Apocalypse, Valor, and the Rainbow Trail

A confluence of gifts came my way today – hard gifts, as happens during hard times. I glanced at a headline that indicated a new and unlooked for kind of social destruction, whose radical effect I can hardly imagine. The entire dismemberment of society seems to be envisioned and I am stunned at the thoroughness of the vision and the strategies to implement it. Unless they are stopped, the first assaults directed toward immigrants, trans people, and people of color foreshadow much worse to come.

I am, by chance – as we call it – re-reading Black Elk Speaks. In it, he describes a long, beautiful, terrible vision he received while in a twelve day coma as a child. The unveiling begins as he walks through a rainbow door into a sacred teepee where he is instructed by six elders. He sees laid out before him four cycles – one in which his people live well and happily, one of mounting agitation and terror, one of whole-scale devastation, and one of universal renewal. “I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.” (John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: the Complete Edition, 26). Black Elk lived through the first three of the cycles – perhaps the fourth gave him what he needed to walk with his people in their valley of death. Black Elk is one of a number of Native American visionaries who perceived the coming apocalypse that would destroy their people and yet beheld a vision of survival. (We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope, Steven Charleston)

This morning the lectionary offered Isaiah’s message of destruction sent to a people destined to ignore it. When Isaiah asked how long the ruin would endure he received a chilling answer:

“Until cities lie waste without inhabitant
And houses without people,
And the land is utterly desolate;
Until the Lord sends everyone far away,
And vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.
Even if a tenth part remain in it,
It will be burned again,
Like a terebinth or an oak
Whose stump remains standing
When it is felled.
The holy seed is its stump.”

—Isaiah 6:11-13

I am not a visionary and do not know what to anticipate in the coming years. But I am aware of a mounting fear and terror I must work with every day. My activist friend reminds me that “doom scrolling” and reposting disasters and rants on social media “reduces the effectiveness of social action.” But she encourages all of us to continue to call legislators or participate in demonstrations – our voices still matter. As we choose how to respond, direct action remains a powerful way to be in community with others that cherish a vision of democracy and empathy.

I am also sitting with the wisdom of these elders who lived through apocalyptical endings. These visions are clear-eyed about the extent of the devastation. At the same time, a much wider vision is unveiled to them – a great hoop and mighty flowering tree holding all of life in abundance, a holy seed from which a remnant will find renewal. Visions of apocalypse move through American slave songs – music sung when more than everything had been lost. And yet these witnesses to survival became classics of theological poetry.

These songs and visions do nothing to soften the reality of world-ending loss. But they reveal the spirit’s capacity for enormous valor, its capacity for hope that “won’t stay dead even if they kill us,” as Marquis Bey says. I find myself seeking not only how to respond to existential and material threats but how to break through to the fierce valor we humans have proved capable of.

This valor is buried in the land of forgetfulness where the full reach of the human spirit lies dormant. Episcopal priest Berto Gandara insisted today in his homily that “original sin” is not guilt or stain but rather our forgetfulness of who we are. He reminded us that in the stories in which Isaiah and Peter were called, when the sacred was unveiled to them they cried out – I am undone, I am unworthy, leave me. Before they were able to live into their call, the Beloved had to heal this lie. They are – like all of us – bearers of the fierce intensity of the divine image – a ferocity of love that is almost too frightening to bear.

We live in a world of news feeds, of stop lights, grocery stores, emails to friends and colleagues. This “world” is the place of our habitation and also the land of forgetfulness. And yet we shine like the sun. We are beautiful and powerful. The divine light is radiant in us. Our great tragedy is that we find it so difficult to feel this, to live this. We humans have seen the end of everything we loved – we have seen the holy city of Jerusalem turned to rubble and rapacious warriors torment our loved ones. We have been torn from Mother Africa – from our Igbo, Yoruba, Ashanti homes. We have wept as our Lakota and Miwok and Cherokee nations were reduced to beggary. And yet we keep shining. From rubble we flame forth in not one but two great spiritual traditions. Reduced to slaves, we sing and we rise. Swept away by a powerful country, we teach our children our almost forgotten language and the wisdom of the pipe: “the only thing I really believe is the pipe religion,” Black Elk tells his daughter not long before he dies.

I do not know how the Ghost Dancers kept dancing or how the people of Israel rose from the rubble. I do not know how the Palestinians survive their grief. But I see in these apocalyptic visions that they do – we, we humans, do. Whatever else my work will be in the coming days and years – the heartbeat of my work will be to try to learn this, to discover this rainbow path that lights a trail when it seems all paths have turned to ash.

“And a rainbow was the open door in it.”

—Black Elk