Enlightenment Town. Jeffery Paine

       Overture

      Far away, remote from anywhere, lies a place that may open an unexpected window onto what it means spiritually to be human. Not all that long before I first strayed there, this high-mountain hamlet had housed but a few score miners’ descendants, who when they wanted to eat went out and shot a bear. When I first arrived there, to visit long-unseen friends, I felt I had stumbled onto the set of a budget Western, straight out of Gunsmoke or Bonanza. Little did I suspect then that that cowboy set, that dot tucked away in the distant mountains, would draw me back again and again and become the place where I felt most at home and would eventually form in my head, without my forcing anything, the book now in your hands.

      Back when I first got there, in 1990, I did note the curiosity that a few unusual religious groups — Carmelite, Hindu — had set up shop in this tiny Colorado town. From those small beginnings would soon flower an unprecedented phenomenon. Today the former mining town boasts twenty-five major spiritual centers, representing nearly all the brand names of world religion. Almost all the globe’s religions cohabiting practically under the same roof — nothing quite like this had happened before — and there I was, lucky enough to witness it unfolding.

      Sadly, I never could live there, not full-time, year-round — a combination of my bad lungs and its too-high altitude — but then the Native American Indians, who once made holy pilgrimages there, thought that landscape too harsh for any two-legged creatures to inhabit. For four-legged creatures, and yes birds too, it was always a peachy place to call home. Oddly, that may be part of its appeal: with its thin mountain air, with few diversions available, with winter practically three seasons out of four, so challenging is living there that having a good ol’ time becomes a Darwinian survival mechanism. In that town I discovered that a sense of humor, the spirit of play, is almost a necessity, and eccentricity, instead of being tolerated, is the norm. Who could not help but be attracted to this geosocial nonesuch that counted within a relatively small circumference more visionary, compassionate, offbeat, funny, untamed, and just plain uncategorizable citizens than, square mile for square mile, possibly any other location on the planet? There a religious and a secular zest for experience exist side by side, like good neighbors helping each other out.

      This town, Crestone, Colorado, with its larger-than-life characters and wider-than-usual spectrum of permissible behavior, would merit one’s curiosity, even were that the whole story. But that the town is also a sort of miniature Wild West Jerusalem offers a rare vantage point and raises an unusual question: What new understanding does beholding the world’s various religions all together, each one shedding light on the other, allow us?

      Consider this metaphor: If you know five or six — or twenty-five! — languages, you’ll see beyond the peculiarities of your native English or Mandarin, understanding how language itself actually works. Likewise for religion and spirituality. Through encountering the town’s twenty-five religious groups living side by side, we may begin to fathom what underlies all faiths. And, measuring one against another, we can also gauge how each is adapting to today’s changed realities, often trespassing beyond older notions of religion.

      Here, in fact, was an author’s dream: to write a story never before told. This book is a voyage of exploration — investigation as a mind-heart adventure — into the heart of spirituality. For these townspeople and their sometimes wild tales can help us fathom what it means to live in a period when religion has slipped its millennia-old moorings. Compared to the earlier, seemingly solid ground of God, salvation, biblical morality, sacredness, etc., we have rounded a corner into less certain territory that Rabbi David Cooper, who used to live in this town, called “postreligion.”

      Commonly accepted matters of faith are now routinely challenged, which leads to this book’s heart-queries: Is there a deep, transfiguring human reality, often going by the name religion, yet not limited to any or all of the known faiths? From what raw materials, out of what substrata of experience, is a personal transformation mined and refined? To find the answers, must we — with or without the example of Plato and Moses and Siddhartha — descend into the cave and climb the mountain and meditate under the tree once more, this time on our own?

      Or could we instead undertake a little jaunt to an unusual place in the mountains of south central Colorado? Enlightenment Town does not catalog contemporary religious denominations so much as explore new possibilities across denominations (and beyond), as brewed in that town’s most incongruous melting pot. Shall we pay a visit?