This certainly falls into the “late to the party” category, but I have been reading Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. I knew of the TV miniseries from years ago. I have a vague memory of that show from elementary school (I know, I know), which means I think I can remember my parents watching it. I had recently watched a docudrama series about Westward expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries, which, in turn, got me in the mood for a Western. I watched the movie on a streaming platform and then looked it up on Google. I didn’t know that McMurtry had won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Lonesome Dove. Once I learned that little tidbit, I realized I needed to read it for myself. So yeah, a little late to the party on this one. It’s a great book so far, and I’m pleased to be reading it.
I enjoy Westerns now, although once upon a time I couldn’t have cared less for them. I saw some popular ones over the years, but I wasn’t into John Wayne movies or watching Gunsmoke. I watched Bonanza as a kid, mainly because it was on when someone else was watching, but I didn’t get the Western bug until a few years ago. I’ve been playing catch-up ever since.
Some of you no doubt remember my “Oregon Trail” sermon from last year (I know because it comes up once in a while with fellow Gen-Xers). It was Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone series and the spinoffs that followed that put me in mind of those childhood explorations of Westward expansion. There is something about stories from the Old West that is akin to dystopian fiction, which is a genre I have long been interested in. When I made that connection, I suppose it just made sense that a strain of Western storytelling essentially describes the same dystopian themes, such as the hard life on the edges of civilization, where rules and laws were always in flux, or at least relative. They are also genres where there isn’t always help on the way when things go bad, and people have to figure out how to help themselves. And, there are often shared themes regarding the complexity of human beings, a mishmash of light and darkness, and the struggle for survival and self-preservation, weighted against collective needs.
I am certainly one who is grateful that I don’t live on the frontier or in the Old West. Granted, it’s unlikely that I’d be picked up and planted there with my modern skills (or lack thereof), but I am quite content to go buy what I need most of the time, rather than making it. Air conditioning is pretty good, too. But, in some ways, we still encounter frontiers here and now. Most of the world is “settled,” so we don’t feel like pioneers on our way to some virgin promised land. And yet, there is a sense that we are always on the edge of a changing world.
We might consider the digital frontier, for example. (Digital frontier is a term I can’t define in detail; as soon as I typed it, I knew I couldn’t have invented it, and a quick Google search tells me my hunch was correct. It could be one of a handful of commercial entities or blogs, but Google tells me my thought about a digital frontier is not unique!) We live in a world with a digital frontier, marked by rapidly changing technology, most notably and recently by the rise of AI. We’re having to find new ways to do things and to figure out where our moral guardrails are for this technological innovation. There may not be groups of people on horseback coming for us, but it can feel like something is coming for us, or if not for us, for our way of life.
We also live on a medical frontier. So many ailments can be treated or eradicated. Pharmacology is moving at a fast clip, faster all the time, based on the number of ads I see and hear. We’re having to navigate longer lives and the opportunities and challenges that come with them. There are the historic frontiers, too, which every generation encounters when they live through events and eras that we know will be of particular interest to people in several generations. They can be harder to realize and name as we live through them, but we know that it’s true, too. Let’s just say it was humbling when our youngest described her AP US History lessons on the 1980’s - I felt as old as some of you did when you read that Lonesome Dove aired when I was in elementary school!
Westerns clearly contain themes that we can relate to, even if we’re not living on the edge of the known world or traversing “no-man’s” land. For example, Lonesome Dove offers lessons in integrity, compassion, friendship, grit, love, and death, among others. They are lessons that translate into our modern, settled lives and the modern frontier lives we lead. Although McMurtry doesn’t use religion or faith as a driver in his novel, we know that the lessons he offers can overlap with faith a bit. While the main characters in his novel largely look within for guidance and motivation, we look to God and try not to rely on ourselves as our own compass.
Our faith teaches us that meaning is found in the relationships we’re created and called into, although creation and calling are not explicitly understood in the novel. We have learned to look to God for meaning and hope to stay on difficult paths, rather than just rely on determination and toughing it out. We also know that while we have our own “codes” for living and behavior, God has established the law that governs our hearts, minds, and, ideally, our actions.
I’ll close with an acknowledgment that Westerns don’t always portray the complexity of the history of Westward expansion. I don’t have time here to get into the questions we sometimes ask of history and those who lived through it, but I think we are all aware that the treatment of indigenous persons and their portrayal in popular culture is a serious and painful issue for many. The treatment of women, immigrants, enslaved people, and a host of other things we’ve learned to see differently are on the same list. There are a lot of things that we name in our history that clash with our modern sensibilities and understandings that we can’t undo, and I don’t want to make light of them.
The Bible also conveys a challenging history for us to wrestle with. The storytelling is all part of how we make sense of such things and ourselves. It’s another frontier of sorts – learning from where we’ve been and trying to do it better as we move forward. As we know from scripture, history, and even the stories we tell, the most important lesson of all is that God doesn’t recognize a frontier, which is to say, wherever and whenever we go, God is with us for the journey. That doesn’t mean whatever happens or whatever we do is pleasing to God, but we certainly learn as we go. Every generation and every genre tackles these realities of human existence. We’re all late to the party in that sense, but with intention and humility, we can catch up.
