Vigilante Day and the Bigger Battle

Note: The credit and blame for the historical analysis discussed below should fall upon the shoulders of Frederick Allen and his book "A Decent, Orderly Lynching: Montana's Vigilantes"

May 5, 2011

The reason I started doing this project was to share my belief that there is a spiritual reality that affects our our lives.  The world is more than what we have the ability to consistently perceive and measure.  We can argue all day about the theology that may define that reality, but my core message is that it exists and it is not in our best interests to pretend it does not.

The follow-on to this argument, is that the spiritual world is not all Divine love, rainbows, and guardian angels.  Evil exists.  It exists in the physical world and it exists in the spiritual realm.  This basic concept of evil in the spiritual realm is reflected in Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism. http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/2001/08/What-The-Devil.aspx?p=1. 

I've struggled with how to describe this basic concept to an audience that is so versed in media stories about evil.  It feels like trying to tell someone that the sky is blue when really the point is why the sky appears blue. 

Earlier this week, a Navy SEAL team killed Osama Bin Laden.  The story of the operation and Bin Laden's death reverberated around the world.  For the past few days, even the most blithe have had trouble avoiding conversations of justice, evil, and retribution. 

A courageous writer would tackle this story and try to drain deep meaning out of how a man who fought for Aghan freedom from the Soviet occupation transformed into a terrorist, but I am not a courageous writer.  I'd rather analyze Vigilante Day.

Tomorrow afternoon, Helena's teenagers will celebrate another Vigilante Day by riding historically-minded parade floats through downtown streets.  The parade will offer a fun couple of hours and a full serving of our frontier culture, but it's not likely that there will be a lot of reflection about the men and events the day is named after.  That may be a good thing.

In the first six weeks of 1864, Montana's Vigilantes killed twenty-one men.  These twenty-one were alleged members of the Plummer Gang who the Vigilante's claimed were responsible for over one hundred murdres across the Montana territory.  Over the course of the next six years, the Vigilantes killed thirty others. 

The initial accounts of these killing shone with the glory of dime store novel frontier justice, but over time the accounts have become more skeptical, some even going as far to say it was all a political power play to seize control over the young Montana Territory. See, http://www.jcs-group.com/oldwest/sinners/plummer.html.  The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, but there is little doubt that a portion of the people that ended up the wrong end of a noose without a trial either were innocent or had committed crimes that didn't justify death even in the 1860s.

It's beyond me to try and determine how good the Vigilantes were before they starting lynching the Plummer Gang or how bad they became by the end of their spree.   But their fall from grace reflects a pattern that we still see played out every day.  People fall to temptation and commit evil acts.  The evil can be commonplace arrogance or hard heartedness or somewhere more along the lines of lynching and flying jets into the World Trade Center.  Either way, it's from the same vein. 

It's easy to look in hindsight and say that these people were never good.  We blame it on their childhood, their environment, their genes, their brain structure, their religion, their lack of religion...  All of those justifications have their place, but there's something bigger going on.  Something that we've tried to put behind us.  It's the basic reality of what evil is and how it impacts our lives.

The Buddhist say that Mara is the king of demons and his goal is to keep humans from proceeding down the right path.  Iblis, the devil in Islam, tempts humans and tries to mislead them.  The Bible describes the fight against evil as a battle for souls.  "For our stuggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens." Ephesians 6:12.

If you follow any of these spiritual paths, then your course is lit by the reality that there is evil in the world and it is going to constantly try and take you away from your duty to the Divine.  Evil has the power to shape the events in our lives and set us up to fall.  It will attack you at your highest point and again at your lowest.

We will all take that fall, over and over again; but each day and even every decision offers an opportunity for redemption.  We can take two steps forward for every step back, because we are called to the light and the light is more powerful than the darkness.  While each of those faiths has definite description of the Devil and other evil entities.  None of them presents evil as being anything more than a candle against the sun of the Divine light.

That Divine protection from evil is waiting for us.  We just need to ask for it with an an open humble heart.  As described by Saint Paul, "draw your strength from the Lord and from his mighty power."

Each one of us is going to lose our daily battles with evil, but we cannot let those defeats stop us from trying to win the war.

Something Went Wrong

I didn’t plan to cover this part yet. I wanted to describe about ten or fifteen episodes when I was fortunate enough to see things that I couldn’t explain in a rational manner and then pull in other stories to complement them. After describing all of these events that I couldn’t justify rationally, I figured that I’d write about what conclusions I’ve drawn from them.

That idea went out the window sometime around five o’clock this evening. The devolution of my writing process may have begun when I spent forty minutes this morning talking with a woman trapped in a deep psychosis. Her brain is so sick that she can’t realize she’s sick. The woman is lost in a nightmare of delusional immune diseases and conspiracies. Over the years, she’s lost her husband, her kids, her career, and her home. Our society values her “civil rights” too much to force her to take the treatment that will keep her brain from further breaking down. Montana doesn’t have the combined legal and medical framework to help pull her out of that psychosis. As she spoke, I tried not to think of her chances of making it through the winter.

Or maybe it began yesterday, when I talked with a mother of two about her husband’s bipolar disorder-induced suicide in order to help her deal with her unnecessary guilt. Or maybe it was this afternoon, as I mumbled into the telephone trying to find the right words to help comfort a mother grieving her teenage daughter’s suicide. Or maybe it was some of the personal challenges that I’ve faced recently.

Either way, I decided it was time to bring up the biggest question of spirituality. If there is something beyond what we can see that ties us together and even has the power to affect our individual lives, then why can the world be so horrible and unfair?

If this spiritual realm had the power to warn me to catch Shane before he slipped of the building, why didn’t I get the same voice telling me to take Darcee to the hospital for a full examination when I last saw her two weeks before her death? If this spiritual realm had the power to send me a miracle to pay for my family’s bills, then why didn’t it just cure my wife of her devastating illness?

I don’t have those answers and I don’t think any person has them to the level of specificity that would please me.

The best explanation that I’ve heard came from a former Army sniper with PTSD and TBI. He was haunted by his past and struggled with addictions in the present. While we had coffee one morning, he told me about the simple spiritual revelation that helped him make sense of the horrors he’d seen.

“God didn’t create evil. God didn’t create death and He didn’t intend for us to suffer.”

The veteran’s simple and common sense explanation put the paradox in perspective. It was too deep for me to ever understand, but all that I really needed to know was that something went wrong.

Fundamentalist Christians would point to Adam, Eve, and the snaky Devil. To other denominations that story acts as a metaphor that passes on the basic truth that humanity strayed from the path our Maker intended. Either way, the message is that something went wrong in between creation and the present.

To me, it’s the only explanation for how the spiritual world that I’ve seen do so much good can coexist with a natural reality where there is so much suffering and evil. While that explanation leaves a multitude of mysteries about what actually went wrong, it does provide enough of an intellectual framework to help us look beyond some of the horrors of our everyday lives to something much more powerful and good.

Without that framework, it's pretty hard to see the bigger picture.

For anyone looking for a deeper explanation of what might’ve went wrong. I think that Jesus left another powerful clue in parable of the Tenants and the Vineyard. Luke 20:9-19.