadn’t heard before. A well-mannered tourist from Japan had traveled to America, and to understand this country before he embarked on his journey, he had read its holy book, the Bible. To this Japanese Buddhist, the Judeo-Christian book contained everything — mythology, morality, poetry, history — everything except one thing: Where, he wondered, where was the religion in it? For him religion was not miracles or moral commandments but working with your mind to transform negative emotions, to obtain enlightenment. Father Dave had to laugh, saying, “No, if you don’t think this is what religion is, then you may miss it in the Bible.”

      To witness traditional old-fashioned Christianity, if not Crestone then the terrain around it is the right place to come to. “Seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be answered,” the Bible says. I didn’t have to. Christianity knocked on my door in Crestone one afternoon. Woke me up from a worldclass nap. Or was I still dreaming? At the door stood two unfamiliar African American women, more properly attired than anyone I’d ever seen in Crestone. Through the screen I wondered whether they could see me, for I was wearing only my underwear. Probably not — they weren’t running away, screaming in horror. In my groggy state I was slower than I should have been to identify these unfamiliar women. Jehovah’s Witnesses.

      They were spreading the Good Word. Spreading it all the way from Fullerton, California, since the nearest Jehovah’s Witness church around here, the one in the town of Center, had only thirty members, too small to do much spreading. To bring the most valuable gift of all to endangered souls, those two brave women willingly endured personal sacrifices without complaint. Instead of complaining, they panted: the high altitude of Crestone was obviously a trial to their lungs, and that wasn’t the only trial. They had, unprepared, wandered into the land of — what were folks around here, Buddhists or Hindus? Everybody, they reported, was so polite to them, everyone courteous, yet they sensed they were not making much headway.

      I took this as a challenge; I would make them feel good about sojourning among pagans. And it was a challenge. After reading sections from Revelations, they asked if I could envision that a time will come when there shall be no more death. “You know, I’m really not sure.” They foretold of the coming era when men and beasts shall dwell together in perfect harmony. I kept silent, not blurting out, “Better be soon, while there’s still some other species left.” Why was my (silent) reaction so churlish? If what they were describing was religion — man and beast and God all one in the immortality of forever — what’s not to like? And how their vision sustained them: aging, illness, misfortune, and dying will likely shatter them less than the flu does me. Why didn’t I convert on the spot, right there in my skivvies?

      I found a clue as to why later that night. There was a party to welcome back Tsoknyi Rinpoche,¹ Crestone’s brilliant and funny Tibetan teacher, from his teaching and travels. At the party Tsoknyi told about a wealthy Indian woman who had adopted his book Carefree Dignity as her personal bible and would stop at nothing, certainly not his wishes, to get him to come teach in India. “She is a tough lady,” Tsoknyi said, “but kind-tough, which is okay, not nasty-tough.”

      “Tough lady?” challenged a woman at the party, obviously a tough lady herself, who suspected Tsoknyi of harboring antifeminist stereotypes. “Pray, tell us, Rinpoche, what you mean by tough lady.”

      “A tough lady, like a tough man,” he answered, non-plussed, “is somebody who rolls over everything to get what she wants. Including other people. She talks, you listen.”

      I was reminded of those mild women of Fullerton, every inch proper and demure, who were undercover tough ladies. They had talked and I had listened. Since all the Buddhists hereabouts puzzled them, I suggested that they might want to read Thich Nhat Hanh’s Living Buddha, Living Christ, which explains Buddhism in terms sympathetic to Christianity. But they obviously had no interest, and that merely begins the list of things uninteresting to them. Including me. I was a generic Homo sapiens container, and as such suitable for filling with Christianity, Jesus, and God. If Jesus was the Way, I was just in their way, the next person in line to receive their announcement of the Truth.

      Though not Crestone itself, much of Colorado belongs to the Christian Kingdom. I entered that kingdom two days later, when I drove to the High Valley Stampede, Colorado’s oldest rodeo, in Monte Vista. That small town had swung into the saddle for the weekend and was enjoying itself immensely. From kids with chili-cheese fries to grandpas with oxygen tanks, everybody there knew one another. One event of sweetness was a lamb-riding competition in which pre-kindergartners held on for their dear little lives to bucking lambs. Another competition pitted against one another the fire departments from the neighboring towns, racing to rope, and put enormous ladies’ panties on, an indignant heifer.

      But evidently one more item was required for that rodeo to be complete. The Messiah. The rodeo’s emcee, a beefy dude in cowboy duds, straddling an enormous horse, kept announcing through his hand mike, “Being good is good. But not good enough. Friends, recognize Jesus Christ as your savior. He was God’s greatest gift to us, so let us be our greatest gift to him.” I did not disagree, of course, but maybe it was the heat or my overindulgence in chili-cheese fries, for I had no idea what he meant. The most opaque words open to various interpretation — God, savior, our gift to him — were tossed around like tangible objects, like rope or saddle.

      The emcee’s inspirational message was like a coded signal, meant for those who already knew the code. I looked around: What did Christianity have to do with any of this? Bareback bronco riding is as daring a feat as exists in sports, but to what does it correspond in the New Testament? The Jehovah Witnesses’ promise of God’s creatures living in harmony rules out rodeos in heaven. For a moment the rodeo vanished and in its place was organized cruelty to animals. A minute later, though, I got caught back up in its excitement.

      Half a century ago, when I was a boy, the future of Christianity was thought to lie with thinkers like Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich, who used the meeting of Christianity and modernity to deepen our understanding of both. But the mainstream churches whose members once read such theologians are increasingly empty; rather, the pews are filled with fundamentalist tough ladies and gents like the Fullerton Jehovah’s Witnesses and the rodeo emcee. I decided, when I got back to Crestone, to meet a different kind of Christian, a “Crestone Christian.”

      If that was my goal, I was told several times, Father Dave Denny was my man. “Father Dave,” so said the English filmmaker Mark Elliott (who will figure prominently in the narrative later), “he is what a Christian should be.” That was high praise, for I was surprised that Mark thought anybody should be a Christian.

      I made some inquiries about this Father Dave, and if what people said was true, then he is that seeming impossibility: a completely good man. People who have known him for years cannot recall his ever once being mean-spirited. The worst display of temper anyone recalls is when an irritating woman was being willfully obtuse and Father Dave burst out, “Jeepers, Sharon!” Furthermore, so I was told, Father Dave was a completely devout Christian but not bound by what that had meant in the past. Hearing such reports, I did want to meet him — perhaps a new kind of Christian for a new century?

      To seek out a sage, in mythological tales, the pilgrim must wind his or her way through unmarked trails, panting and stumbling, up to the top of a mountain. Father Dave, in fact, lives high up on a mountainside just outside Crestone. Since the chances of my successfully winding and finding were practically nil, Father Dave drove down to drive me up. I was greeted by a slim, trim, neat, bearded man, perhaps in his midfifties. He drove me to something equally trim and neat, his nine-hundred-square-foot house, a dot in that high-desert emptiness. A perfect cabin for retreat and contemplation. Father Dave hardly resides there as in a monastic cell,