Magdalena Mountain

by Robert Michael Pyle

  “As I thought.” Mary sighed and almost put it down both for the use of the word man and the word religion. “This is a religious house. Here comes the dogma.” But she read on in spite of herself, and her reaction and her mind began to change.

  “Religion,” wrote Burroughs, “as I use the term, is a spiritual flowering, and the man who has it not is like a plant that never blooms. The mind that does not open and unfold its religious sensibilities in the sunshine of this infinite and spiritual universe is to be pitied. Men of science do well enough with no other religion than the love of truth, for this is indirectly a love of God.”

  “Not fundamentalists,” Mary guessed. “But I wish he’d stop saying ‘men.’ ” Then, checking the date of the essay’s publication, 1920, she decided to cut it some slack.

  The astronomer, the geologist, the biologist, tracing the footsteps of the Creative Energy throughout the universe—what need has he of any formal, patent-right religion? Were not Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall and Lyell, and all other seekers and verifiers of natural truth among the most truly religious of men? Any of these men would have gone to hell for the truth—not the truth of creeds and rituals, but the truth as it exists in the councils of the Eternal and as it is written in the laws of matter and of life.

  “Wow,” she whispered. “Who is this guy?”

  “The religion of a man that has no other aim than his own personal safety from some real or imaginary future calamity is of the selfish and ignoble kind.”

  Mary read faster.

  Amid the decay of creeds, love of nature has high religious value. This has saved many persons in this world—saved them from mammon-worship, and from frivolity and insincerity of the crowd. It has made their lives placid and sweet. It has given them an inexhaustible field for inquiry, for enjoyment, for the exercise of all their powers, and in the end has not left them soured and dissatisfied. It has made them contented and at home wherever they are in nature—in the house not made with hands.

  “I’m liking this,” Mary said, not beneath her breath.

  “This house is their church,” Burroughs went on,

  and the rocks and the hills are the altars, and the creed is written in the leaves of the trees and in the flowers of the field and in the sands of the shore. A new creed every day and new preachers, and holy days all the week through. Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth. There are no heretics in Nature’s church; all are believers, all are communicants.

  “Oh, yes!” Mary cried, reading with a fervor she had known only once in months and months: when she had found herself first able to read at all in the home and had come across an old story that seemed to matter deeply. She read on.

  “The beauty of natural religion is that you have it all the time; you do not have to seek it afar off in myths and legends, in catacombs, in garbled texts, in miracles of dead saints . . .”

  “Right on!”

  “. . . or wine-bibbing friars. It is of to-day; it is now and here; it is everywhere.” Shivering with forgotten recognition, Mary began to read aloud:

  “The crickets chirp it, the birds sing it, the breezes chant it, the thunder proclaims it, the streams murmur it, the unaffected man lives it. Its incense rises from the plowed fields, it is in the morning breeze, it is in the forest breath and in the spray of the wave. The frosts write it in exquisite characters, the dews impearl it, and the rainbow paints it on the cloud. It is not an insurance policy underwritten by a bishop or a priest; it is not even a faith; it is a love, an enthusiasm, a consecration to natural truth.”

  What kind of people are these robed mountain men, Mary wondered, who think like this? As they must, to put this here for me to see. Ravenous to finish, she hurried on. “ ‘The God of sunshine and of storms speaks a less equivocal language than the God of revelation.’ ”

  Her voice rose:

  “A man is not saved by the truth of the things he believes, but by the truth of his belief—its sincerity, its harmony with his character. The absurdities of the popular religions do not matter; what matters is the lukewarm belief, the empty forms, the shallow conceptions of life and duty. We are prone to think that if the creed is false, the religion is false. Religion is an emotion, an inspiration, a feeling of the Infinite, and may have its root in any creed or in no creed . . . Any creed that ennobles character and opens a door or window upon the deeper meanings of this marvelous universe is good enough to live by, and good enough to die by.”

