Dossier, Volume 14 #4

Oil Lamps, Cold Beer and Computers

Computers make me nervous. I don't like them and I have avoided getting one of my own. I know I'm quickly slipping behind the times. I wish there were another way. But I can't trust these things, not as long as they behave the way they do. It's scary.

I recently read in the paper that someone had to be hospitalized after his monitor blew up in his face. And there are at least two fully documented cases of computer junkies who have disappeared while surfing the Internet. Yes, right here in Toronto-the-safe.

Now, something really awful happened to me not long ago. I was at the Benedictine monastery of Christ in the Desert, in New Mexico. It was Easter, just before the vigil. I had been asked to help bring a few chairs into the church. The monks were afraid there might not be enough seating for everyone.

I opened a door, a normal door, and found myself faced by a roomful of computers. I stayed cool. Thank God, nothing happened. The room was dark and very quiet--the beasts were silent. I took two chairs and tiptoed out.

Christ in the Desert is not your average monastery, mind you. It is way out in the desert, the kind of spot where you expect to see surprising things, like snakes and cactuses and huge bugs that come from nowhere. And by the door of the church there are three tombs. Two are occupied by the bodies of guests who, a few years ago, went for a walk in the desert, too far from the monastery. The last tomb is a gaping hole, wide open, ready. "Just in case," a monk said to me.

I got there on foot, a day's walk from the nearest village--a liquor store, a church and a bunch of adobe houses, the whole thing fairly easy to reach by bus from Santa Fe. I wanted to walk, pilgrimage kind of thing. A car stopped by me on the dirt road, heading for the monastery. The morning was bright and breezy, I felt wonderful and refused the ride. I was fierce about walking. Kindly the man insisted on taking my backpack: "It's gonna be a very long walk, you know."

The mountains in the distance were beautiful against the Van Gogh sky. A few shrubs here and there, rocks, lots of rocks that turn to dust as you touch them. Red dust. Red earth. Everything strangely red and incredibly dry. And the sun, the sun everywhere. As the car was disappearing on the horizon, I realized with a jolt that my water bottle was in the backpack.

The man was right. It turned out to be an awfully long walk. Never been so thirsty since the day when I tried to walk from Nazareth to Capernaum and got lost somewhere around the Horns of Hattim. I made it to the monastery just before dark. For the last few miles I was pretty well hallucinating: northern lakes, white pines, cool breeze and cold beer. Cold beer. That's the first thing the monks gave me when I sort of staggered into the main building.

I was happy as a pup but I kept wondering how they keep their beer cold since I could see no sign of electricity in the guest house. Only flashlights, old-fashioned oil lamps and wood stoves.

"We have a small generator," the guest master said to me. "Just enough electricity for a fridge and some light in the kitchen. It comes handy for the beer."

Which brings me back to the roomful of computers on Easter night. Of course, I was horrified to find them there, hidden in the small adobe building that is the heart of the monastery. I was shocked. But I was also puzzled. What are these computers running on? Are they competing with the beer? This can't be.

As soon as the Easter service was over, I asked one of the monks, a young man from Vietnam with whom I had made friends.

"Oh, there are solar panels at the back of the building," he said. "These computers are a hungry bunch. They suck up a lot of electricity."

"What do you need all those computers for?"

"That's how we make a living," he said.

"A living?"

"Yes, we work on the Internet. It's getting real big, you know. More and more organizations and businesses want to have a site. We bring them the technical and artistic expertise to set it up, to present themselves and their products. At the moment, we are negotiating a big contract with the Vatican. If it goes through we won't need to worry about money for quite a while."

"But how did you get into such high-tech stuff? I mean, you're in the middle of nowhere, you go around with oil lamps, you fight off bears and rattlesnakes!"

"There is this guy who came to live here. He wants to be a recluse. He is building a hermitage on the other side of the Rio with a big wall around it. When he's finished, he'll never come out. He is a computer genius. We had big bills. He came up with the Internet idea, trained a few of us. Now we're on a roll. Most of us spend our days with the computers."

"I hate computers. Don't you?"

"I don't know. They're demanding all right. But they open up endless possibilities. It doesn't really matter to me whether I'm working on the Internet or sweeping the floor. I try to be centred on God."

I had always thought that monks must make a living weaving baskets or milking cows. Even at Christ in the Desert there are a couple of beehives. I've seen them, and tasted the honey on my bread at breakfast time. Waoh! Good stuff!

But for the folks here beehives are obviously not the way of the future. I hate to admit it, but I suspect they're right.