It is recommended that your book diet feature variety: too many long novels leaves you craving a brief, non-fiction text, too many short stories and all you want is a lengthy, deep psychological thriller. No matter what you’ve been consuming lately, Desert Notebooks: A Roadmap for the End of Time by Ben Ehrenreich will fit in nicely, for it is a book with very few peers.

Ehrenreich writes to us from Joshua Tree National Park, and Las Vegas. These places inform his voice, but the cosmos, earth, history, and humanity as a whole take center stage as well. Overlaying all of this are meditations on time, that great connector of everything. He manages to force the reader to consider theirs, without impressing any of his own personal philosophies. And this is a major accomplishment of the book, as the various thinkers and philosophers he reflects will lead you to Wikipedia and Google searching for more to read. Personally, I am drawn to examine Marija Gimbutas, Mayan theology, and more of his work as a result of reading this book.

Of particular fascination to me was his summary of Christianity, which he described as an outside observer:

“…a new religious movement began to spread among the Jews and from them to other colonized and traumatized peoples throughout the Roman Mediterranean: the Messiah had already come, it insisted, but he’d been rejected, executed like a common criminal. With his arrival, time had started over. With his return, time would end. For good this time.

This new religion, Christianity, sought to set itself apart from other sects. It was not bound to a people or a place. It did not require memorization of arcane rules of behavior, complex ritual proscriptions, or codes of purity. Its most energetic publicist, Saul of Tarsus, later known as Paul, ecstatically declared that Christ had freed his followers from the tyranny of the Law: his followers would be justified through faith. And faith, in this context, was primarily a relationship to time, an orientation to the future. Faith was purest expectation. Time, this thing set in motion with creation, and reset with Christ’s birth and crucifixion, would end with his return. The universe would be redeemed. The faithful would be rewarded with the greatest of all conceivable gifts: eternal life, timelessness in the presence of God. Paradise was reimagined as an escape from the trauma of time.

This new sect was so extraordinarily successful that within a few short centuries- which would henceforth be counted from the birth of the Messiah- it had been adopted by the Empire itself… it would prove a uniquely flexible faith, a source of solace to the dispossessed capable also of offering succor to their conquerors. And- this is perhaps its greatest strength- to whatever fresh populations they chose to conquer and dispossess. As the centuries gathered it would spread by sword and cannonade to the Americas, to Africa and Asia and farthest Australia. The people of these continents- their own calendars destroyed, their songs and feast days banned, their sacred texts burned, their elders and their infants slaughtered, and their ancestors defiled- would in turn be thrust reeling into traumatized time.”

This is maybe the clearest summary of the practical history of colonization by “Christians” I have ever considered, and it is worth examining from a contemplative perspective. A close friend and I frequently ask ourselves that if we learned Jesus was just a crazy guy who preached love, would it change our actions or outlook? We believe if the answer is no, then we are doing our religion correctly. Ehrenreich’s summary provides an outsider’s lens of what Christianity is and has done in the world, featuring both aspiration and appropriate condemnation. I’m glad I read it, and I am glad I read this book.