Lectio #5 - Meditations on the Words of Big Elk

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"Big Elk, an Omaha chief, delivered a funeral oration in 1815 at the death of Black Buffalo, a fellow Omaha, and counseled his fellow chiefs as follows:

Do not grieve. Misfortune will happen to the wisest of men. Death will come and always out of season. It is the command of the Great Spirit, and all nations and people must obey. What is past and cannot be prevented should not be grieved for.... Misfortunes do not flourish particularly in our path. They grow everywhere.”

When I read this quotation from Big Elk, cited in Chapter 10, Death, and Religion, in God is Red by Vine Deloria Jr.,  a deep slow sigh sent fresh air down to the very bottom of my lungs. I wrote "Whew" in the margin, as I often do when some truth  comes off the page and lifts a burden from my shoulders.

I wanted to sit with it for a while.

This is how I read.

Something takes me by the shoulders and shakes some sense into me. My task, as I see it in that moment, is not to understand what the author meant word by word, nor is it "to decide if I agree with them or not”  (This I have learned, is a common goal of many readers of non-fiction).

The call, when I feel a certain kind of wind blowing around a phrase or a paragraph, is to sit for a moment and uncover why these words caused my spine to shiver or my breath to deepen or my heart to swell.  I pause to discover what those words mean to me. What needs, yearnings loneliness, desires, associations, or context did I bring to those words? What memories, intuitions, ego-rest did those words call up in me?

Here is what arrived in the silence and the breath that came in response to the worlds of Big Elk:

Do not grieve.

Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Be comforted.

Of course you will mourn, but might there also - alongside the pain - remain a small part of your soul floating just beyond grief’s reach? A piece that insists on a love, exactly as strong, as real, as deep, as eternal, as vital as every moment they were here alive and standing with you?

There is, within me, a piece that does not grieve, because it is comforted. It remains adamantly and stubbornly in the emotional presence of the lost one. It insists on carrying those I have lost with me, always with me, and this piece does not grieve even when am wailing and keening on the floor of the shower, even when the absence of embodied one I have lost is intolerable to my own body.

Even when my body and my heart are flooded with loss, there is a part of my being that nevertheless does not grieve and cannot grieve because they are still with me, and I am with them.

Be comforted. Find this place. Grieve yet do not grieve wholly.

Misfortunes will happen to the wisest of men.

There is no escape. Misfortune, like Mercy “droppeth as gentle rain from Heaven upon the place beneath.” On the just, and the unjust. On the wise and foolish. On the good and on the bad. And if the rain of misfortune is not distributed equally,  everyone will eventually get wet.

Life is not a moral test, or an intelligence test. Fair or not, everyone will encounter misfortune. Wisdom and goodness cannot protect you. Life doesn't unfold according to our personal preferences and the wise know this.

I also consider the inverse: Can you be wise or good without misfortune? Is it even possible? Perhaps the wisest and the best things we can generate on this earth emerge alchemically, from our misfortunes. Maybe some die, some are annihilated, some thwarted some twisted by misfortune through no fault of their own, and maybe if it doesn’t happen to possess, destroy, or distort you, there may be an opportunity to emerge from misfortune wiser.

I wonder if Black Buffalo and Big Elk were wise in both the ways I've imagined: Wise because they could accept misfortune as natural occurrence in a living, interdependent as system and wise because the misfortunes they survived filled him with the desire to be wiser and better.

Death will come and always out of season.

Loss will always disorient us, sending the ordinates and our experience of time and place spinning. The time is never right for death. We always want one more breath, one more word, one more moment as we say goodbye to an exquisitely beautiful and complex world, no matter how unfairly it has treated us. We want a moment, a week, a month, a season more.

When the snow comes? But the snow is so beautiful and cleansing. When the winds come? But there is such magic in the wind. Well, then when the buds bloom? But the blooms and the sunshine are so glorious.

And the time is never the same after someone has died. The seasons by themselves no longer mark time passing in the same way. Four summers from now we will mark time as "four years since the death of Black Buffalo," and not merely "four summers ago."

Loss changes our experience of time  - the time of departure feels simultaneously like a lifetime ago and just a moment ago, and like it never happened all at once and for the rest of our own lives.

It is the command of The Great Spirit, and all nations and people must obey.

This isn't personal. Our deaths and our misfortunes aren’t directed at us personally for our failures and errors in this lifetime. We aren’t being punished.

We are a piece of a much larger project an intricate harmonic dance, where each note is one tone in an extraordinary piece of music. A note that means nothing much ringing out by itself – just a hum or a buzz. But when the whole piece plays out from beginning to end, each note its place between and among notes that sing above, below, before, and after ours -it is part of something incomprehensible. Unthinkable – only able to be felt.

So, trust it. Life is about what we are a part of, not about us or them or me. And no one is alone in this. Every plant, every animal and insect, every star, every person has its time and place.

This is what nature decrees. We must remember our lives are lives in a vast context of life. That context is sacred, and we are each honored and fortunate to play our part however brief or sustained.

Our lives and our deaths serve creation and the Creator. We may mourn, but may we also remember that to have fulfilled this service, is enough. Is more than enough.

What is past and cannot be prevented should not be grieved for....

Again, we may feel sorrow, we may mourn- but be careful not to let this sorrow collapse into mere regret, self-recrimination, or blame. We have done what we knew how to do. We must accept that Black Buffalo was who he was. That we were who we were. We cannot change what is past. We must redirect our imaginings and our visions toward a future that manifests all we have learned so far. All we have received, all we have given, and all those we have lost who we will keep with us. Accept the past. Let us direct our energies into transforming the future.

Misfortunes do not grow particularly in our path. They grow everywhere.

This isn't divine persecution. This isn’t a story of Job where God and Lucifer shoot craps for our lives.

We are a gesture, a moment, a movement, a song, a breeze, a season.

Misfortune shapes us. redirects us, breaks us, corrects our course, challenges us, destroys us, redeems us. It is both essential and unavoidable.

Life involves suffering and misfortune. And our task is to learn to live in, and around, and through in- to be changed by it, to prevent or ameliorate it whenever we encounter it and have the capacity to relieve it. There is nowhere on this earth to avoid it.

We all share this. it connects us and leads us to find strength and connection. We stand with the rocks and trees, the fish and birds, and mammals, the sky and the waters holding this challenge together: To say "Yes" to life, to all natural forces, to this Great Spirit - whether it arrives in our lives as misfortune or as fortune, or as both at once and everything in-between.