The Temptations of St. Ed and Brother S. Frank Bergon — Frank Bergon

The Temptations of St. Ed and Brother S is a richly original novel about people caught in a contemporary conflict between nuclear and spiritual energy. It is the mid-1990s. The U.S. government plans to install the nation's first high-level nuclear waste dump in a remote mountain in the southern Nevada desert. Two modern-day monks suddenly find themselves in a violent struggle to protect their tiny hermitage against the enormous forces of the U.S. Department of Energy.
Fantastical, funny, and philosophically disturbing, Frank Bergon's ambitious novel tells the story of modern seekers in today's new West. Edward St. John Arrizabalaga - a forty-nine-year-old desert visionary nicknamed "St. Ed" - has a dream of a new monastic order for the modern world. Brother S, a young, idealistic former lumberjack from the Oregon coast, keeps the solar-powered hermitage functioning while he secretly longs for a mystical experience. Together, the two monks follow as best they can the fifteen-hundred-year-old traditions of Western monasticism.
Faced with a growing clash between their own spiritual energy and the DOE, the monks undergo numerous temptations. Brother S struggles with the temptations of the flesh. St. Ed faces his greatest temptation when he recognizes the conflict between the faith that underlies a technological society and the faith that supports a spiritual community.
The longings and dilemmas of these spiritual pilgrims become our own - and all America's - as we approach the uncertainties of the next millennium. Frank Bergon's powerful novel dramatizes the inner lives of intriguing modern-day monks, contemporary Shoshone Indians, a Basque prospector, a Mexican-American BLM ranger, a DOE nuclear test site worker, a Las Vegas TV talk-show host, and numerous desert dwellers engulfed in a controversy that is a current concern for all of us today. The Temptations of St. Ed and Brother S offers a dramatic, high-spirited search for recoverable sources of spiritual energy in our nuclear age.