  “Amen!” Mary fairly shouted. And a chorus of “amens” mixed with gentle laughter rose outside her door, which was ajar. Mary started and turned to see a dozen friendly faces looking in. Drawn by her unself-conscious oration, they had come one by one to listen at the door. Mary stood and blushed, then smiled back and accepted a round of gentle, woolly hugs.

  “So you see what we are about,” said one.

  “More or less,” said Mary, “and I think I like it.”

  The next afternoon, when she seemed well rested, Oberon asked Mary if she was ready to take a walk. She paused, touched her chin, turned her head, and said, “Yes.”

  Oberon led her down a gravelly lane from the monastery to the state highway. She shielded her eyes from the high, bright sunlight, so much purer and sharper than she’d known it in the city. They passed a strange and pretty stone-built chapel, crossed the highway, and found a small trail on the other side. It led up a gentle grade through pink granite grus and twisted limber pines, above a series of beaver dams, to one of the round domes that pillow the Front Range here and there. Made of orange and gray feldspar, black and clear mica, and white and rose quartz, all bundled into granite by pressure, heat, and time and spattered pale green with lichens, these humps exfoliated slabs of themselves when the winter ice swelled and then melted in spring, like the layers of some tough kind of bulb. Their smooth tops make fine perches for ravens, watchers, and meditators. Oberon led Mary Glanville to one of these seats.

  Mary’s eyes, thirsty for fresh images, took in every nuance of the scene before her. It began at the double summit of Magdalena Mountain, sharp in the clear light, then followed the rocks and trees down the mountain’s middle to the humpy forest, on the lip of which stood the monastery. Its five gable windows in the big shingled roof, twenty-two room windows below them, and twelve big windows on the ground level all shone in the afternoon sun like giant flakes of mica.

  Her eyes continued farther down, across the willow bogs, to Cabin Creek and its culvert under the road between beaver ponds. Cerise fireweed, rose cranesbill, foamy white umbels and everlastings, lemony cinquefoils and goldenrods colored the marshy edges, and all around on the sandy floor the yellow and purple asters of the season filled in the colorless shell that Mary had become. Oberon kept his peace as Mary sucked in the view, growing drunk with relief and a swelling joy. Ravens echoed bass notes overhead, juncos and bushtits tinkled in the pines.

  Mary fixed on the little stone chapel, a Byzantine confection more at home in Old Europe than Colorado. The south-end vestry was rounded like a boat’s prow; the other end supported a cylindrical bell tower with a tiny circular window near the conical peak. Red sandstone Roman arches rounded the three tall windows of the gabled nave and smaller ones on either side. The whole sat seamlessly on the stone, as if it had grown out of the very bedrock, like a great fruiting body put forth by the lichens that covered its blocks. A massive white statue of Jesus stood on the outcrop just north of the chapel. “What is this place?” she asked. “Who are you all?”

  “That mountain is called Magdalena,” began Oberon. Gazing at the peak as he spoke, he missed the contented shade that crept across Mary’s face. “The monastery borrowed its name, or vice versa, a long time ago, although we simply call it the Mountain Monastery now. And the little church, perched there above Cabin Creek, is the Chapel of St. Mary Magdalene.”


  “Of course it is,” said Mary. “But which came first, the mountain or the chapel?”

  “Why . . . the mountain—”

  “I mean, the name—which one was named first?”

  “I have no idea. Although I suspect it was the mountain, since the chapel was not built until sometime after 1930. And here’s another oddment for you: the settlement around the old lodge up the road is called Magdalena Park. It began in the twenties, I believe. So a tangled web indeed has been woven hereabouts, namewise.”

  “Don’t you suppose there must be some connection?”

  “Maybe so. But the world is full of marvelous coincidences, and all these Magdalenas may be just one more.”

  “I doubt it,” Mary said. “It all fits. By the way, do you believe in coincidence?”

