Phil Oakley

San Juan Bautista Phil Oakley

Three revolutions, three lives devastated and a monastery in the American Southwest come together in this novel where, for a time, hope seems a dream too big. The revolutions tore the fabric of their locations: Poland, Nicaragua and Rio Arriba County, New Mexico. The three crushed by the violence and its consequences were, a teacher, the young son of a subsistence farmer and an American priest. While the inspiration for this novel came from a set of video images for an amazing television news story about the Christ in the Desert Benedictine Monastery in Northern New Mexico, it is not stretching too far to observe common roots between this book and a number of classic novels featuring monks, nuns and priests. Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Fiodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory are three that come quickly to mind. With these introductory words the scene is set to begin the life stories of Wojciech Zirinski, Javier Montoya and Juan Carlos Medrano.