"When All the Buffalo Went Away"

“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.”

Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow Nation (1932)

Sometimes the buffalo go away.  And then our hearts fall to the ground, and the weight of our fallen hearts is so heavy that we cannot lift them up. We cannot even try.

So nothing happens.  Despair leads to depression.  Nothing.  We feel nothing. 

It doesn’t matter “why” the buffalo went away-that is not the source of despair.  It is that they are gone, and now the lives of a whole nation are changed, forever. Their reason for being, their raison d'être, went away.  When that happens we ask questions like, ‘Why am I here?’; ‘Why do I exist?’  Nothing happens because we hear only a voice of despair.

And then a  Chief Plenty Coups comes along with a vision or three, speaking hope for his people. The voice of hope says, ‘My life will be given new meaning. The buffalo do not give me a reason to be. I have the ‘courage to be’ in some new way, planning my future around some new source of life.’

When all the buffalo go away there will be heavy hearts. For a time nothing will happen. But, if you will listen carefully you will hear the voice of a prophet saying, “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?  I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” (Isaiah 43:19, NIV)

Something is happening, though all the buffalo went away.

(Credits: What Does it Mean to Hope?, by Charles Pinches, quoting from Jonathan Lear, author of Radical Hope, at www.christiancentury.org, July 10, 2017)