  “Absolutely. Jung spoke of the physics of fate: so much is going on at any given time that if we pay attention, synchronicity is sure to pop up now and then.” He paused. Then, as Mary said nothing, he went on. “It may seem so sometimes, but I don’t accept that things are prearranged. Free will, flawed as it is by hubris and Murphy’s Law, does exist. We can make it work, or we can screw it up. And at the moment, right here, it’s a toss-up. If Attalus has his way—”

  “Wait, wait. Slow down, back up,” Mary pleaded. “Oberon, what is going on here? What is it you’re trying to do, and why do you all have these funny names? And outfits? And you still haven’t told me who you are—except Oberon, which I very much doubt was your given name. Oh, I’ve picked up bits, and the John Burroughs essay was wonderful. But I need to know more—especially since it seems that I’m the crux of your immediate problem. And because I do somehow feel that I am supposed to be here.”

  “Okay, fair enough. I know it all seems a bit strange. The monastery was built in 1925 to house a healing order of Catholic monks known as the Brothers of the Bleeding Bota. They took their name from an obscure and controversial ‘miracle.’ The order, never fully recognized by Rome but tolerated on account of the useful work they performed among the miners, many of whom were Italian, Irish, and Polish Catholics, was founded by Gunnison Whetstone.”

  “Who was?”

  “A second-generation English immigrant rancher from the Western Slope. He took holy orders more to escape than to repent for a series of peccadilloes, or so the story goes. Following the putative miracle, and in a fit of belated contrition, he sold his ranches, built the monastery, gathered the brotherhood around him—mostly ex–World War One medics and defrocked country priests. Together, they set up the order.”

  “So what was the miracle?” Mary asked, her voice dripping with skepticism.

  “On a hunting trip, Whetstone encountered a Basque padre ministering among the sheepherders from his homeland. He carried a leather bota of wine for Communion and other emergencies. The two men shared a campfire and company, and passed the bota. Whetstone, struck by the old man’s sincere and simple faith, confessed to him, which took quite a while. In the morning the bota began dripping what the friar took for the blood of Christ. Doubtless having helped to consume the better portion of its contents, and feeling religious to boot, Whetstone found no grounds on which to disagree.”

  “And these two . . . ‘wine-bibbing friars,’ I think Burroughs called them . . . were believed?”

  “Hardly. The priest submitted the vision and Whetstone’s sworn witness to a Board of Miracles at the next papal review, or however they do that. But apparently the board regarded the bota as merely holey rather than holy, and the petitioners as earnest but deluded. Nonetheless, Whetstone was impressed—or maybe he just liked the symbolism. Some say he was never seen without a bota ever after, and that he presided personally over frequent bleedings of the icon.”

  “And you say this bemused sot ran a medical order?”

  “Yes, and rather a good one, for both humans and other animals. He was a self-taught vet for cattle and horses and a cat lover. Several of the others had experience from the trenches and field hospitals in Europe. Over the years they recruited a talented band of disillusioned doctors, and eventually a small nursing sisterhood settled in across the road in an old log ranch house, since burnt down.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well,” said Oberon, scanning the scene around him as he spoke, “between the two orders, they brought a modicum of care to a motley collection of patients along the Front Range: poor, uninsured, doctor-fearing, superstitious, itinerant, snowbound . . . they were a boon to the area for decades, even if Whetstone proved incorrigible.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, he and the others often bartered for payment, of course. Some of the female clients, bearing cats and poodles for Gunnison’s ministrations, were said to be recognizable from certain well-known houses in Central City and Blackhawk. This is mere hearsay, of course. Almost certainly apocryphal is the local legend that Whetstone built a tunnel between the monastery and the convent.”

  “A tunnel—in the rock?” Mary ran her soft hand over the unyielding granite.

  “It was supposed to incorporate part of an old gold mine drift.”

  “So what became of them?”

