hope

by Niki de Saint Phalle

On Saturday I got to travel to Freiburg/Fribourg to attend annual gathering of the Christian Life Communities (CLC! GCL! CVX!) in Switzerland. After the rather boring administrative part of the day, we went to visit the Espace Jean Tinguely - Niki de Saint Phalle, a gallery of works by those artists and others. Later we were supposed to reflect in groups on what we had seen and connect it to something in the Gospels, an assignment that challenged even this biblically-fluent group. Does all art have to have a connection to the Bible? 

If I could wave a wand and remove "Christian" from the CLC I'd do it. I think its reflective small-group practices are powerful and desperately needed, and I get frustrated that all our source material has to come from scripture and that group membership is thus effectively limited to a shrinking population of Catholics and a few sympathetic Protestants. *And* the closing liturgy was lovely and intimate and such a far cry from the sparsely-attended, organ-heavy services I usually attend. I wouldn't presume to take Christianity away from this group, so if I want to find out whether the practice is separable from the language, I'm going to have to find a way to do that on my own. Or, if I'm lucky, find some co-conspirators who think like I do. But where?

On Sunday my choir sang at the Protestant church service and I had for the umpteenth time the experience of looking out into the congregation and knowing next to no one. This does not get easier with time.

Anyway. Onwards:

Four Books I Think Are Relevant Here, Part 2: Radical Hope by Jonathan Lear

This book came highly recommended (by whom? I don't know any more) but as I started to read, my first impression was: ugh, philosophy... On page 2, Plenty Coups, a chief of the Crow tribe around the turn of the 20th century, is quoted as saying (among other things), "after this nothing happened." Lear dedicates the next 50 pages to an analysis of those four words. Whew. Sometimes I think that I missed the boat by not getting a proper liberal arts education; other times I doubt I would have survived one. So much...talking.

But. The book stuck with me. Here, in far fewer than 50 pages, is what my non-liberal-artist self took away from it:

Plenty Coups had a vision. 

If there are people out there who believe dogmatically in the triumph of pure reason, I don't know them. But we assess our kids based on whether they've learned economically-useful skills; we reward technical work far more than artistic work (and rest not at all); we have no common religion. Who are the visionaries of our times? Where and how do we hear their dreams?

The elders of the tribe heard him.

Young Plenty Coups was called to go off and dream when he was nine years old.

... ...

It is fascinating to see how the Crow used dreams cooperatively. The young men were sent out to dream; and at a later ceremonial occasion the old men interpreted the young men's dreams. The tribe relied on what it took to be the young men's capacity to receive the worlds imaginative messages; it relied on the old men to say what these messages meant.

Nine years old! Leaving aside for the moment the fact that young and old women might also have wisdom to share...do we have anything like the equivalent of this? I'm drawing a blank.

The vision and the belief helped the tribe to maintain their identity through a cultural apocalypse.

In his visions, Plenty Coups sees the death of the buffalo, which are the center of Crow culture. But he is given a tip: become a Chickadee.

He is least in strength but strongest of mind among his kind. He is willing to work for wisdom. The Chickadee-person is a good listener. Nothing escapes his years, which he has sharpened by constant use. Whenever others are talking together of their successes and failures, there you will find the Chickadee-person listening to their words. But in all his listening he tends to his own business. He never intrudes, never speaks in strange company, and yet never misses a chance to learn from others.

The elder Yellow Bear later interprets this vision to mean that "the white man will take and hold this country" and warns that "the tribes who have fought the white man have all been beaten, wiped out." Based on the vision and this interpretation, 

[The tribe] decided on a foreign policy that would guide their acts for the next century. They explicitly recognized in an official council that their buffalo-hunting way of life was coming to an end, and they decided to ally with the white man against their traditional enemies. This is the way they hoped to weather the oncoming storm and hold onto their land.

The Crow were, indeed, able to retain [parts of] their native lands in a time when other tribes were murdered and displaced. But I don't think the fact that the Crow foreign policy was effective is the point of Radical Hope. Nor is Lear interested in glorifying or imitating Crow culture. Rather, Lear uses Plenty Coup's story to explore the practice of this thing he calls radical hope, by which he means something beyond wishful thinking, beyond successful outcomes, and over the horizons of what we can understand: the ability to draw creatively from our traditions while at the same time living into a future in which they may well become meaningless. He concludes:

It is one thing to dance as though nothing has happened; it is another to acknowledge that something singularly awful has happened--the collapse of happenings--and then decide to dance.

...

Through his dream-vision, Plenty Coups was able to take a valued and honored spiritual force and put it to creative use in facing up to new challenges. Thus, although Plenty Coups was advocating a new way of life for the Crow, he was drawing upon the past in vibrant ways. And thus I think a case can be made that Plenty Coups offered the Crow a traditional way of going forward. 

In this time when environmental and cultural collapse feels inevitable, and "conservative" and "progressive" seem like mutually exclusive poles of response...will we find ways to do the same?