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 them anathema. “At least,” Hanne Strong commented about his misconduct, “it wasn’t with children.” Father Dave did not have the luxury of such detachment. He had worked closely with Father William for thirty years, and what he once thought true now seemed a sham. Father Dave’s life work, his vocation, his belief in inherent goodness, everything he had trusted — the whole edifice — crumbled in an instant.
His days now began not with a psalm book in the chapel but with the question, “Can I get out of bed?” His body was shaking, he could barely eat. Barely talk. He felt that if he remained in the monastery he was doomed and that if he left the monastery he was doomed. Besides, how would he support himself (not many ads run “Freelance Monk Wanted”)? The chaplain of Colorado College tried to encourage Father Dave, telling him he had much to look forward to. Dave understood the words separately — me. . . look forward . . . something good — but how did they apply to him?
Needing to get away somehow, Dave rented Mark Elliott’s retreat cabin above Crestone. “Just one thing,” Mark joked. “Please don’t find God in a Buddhist cabin.” It felt good to be in a Buddhist atmosphere again and be reminded of its basic teaching of impermanence, that nothing, including his despair, lasts forever. That thought deepened into: if I want to be true to the essence, I may have to leave the form behind. The form had been his work at Nada with Father William, but the essence was faith in a goodness despite transgressions, at once within and independent of circumstances. With that realization, Father Dave moved to his new home, that cabin high on the mountainside, where the timelessness and impersonal emptiness of the desert — an experience of wordless existence beyond categories, beyond personal suffering — helped heal him. His was a Christian kind of story, of one returned from the dead.
A few weeks after visiting his cabin, I stumbled on a clue as to how Father Dave can wear his deeply felt Christianity so lightly. The clue came, oddly enough, from a Buddhist teacher who was visiting Crestone. During the retreat he was leading, he said — it sounded odd, coming from a religious teacher — that leaving religion behind creates a paradise for certain people.
This gentle teacher, Anam Thubten, described three levels to the religious life. The first level is belief: one assents to an ideal. At this level devotees “believe,” but their belief does not necessarily determine, or even much interfere with, their customary behavior (nor are they ruined if the belief turns out not to be true). This is religion as ideology, personal comfort, and grand thoughts.
The next level, Anam said, is religion itself. And religion is a very serious business. You have a lot to think about now: What’s the morally right thing to do? Is it in accordance with divine law? Do I have a good conscience? You are shouldering grave responsibilities — enough to hunch you over as you bear so much dogma, duty, and goodness. It’s a 24/7 job, with good works instead of vacations; it’s a school in which ethical satisfactions take the place of recesses, and the homework assignment is for all eternity.
The third level of religion comes after that, on the other side of Bible reading, temple attendance, and good works. Religion is not left behind, but your way of living now allows its truths or insights to materialize on their own. Sacred manuals are no longer necessary; you seem to know without trying to know. After continual striving and duty rendered, finally after age sixty, Confucius said, he could do what he wanted without going against the path. (How such a harmonious state of being comes about is investigated in part 3 of this book.) Father Dave appears today to be that kind of almost effortless Christian. As for Jesus’s teachings, they are no longer found only in scripture: effortlessly, automatically, they arise in his thoughts to meet whatever the situation is, and opening his eyes wide, he sees the teachings on display all around him. First thing after waking, Father Dave enters into contemplation, which is deeply gratifying, but for him the experience feels not all that different from when he cuts firewood or goes into town for groceries. Everything has become liturgy.
Does Father Dave — open-minded and inquisitive, undogmatic, recognizing his religion’s kindredness to other faiths — augur a better future for humanity?
Possibly not. Christianity is growing by leaps and bounds, particularly in Latin America and Africa, but often it is not Father Dave’s version but a narrower faith, shuttered against other possibilities, damning all forms of religious expression except itself. Dave attended a conference in the Northwest, where he was admiring a magnificent totem pole, a wondrous expression of folk art, full of potent mythic symbols, when a Christian delegate from the developing world sneered, “We should burn it to the ground. It’s the handiwork of Satan.”
Still, the future may not be solely a question of numbers, of statistical majorities. The religious cast of mind, as noted, wears bifocals: it sees the relative and the absolute, or the historically conditioned and the unconditional, or the daily and the