  Oberon combed his beard with his fingers, shook his head, and stretched. “Well, the nursing nuns aged and failed to attract recruits, given the shortage of nurses everywhere, and all of those going to Vietnam. The medical monks followed, whipped by a grand slam of malpractice suits by ingrates, insurance burdens, and harassment by the state licensing board. I’d guess a collective loss of faith finally did them in. The last of them, except for Attalus and the hermit Thomas, went down the mountain just last year.”

  “So then what? How did you all get here?”

  “Xerxes, Sylvanus, Abraxas, and I were all bumming around the Peak to Peak or the park for one reason or another a few years ago, and we got to know each other. We were all naturalists. Sylvanus knew Attalus, a member of the old order, via botany. His name was Brother Jacob back then. Through Jacob, we found out that the whole place was going to be put on the block by the archdiocese. So we threw our bankrolls and grubstakes together, took out loans, and bought an option on it. Now we’re trying to raise funds to buy the title outright from the Catholics.”

  “To continue the brotherhood?”

  “In a manner of speaking. The original order was abolished by the court. The Vatican didn’t give a hoot; neither the miracle nor the order was ever sanctioned. After suits were settled, the remaining assets went to the archdiocese, which had tolerated the brothers up to that point because they filled in a hole on the map. So we have no ties to the old regime, or to the church. We are now a new kind of brotherhood—soon, I hope, to be a sisterhood as well. But as you’ve seen, not much like the old outfit.”

  “Some kind of a New Age cult?” Mary asked, hoping it wasn’t so.

  “Hardly a cult—and definitely not new. We’re a chapter, or Grove as it’s called, of a more widespread federation called the Pan-Pacific League, inspired by the Old Religion, demystified. A band of pagans with a pantheistic bent, but not really theists for the most part, and with lowercase p’s, too. We try to live by consensus, have no leader as such, and share a set of core beliefs along the lines of that Burroughs piece you so enjoyed. What? Who was he? Oh—the best-known naturalist of the past century, friend of Muir, Whitman, and Teddy Roosevelt. One of the founders of conservation.”

  “Oh, is that all. So he’s your prophet. What do you worship?”

  “Nothing. But we venerate all the natural processes—including ourselves. We try not to recognize any real separation between humans and the rest of nature.”

  “ ‘And no religion too’?” Mary asked, nodding toward Jesus as she quoted John Lennon.

  “Well, we borrow some of the teachings of Christianity, yeah, as well as Judaism, Wicca, Buddhism, Islam, Shinto, Hinduism, Native American traditions, and other faiths, while rejecting the cant of any and all. But our fundament is nature itself. We revere the earth as a
part of the universe, and our ultimate sympathies lie with the land. Hence the Burroughs creed, and of course Aldo Leopold’s land ethic as a kind of doxology.”

  “I’ve heard of him, but what did he say? Remind me.”

  “ ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’ ”

  “My, that’s good! Says it all. Okay, no cult then.”

  “And certainly not New Age! We have no truck with the muddy-minded maundering that passes for thought under that heading. Crystals are lovely, but we prefer them in the ground or hanging from the rearview rather than casting spells or telling fortunes. To each his own, or hers, but we tend toward the hard head and the clear eye—or try to. So don’t try to find anyone to push your horoscope or Tarot cards around here.”

  “Darn!”

  “You could say the Pan-Pacific ideal is based on the real physical world, understanding it and keeping it alive and well and hospitable to humans and their neighbors as long as possible. We’d like to play a small role in that. But the outfit is young and pretty tentative at this point, with no bureaucracy, thank God—so to speak.”

  “And your, let’s say, unusual names?”

  “Well, some of the Groves are involved in direct actions of resistance, and they have sometimes found aliases useful in dealing with the law. But the names are also just for fun and, like our practical robes, a way to leave old lives behind. Monks know what they’re doing, you know. Our names mostly come from the far past—rustic deities, mythic and classical figures, and so on, many of them in some way connected to fauna and flora. Our ‘friend’ Attalus, for example, chose his handle because at least two historical figures by that name were plant lovers.”