Enlightenment Town. Jeffery Paine

at a distant college; he travels to raise money for a relief and development agency (Cross Catholic Outreach) that brings clean water, nutritional food, and shelter to the Earth’s downtrodden; and he takes care of his mother, who has Alzheimer’s.²

      Father Dave’s story begins in a practically pastoral idyll in a bygone America. To say that Kokomo, Indiana’s thirteenth-largest “city,” resembled a Norman Rockwell small town sounds dismissive, but it did look like a Norman Rockwell painting. Farmers wore bibbed overalls to church, and their wives, starched spotless aprons. Cocooned in a large loving family, young Dave assumed that basic human goodness was a fact of life.

      Religion in midcentury America, unlike today, occupied a fairly marginal place, for most restricted to Sundays and holidays. But then came the spiritual-questing sixties (which occurred mainly in the seventies). In the heady spirit of those times, Dave enrolled in a college course about a book largely unfamiliar to him: the New Testament. During that course he learned all sorts of surprising things, such as that there were still monks. In the twentieth century! Dave read about one monk, named Thomas Merton, who observed monastic vows yet was fully engaged in the issues of his time. If, in the spirit of the sixties (seventies), Dave decided to experiment by going on a group retreat, it was hardly odder then than going to the Apple store would be today.

      At the retreat the other participants vied to sit next to him. Though Dave was funny and told jokes, and his fellow retreatants sensed him a pleasant person to be around, there was something more, a deep peacefulness, in him. Inspired by the retreat, Dave entertained a romantic hypothesis: to live fully, either become a monk, embracing a spiritual world, or be like Zorba the Greek, exuberant in this earthy one. The person leading the retreat, Father William McNamara, was a revelation to him: a monk and wild — a Zorba of faith. A few years later, inspired by Father William’s example, Dave himself took vows.

      At his vow taking, Dave expressed gratitude to someone for a life-changing experience that had brought him to that moment. It caused surprise, especially at a Catholic ceremony, for the one Father Dave thanked was the Buddha. He appreciated that the Buddha emphasized experience over beliefs and that Buddhism itself required no more otherworldly metaphysics than did an experiment in physics: do A, and B will follow. Do meditation, and your mental world will be transformed. He wondered how many Christians could say the same about the effects of church attendance. Earlier Dave had gone on a Buddhist Vipassana retreat, and its effects surpassed his every expectation, but must he, he wondered, swallow Buddhism’s strange and unfamiliar pill? Or could he have the same (or better!) experience through Christianity? There was one way to find out. His taking monk’s vows that day was that way.

      Father Dave thus became a Christian, but not one out to convert anyone else to his beliefs. As for our being God’s favored people, he says, this belief charges a Christian’s life with dignity — but he doubts any God’s validity who would choose one people over another. He can even imagine someone forsaking Christianity for Christian reasons: because it has become too much rote assent, a form of idol worship. Such an attitude will hardly ignite faith-based wars or allow shady politicians to hide behind a Bible. Father Dave’s measure of whether Christianity — or for that matter, any religion — is at work in your life is simple: Has it made you more alive, more loving, more capable of relationship?

      Is there a limit to such ecumenical open-mindedness? For there are differences too deep to be simply waved away. In Buddhism nothing is permanent, while in Christianity one’s soul (which also doesn’t exist in Buddhism) is durable unto death — and beyond. Another difference: in Christianity, God is the creator of the universe; in Buddhism, no God, and no creation, either. I asked him, “How would you, Father Dave, go about reconciling Buddhism and Christianity, with their contrary claims?”

      “I don’t. I can’t,” he answered mildly. “Each may be true, while you’re thinking about it, especially if thinking about it makes you for that moment a better person.” In the old Judeo-Christian worldview, he said, each person was considered a container, and each container/person could be filled with only one religion. He proposed a newer, more accurate metaphor: a map. Everyone has inside him or her a map or blueprint of all spiritual possibilities. Some people stay within the shaded area of the religion in which they were born, never venturing into the unknown white spaces. Still, the map or predisposition of other religious potentialities is latent within them.

      We were sitting in Father Dave’s postage stamp–size kitchen, overlooking an endless, arid landscape of such ancient timelessness as to make the words infinity and eternity almost palpable. We drank tea and speculated about great matters — a not unpleasant way to pass the afternoon. We were bound to eventually come around to the subject of Jesus — bound to, because of course I brought it up.

      “We could be entering a new era,” Father Dave speculated, “in which, perhaps for the first time, we are beginning to comprehend fully who or what Jesus was.” What a treat! Two thousand years passed before me, as it were, in four successive blinks of the eye — the whole history of Christianity in four movements. It begins with the period of Christ, when during his lifetime and for three centuries thereafter disciples attempted on their own — without the dictates and dogma of an official Church — to figure out who Jesus was and what his relation to the godhead was. This period yielded to Christendom, when in 380 CE the faith became the Roman Empire’s state religion, and for the next millennium earthly power and divine authority were practically interchangeable, each underwriting the other. Then in the Renaissance and Reformation commenced what Father Dave called by the familiar name Christianity, when it was no longer the official state religion yet Christ-as-God still shaped people’s thinking, the divine component of their overall worldview. But now, he said, we, or at least many Christians, are entering a new era of faith.

      “As for a name for this new era,” Father Dave suggested, “it might not be Christianity but Christ-ness.” In it Jesus may be less a God to worship and more a model of how to incarnate divinity within yourself. He elaborated. “We have brooded too long on God’s omnipotence, which may not get us very far, and not enough on Christ’s love and perfect compassion, which radiates in us, too.” Before my eyes Father Dave was shifting the locus of Christianity/Christ-ness from orthodoxy to orthopraxy, from creed to experience. “Even now a consciousness resembling Jesus’s,” he said, “may be coming to fruition in ever more souls.”

      When I mentioned the filmmaker Mark Elliott — a good man who was at times called “the king of Crestone” and is Buddhist to the core — Father Dave said that when looking at Mark he saw Christ. If I had Father Dave’s breadth of vision, would I have not simply been talking about Jesus with him but sensing his presence as well?

      Later, after Father Dave dropped me off, something about that afternoon struck me. He had not made any argument in favor of Christianity. Though his Christian faith is everything to him, Father Dave voiced no claim for its superiority. Does that “noble silence” — that spiritual humility, that lack of religious jingoism — rare in the epoch of Christianity, characterize a new era of Christ-ness?

      But why was Father Dave living all by his lonesome up in a mountain cabin and not — for he is a monk — in a monastery? He originally came to Crestone to join a Carmelite monastery, Father William McNamara’s Nada Hermitage, erected in the high desert’s void and vastness. The handsome monastery so architecturally suits the high desert as to practically materialize out of it. In its chapel glow two stained-glass windows depicting not the apostles but a black slave, a downtrodden woman, a suffering Vietnamese, a wounded animal, and other beings in travail, to remind the monks and nuns why they are here: to pray for and aid whoever sorrows. Indeed, the Carmelites quietly help people here in need, without broadcasting it. For Father Dave the years rolled by at Nada, the work went well, the monastics dwelt in harmony together, all was of a loveliness. Until . . .

      Until it was discovered that the head of the hermitage, Father William, hardly the chaste monk he presented himself as, had seduced one nun after another. And this was the man who, if a monk and a nun at Nada fell in love and renounced their vows in order to marry, exiled them and pronounced