NONFICTION - April 28, 1996

EN DIVINA LUZ: The Penitente Moradas of New Mexico photographs by Craig Varjabedian, text by Michael Wallis (University of New Mexico Press: $42.50; 130 pp.). In remote villages of the Southwest, an obscure religious brotherhood has ministered to the spiritual needs of the people for some 200 years. Los Hermanos Penitente, or, the Penitent Brothers, found their calling in the days of colonial New Mexico when a handful of Catholic priests struggled to serve the region’s growing population.

Varjabedian spent several years photographing the effects of desert lighting on the brothers’ places of worship, crude adobe and wood structures called moradas. This experience, he says in his afterword, led him to consider “my own relationship with the Divine.”

In fact, both he and Wallis describe the spiritual invigoration they found among the brothers in the desert. The result is a book resounding with awe. Stunning black-and-white photos show the moradas dwarfed against the immensity of bare mountains, open sky and storm clouds. These pictures “speak” in a simple, immediate way of the brotherhood’s humility before the grandeur of their creator. The hermanos also speak for themselves through anonymous quotations that Wallis has incorporated into his text. It is on this point--anonymity, secrecy--that the book produces an unexpected effect. The reader comes away with the sensethat never has so much care gone into making a book so incomplete.

The book contains only exterior shots of the moradas. We are never allowed to see their interiors. The locations of these buildings are not identified. No brothers are pictured either, only the works of their hands--delicate ivory carvings of eagles and turtles and the figurine sculptures of saints called santos.

Why are we kept out? One reason is that the brotherhood told Varjabedian and Wallis that their rituals could not be described for the uninitiated.

There is another reason. Only officially recognized in 1947 for its affiliation with the Catholic Church, this traditionally male lay organization (though there have been hermanas, the authors note) has struggled in its history with bishops of the region, Protestant settlers and, more recently, vandalism and lurid gossip. “Black myths” refer to the stories of scourgings with cactuses, simulated crucifixions and other mortifying practices rumored to be part of their devotions. Some say the hermanos invented these tales to discourage tourists from disturbing them.

But with the public hungry for sensationalism, that ploy has backfired and the brotherhood has received more attention than it ever wanted. After seeing photos of one of the oldest moradas gutted by fire with satanic graffiti on its walls, one can’t help but approve of the authors’ decision.