After this nothing happened

This semester I am taking a course entitled Hope and Despair with Rev. Dr. Cody Sanders, a leading Pastoral Theologian in LGBTQ spiritual care and former chaplain at Harvard University. A voracious reader himself, he assigns at least a book a week throughout the course semester. Although learning by drinking from a fire hose means that many of the books begin to blend together and admittedly I forget all about some of them, it also means that the most striking texts rise to the surface fairly prominently. One such text is Radical Hope by Jonathan Lear, which we are reading this week. Lear’s book is a philosophical reflection around the prophetic words of Crow Chief Many Coups as his people were pushed into reservation life in the mid to late 1800s, forced to leave everything they knew behind. Many Coups said, “when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened” (emphasis mine). 

“After this nothing happened.” These are words of despair—an observation that everything thereafter was so meaningless, it was as though nothing happened at all. Lear goes on to explain that the Crow way of life was centered around their nomadic, tribal lifestyle. Every single thing done within tribal life supported hunting buffalo and tribal warfare. Boys were raised playing with weapons to be used in hunting and skirmishes; girls were raised cooking for and caring for the men in the tribe so they could hunt and fight. So when the Crow people were pushed into a reservation—nullifying their territorial tribal warfare—and when the buffalo began to be exterminated—nullifying their nomadic hunting—everything that revolved around these purposes became meaningless. 

It brings to mind the words of the Teacher in Ecclesiastes 1: “Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” The words of a great leader who spent the entirety of his life accruing wives, concubines, riches, and power just to near the end of his days and realize none of these things would be coming with him when he died. Lear describes this experience of meaninglessness as a result of our life’s purpose suddenly being turned upside down by a new reality into which we are thrust. For the Crow, their new reality was reservation life. For the teacher of Ecclesiastes, his new reality was death. And for us? This despair can result from any number of things that cause a break in our understanding of ourselves, our world, and our God. 

In our world today, there is a deep chasm growing between supporters of LGBTQ rights and inclusion and their opponents. I believe that people’s strong feelings about this issue, whether for or against, has everything to do with their understanding of themselves, the world, and God. Imagining a world where gender and sexuality is fluid means imagining a world where either one’s purpose and understanding is validated or nullified. For those who embrace this change, there is potential for them to live into their fullest understanding of who they are and who they love. Suddenly, in living into this reality, everything in their lives becomes meaningful. They understand themselves in their fullest expression for the first time ever. They view the world in all its multi-faceted brilliance that had once been truncated into a false binary in which they could not find a place. They relate to God, perhaps for the first time ever, as a God who loves them and not as a God who cruelly created them to be something that God abhors.

However, for those who do not embrace this change and hold fast to a rigid view of gender and sexuality, this change nullifies everything they understand about themselves, the world, and their God. It renders so much of what they know as meaningless. This is why it is scary. This is why people hold on to these views—because the alternative is the possibility of meaninglessness. Their world is orderly, binary, simple. Everything and everyone has their place in this world, and there is safety in the certainty of it all. The upending of this certainty demands an entire reimagining of who they are, what the world is like, and who God is. And the transition from point A to point B is mediated by a period of meaninglessness—a wilderness. 

This is the wilderness of growth. The wilderness in which the Israelites found themselves between the certainty of slave life and the hope intermixed with fear in the uncertainty of the Promised Land. The wilderness of the Teacher who began to experience the first throes of transition from this life to eternity. The wilderness of the Crow people who faced a decision point of how they would acclimate (or not) to their lives on the reservation. This is real fear. Any transition, whether positive or negative, brings the possibility of hope or despair depending on how one chooses to engage it. 

Many Coup, the Crow Chief with whom we opened this blog, had a decision to make that would not only impact his experience of this transition but that of his entire tribe. Hope or despair trickles from the top down. It is a question of resilience and flexibility that us Floridians understand all too well when a hurricane comes and tears apart a strong oak tree but leaves a seemingly delicate palm tree intact. Can we weather the storm of transition by moving with it instead of against it? Can we find hope and meaning in a new reality? Many Coup did. Many Coup led his tribe to redefine meaning when their reality was completely torn asunder. While some younger men in the tribe were attempting to salvage their warrior status by continuing a violence that was now meaningless, Many Coup laid down the symbol of tribal warfare, not as an act of surrender but rather as an act of reclamation and survival. 

We do not get to choose how and when our world changes, but we do get to choose how we respond to it. Many Coup loved his people enough to help them adapt to an ever-changing reality. Do we love each other enough to adapt to a new reality where people can live fully into who they are? Do we love ourselves enough to trust in our own courage and resilience to change our minds? Do we love God enough to embrace the possibility that God does not make mistakes and actually does create and embrace fluidity and love in all its manifestations? ​