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, though, being busy in the world: he runs the Desert Foundation, promoting the desert as a source of spirituality; he serves as the chaplain 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
