1883

My parents moved to Park Ridge, Illinois in 1971 when I was 5 years old. Across the street from us was an old weathered white farmhouse that didn’t fit with the rest of the brick construction homes on the block. It was a holdover from when the town was just a cow pasture and it had remained as progress had crept in on it.

What had also remained was the old lady who lived in the house. I can’t remember her name or face; all that remains of my memory is that she was a very old lady. I’m guessing she was in her 80’s or 90’s so she very well could have been 93 which would have made her 5 years old in 1883.

So, what is special about the year 1883?

As I was recovering on the couch from a bout with the flu last week, I binged the Yellowstone TV series prequel, 1883.

1883 might be the best TV series I have ever watched. The writer who narrates the main character has an aptitude with words that is beyond the horizon of my skillset, and I am equal parts of awe and jealousy.

But what struck me most about 1883 was how much the world had changed in a relatively short period of time. That the world I knew as a 5-year-old in a safe Chicago suburb looked like nothing like the world that 5-year-old John Dutton in the TV series was experiencing. And that my neighbor was the living bridge between both of those worlds.

I’m guessing that its human nature to reflect on how the world changes from one generation to the next, but perhaps it’s only a modern trait as the pace of change is now palpable.

The most modern places in the late 1800’s have more in common with prior 18 centuries than the last 150 years, and the wild west setting of 1883 gave me more of an insight into my Biblical forefathers than any book ever has.

Sure, the Oregon Trail isn’t 1st Century Jerusalem, but the insights I found weren’t surface level either. No, what I connected with for the first time, was the primal mindset that we keep buried in the back of our First World closet. We see glimpses of it in times of stress, it has leaked into modern anxiety, and, at our worst, we drag it out to super-fuel our savagery, but it isn’t a constant companion.

No one I know views a river as a life and death boundary. When I took my children to the banks of the Illinois River to skip stones, I never felt an existential dread that the pioneers felt upon seeing the Brazos.

No one I know lost 7 children as the Dutton’s aunt did. And no one I know would find that ordinary if they knew of someone who did. But that was part & parcel of that world.

And there is no sitting on the couch to recoup from the flu in the frontier of 1883. That world gives no respite.

Yet here I am, a Jesus follower in our world, doing just that. And my initial tendency is to give as little respite, as little grace to these people as the world doles out to them. Because I have a teacher in Jesus who commands me to love, to love my enemy, to be non-violent, to be without sin, and I’m not seeing a variety of candidates to pass thru His narrow gate in the characters from 1883.

At least not from a modern Jesus’ perspective.

Hold up.

A “modern Jesus’ perspective”?

As modern Christians we feel entitled to the luxury of a modern Jesus’ perspective, but that is merely a delusion of our ignorance. There is a Jesus’ perspective, but we are fools if we only see it thru our own eyes.

The characters of 1883 divide into two groups: the soft who tend to be slaughtered and the hard who tend to survive.

The hard characters do many things that offend our First World sensibility. They shoot first, they cull the human herd, and they make cringe worthy hard decisions.

They don’t resemble my idea of a Christian, but my idea of a Christian would be foreign to them. And to be honest, it might be foreign to Jesus as well.

The world of 1883 is a hard world just as the world of Jesus’ Jerusalem was a hard world. In 2022, we’ve inoculated ourselves in the First World to much of the hardness, but the hardness can still be found around the globe.

And inoculation to hardness can be inoculation to Jesus.

How often do we want to avoid the Old Testament because of the violence? Every atheist I know has thrown that violence into their argument, and we either defend the violence or make excuses to avoid it. But we rarely just sit and contemplate violence as the core feature of the human condition.

How many of our churches have become like fortresses in our own societal wild west? Places where we cling to our ideas of holiness, purity, and sanctity. But are they built onto the rock of Jesus or on religious dictates that offer a First World illusion of stability?

In the First World, we have been spared the day-to-day struggle just to survive which spares us the apparent day-to-day need for Jesus. Why build on a rock when we have no worry about foundations?

But there is no true inoculation from the hardness of life. Modernity has slowed the frequency of life’s bitterest pills, but no one gets to avoid death calling on family and friends. Death is the most consistent aspect of life, yet modern people are shocked when death makes an appearance.

Then we often curse God or walk away from Him because we have chosen false foundations and inoculated Jesus from the equation.

Look, I’m not claiming to have good answers. I’m the guy who calls off from work at even the hint of a cold, and I’m thoroughly inoculated from day-to-day hardness.

But watching this TV series took a machete to my high minded judgmentalism.

Many of the “hard characters” in 1883 were men and women who were Christian. And while I struggle to see Christ in many of their actions, I would be wise to see them wrestle with their faith out on the frontier.

Likewise with my smug judgment of the characters from the Old Testament. I’m not advocating for sanctioning violence, but there is insight to be found if we can view the violence thru ancient eyes.

Perhaps, though, that link to ancient eyes is what we are missing.

Up till the birth of my old neighbor, generations had passed down the same basic wisdom that life is hard, and wise Christians turned to Jesus to make sense of it.

But somewhere during the life of this lady, a period by the way that saw the greatest loss of life in the history of the planet to war, famine, and disease, that wisdom was forgotten.

It makes me wish I would have gotten to know my old neighbor rather than see her as a relic of a time passed. To ask her what lessons should be learned even if they might seem obsolete. To ask her what her eyes see that mine don’t.