Midweek Musings

The Rev. Katherine Schofield

This year marks the 40th anniversary of “Lonesome Dove,” Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel that continues to captivate readers and viewers alike. To celebrate, Simon & Schuster released a new edition with a foreword by “Yellowstone” co-creator Taylor Sheridan — a fitting tribute, since Sheridan’s own storytelling carries McMurtry’s spirit of grit, loss, and redemption into the 21st century. Our church’s book group decided to hop on the bandwagon and read “Lonesome Dove” this fall. This book was a challenge for many of us (it’s 868 pages of struggle, brutality, and heartache), but we had a lot to say about the vibrant characters and weighty themes.

McMurtry’s story, though set in the dust and danger of the Old West, wrestles with timeless questions — questions that sound less like cowboy talk and more like theology. Beneath the gunfights and cattle drives lies a meditation on mortality, friendship, love, sin, and grace. Against a “God-forsaken” backdrop, McMurtry’s cowboys confront the same questions that faith traditions have long wrestled with: What is good? What is worth dying for? And, perhaps most hauntingly, what gives life meaning?

The West of “Lonesome Dove” functions much like the biblical wilderness — a place beyond order, law, or comfort, where human character is tested. This is no Edenic paradise. It’s a fallen landscape, both beautiful and brutal, where life is fleeting and justice uncertain. The cowboys’ long drive north recalls Israel’s wandering in the desert: restless pilgrims seeking a promised land that never fully materializes.

Yet amid this harshness, moments of grace emerge. McMurtry’s heroes — especially Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call — find redemption not in triumph but in loyalty, laughter, and the endurance of love. The novel’s theology is not institutional or creedal; it’s existential. Like the theologians Kierkegaard and Tillich, McMurtry seems to suggest that faith isn’t about dogma — it’s about courage. The courage to live authentically in a world that often feels godless, to keep riding even when you can’t see where the trail leads.

As I persevered in my reading of “Lonesome Dove” I found myself wishing I could just put the book on hold and turn to my favorite cowboy movie, the Billy Crystal classic from 1991, “City Slickers.”

Now this movie may not fit the genre of a “western” per se, and it didn’t win a Pulitzer, but as one of the only VHS’s in my house growing up, it became an important part of my personal theological development. I must have watched it a hundred times. Only later did I realize that this funny, fish-out-of-water movie was preaching a kind of sermon.

In the film Billy Crystal’s character, Mitch Robbins, joins a cattle drive to escape his midlife malaise. In one of the central scenes, the grizzled cowboy guide Curly turns to Mitch and says: “Do you know what the secret of life

is? (He holds up one finger.) This.”

“Your finger?” Mitch asks. “One thing,” Curly replies. “Just one thing. You stick to that, and the rest don’t mean (hooey).”

“But what’s the one thing?” Mitch asks.

Curly smiles. “That’s what you have to find out.”

It’s a simple exchange, almost a joke — but in its own way, it’s the heart of a cowboy theology. Life is hard. It’s confusing, unpredictable, and often cruel. You can’t control much, but you can choose your “one thing.” The thing that gives your life coherence when everything else falls apart.

For Gus and Call, that “one thing” is friendship and loyalty. For Mitch, it’s family and self-discovery. For anyone reading “Lonesome Dove” or watching “City Slickers,” the question lingers: What is your one thing? What gives you meaning in a world that so often feels meaningless?

Both stories — one tragic, one comic — reveal a truth the cowboy has always known: theology doesn’t just live in churches or sermons. It’s in the dust, in the laughter, in the companionship of people trying to survive together. Whether on the plains of Texas or a dude ranch in New Mexico or on the open waters of the North Atlantic, the same spiritual yearning is at work — the search for grace amid absurdity.

That’s what keeps “Lonesome Dove” timeless, even 40 years later. McMurtry’s cowboys ride through a fallen world, but they carry within them the spark of something sacred: the belief that meaning is not given, but made. The cattle may die, the heroes may fall, but the story endures — because, like Curly said, the secret of life is just one thing.

And maybe faith, in its truest form, is simply the courage to keep looking until you find it.

The Rev. Katherine A. Schofield is pastor at First Parish Church in Manchester- by-the-Sea. Midweek Musings rotates among Cape Ann clergy.