A heavenly visit to New Mexico

Author: By Bud Collins

Date: SUNDAY, April 26, 1998

Page: M12

Section: Travel

This is two weeks ago in the remote wilds of Chama Canyon, whose human inhabitants, the Benedictine Monks of Christ in the Desert monastery, are as white-robed as the presiding moon, and as high in their own way, celebrants of Easter Sunday. The other light on high is a lantern hanging from a sturdy wooden cross that was lugged to a slope above the chapel by a Good Friday procession.

An elderly hymn, ``The Little Brown Church in the Vale,'' comes to mind whenever I enter the monks' 32-year-old sanctuary: the little adobe-brown chapel in the canyon. Soothing Gregorian chants are their messages of faith, the voices intertwining, embellishing the candlelit three-hour service that the boss, Abbot Philip, calls ``the high point of our year. Christ lives after death, and offers that salvation to all of us.''

A chilly dawn does not bring the hoped-for sunrise. But a crimson temple of rocky towers, porches, crypts, and buttresses takes shape as a canyon wall is revealed through the chapel's large clerestory windows. Snow, sleet, rain, and sporadic glints of sun decorate the day. A day that is presently heated up by a right-out-of-hades kind of Mexican dinner prepared by Brothers Raul and Antonio, as they learned at home.

``You mean heavenly,'' says friend Aurelio, who considers enchiladas, quesadillas, and rice spiked with jalapenos and green and red chili ``a religious experience.''

No telephone rings, fax machine burps, TV, radio, or taped screeches assault the stranger welcomed by these monks. Christ in the Desert, a cold-turkey pen in noise-addicted America, lets you have peace and tranquillity along with a spartan cell-with-a-view, kerosene lamps, a wood stove, vegetarian grub, and as many or few Masses as you can take. It is Benedictine, not benzedrine. But the guest who says ``no mas, no Mass'' isn't marked lousy.

``We have our praying pace'' -- 10 services a day, kicking off at 0400. ``But,'' says Abbot Philip, a stubby, puckishly enlightened cleric, ``your pace is your pace, your beliefs or non-beliefs are your beliefs or non-beliefs -- not our concern. We pray for you regardless. And hope you'll pray for us. God likes it both ways.''

The beautifully solitary confinement of the pine-rimmed canyon, whose buttes are striated in such flavors as raspberry, lemon, and mint, led to the founding by a few hardy monks in 1964. Seventy-five miles northwest of Santa Fe, and then 13 miles of lumpy, sometimes impassable, dirt strip off the main highway, the internationally composed monastic community of 42 brothers lies at 6,500 feet in the mountainous high desert neighborhood where Georgia O'Keeffe lived and painted. She prized solitude, too.

But there is solitude -- and there is solitude '98. What would good old St. Benedict (480-547) think of on-line monks, balancing worldly Web-running with worship? As comfortable with computers as compline, some of them help support the homestead by designing Web sites and programs for religious and secular clients alike. An Argentine, Brother Marcelo, has done the art work for Vatican Web pages.

In charge of the operation, called the Scriptorium, is Brother Aquinas, an American computer expert in his previous life. A Catholic convert who eventually took monastic vows, he joined the monastery as a hermit, living in isolation for several years across the river.

``You know . . . those mysterious ways of God,'' he says, smiling. ``Back in computers, in touch with the world again, spending time in our Santa Fe office, driving a car. If that's the way I can serve best, so be it. I want to return to reclusion, but He'll decide when. Meanwhile, if you want to know our Web site, it's www.christdesert.org.''

Prior Philip laughs, his wispy black beard jiggling. ``We may look it in our robes, but we're not in the Middle Ages any more. But really, we're just continuing in a 1,500-year tradition. Back then, we made illuminated manuscripts with pens in hand. Now we turn out successor material by using our fingers on the keys.''

However, the devotion is unchanging. That is clear during the affecting days of Holy Week. ``Symbolism is a strong part of it,'' says Philip.

On the bittersweet Thursday of the Last Supper, he sets aside top hat and walking stick -- the silk mitre and seven-foot crosier -- to stoop and wash the feet of his brothers and the remainder of the congregation. `` `Unless I do this for you, you are not part of me,' Christ told his disciples.''

It's one foot to a customer since he cleanses about 60, including the recent coed addition, novitiates of Sisters of Christ of the Desert. Hoping I put my best foot forward (the less grimy one), I marvel at the long, meticulous, aerobic (up-and-down) undertaking. Philip, who has been here a quarter century, confesses to being in better shape than he'd thought.

Good Friday is dark-robed somber, services ending with the monks prostrate, the cold concrete floor of the chapel in their faces. Visitors from area towns, predominantly Hispanics, follow the shadowy lineup of monks on a fairly demanding journey through the stations of the cross, up a steep dusty incline along the canyon face. The heavy burden of the cross is shifted among various shoulders, unlike the original death march of the carpenter up the hill called Golgotha.

Yet the setting here seems more starkly Golgothan, more agonizingly real than modern Jerusalem's celebrated Via Dolorosa and its paved stations heading for the cross within the Church of the Sepulchre. As funereally-feathered ravens croak ominously overhead, and Brother Xavier's mournful flute echoes from a rock shelf, the snaking queue stops at each station for a prayer, and to chorus: ``This is the wood from the cross on which hung the savior of the world.''

The Easter Bunny fleeing our Sunday footsteps should have accompanied us to the chapel to behold the joyous interior, luminous with lilies, alabaster robes, and candles carried by each who entered.

``We believe in our truth,'' the abbot says in his sermon, ``but we must listen to others and realize that there are many truths, many ways to God, not just ours.''

Amen. The week went under the heading of a retreat, but to me (non-Catholic me), it seemed an advance.

For more information, write to Christ in the Desert Monastery, Abiquiu, NM 87510.